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You would think that it's a hard enough job taking on Microsoft's desktop dominance. Ubuntu's community lead Jono Bacon, however, may actually have an even more audacious goal in mind: completely change the economics of the music industry.

In case you were wondering, Microsoft thinks the battle of open source vs. proprietary software is basically over. "Today, but increasingly in the future, we are all going to be 'mixed source'," Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer said in a lunchtime interview on Thursday. To bolster his claim, Horacio Gutierrez notes Microsoft is releasing plenty of stuff as open source, while open-source companies like Red Hat often license commercial software alongside their open-source products. "I actually think the war between proprietary and open source is a thing of the past," he said.

A week ago we shared that Linux Game Publishing, the company that has ported games to Linux such as Cold War and X2: The Threat, was bringing Jets 'n' Guns to Linux. Just a week later this 2D side-scrolling arcade game is now being distributed to LGP's closed testing community. We have our hands on the first beta of Jets 'n' Guns for Linux and in this article are a few screenshots.

Boy, I wish I'd been at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this year. That way I could heard with my own ears, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tell an audience of high-level business people that if they want to wait for Windows 7 to switch from XP, instead of going to Vista, "They certainly can."

OpenSolaris 2008.05 had given a new face to Solaris through a vastly improved desktop experience. While OpenSolaris 2008.05 was not perfect, it was quite pleasant and a very nice first step. Sun Microsystems is now preparing for the release of OpenSolaris 2008.11 to incorporate their latest set of changes. In this article we are looking at some of the latest advancements in this pre-release.

By now you have probably heard about these newfangled netbooks, products like the ASUS EeePC and Dell Inspiron Mini 9. I've suggested that the biggest growth potential for these devices would come from emerging markets. But after a closer look, I've seen some trends that most likely will cause greater demand in the U.S. and Europe as well.

Almost a month ago, on September 24th, fellow zdnet blogger Mary Jo Foley filed a report under the title: Microsoft: Windows and Linux offer same TCO in emerging markets, which she introduced as: "While Linux may be cheaper up front, but over time, Windows and Linux offer roughly the same total-cost-of-ownership to customers deploying large numbers of PCs in schools in emerging markets."

Linux has all the power and flexibility you need to power your network, both for servers and networking devices. Carla Schroder shows you how to select hardware, software, and not spend money unnecessarily on pricey commercial software. Which is probably Linux or BSD-based anyway.

As the work on KDE 4.2 turns out to be on quite an advanced stage, I’ve decided to test the current development version. For the purpose of this test I used the Archlinux distribution, that features the KDE 4.2-SVN packages repository. It is just enough to add appropriate entries into pacman.conf at the top of the default repositories, and there we can go on installing kde-svn.

We loaded and ran the 2009 (10th Anniversary) edition of Mandriva Linux One, which we reviewed earlier this week. It's pretty, it's smooth, and it had a few problems with the GUI software install/remove utility that would leave a new user scratching his head, but overall, it's a nice update to a distro that started out with the idea that ordinary, non-technical computer users should be able to install and run GNU/Linux without expert help -- and that still adheres to this principle.

People often wonder how to get new capabilities—new packages, new features in existing packages, or even bug fixes—included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The process for doing so is straightforward, but may be foreign to those with a background in traditional software products.

The ps command has a large number of options that many Linux admins have not explored. Juliet Kemp shows how to use ps to show the command environment, who is doing what on a remote machine, and more.

eBay came through with a profitable third quarter, but don't expect such good news in the coming months. Its earnings were almost 1 and a half billion dollars better than Q3 of last year, but the total sum of all transactions on the auction site actually went down one percent. That's a first.

For some reason, mouse gestures have never fully caught on with desktop users. Movements of the mouse that launch a command or simulate a combination of keys are ideal for those who prefer not to move their hands constantly between the mouse and the keyboard, or who have trouble typing because of some physical challenge. Yet many users have never heard of mouse gestures, and they are apparently so little in demand that, nine months after the KDE 4 releases began, KDE has yet to implement any of the software or settings that enabled mouse gestures in earlier versions of the desktop.

Microsoft delivers the beta of a download manager and packaged open-source applications to make it easier for Web developers to install Web products. The move follows Microsoft's support for an Eclipse Foundation project related to Silverlight and precedes sponsorship of the Government Open Source Conference. GOSCON will take place in Portland, Ore. Meanwhile, OpenLogic announces a slew of professional services to help companies interested in trying open-source software during the economic downturn.

Open source software is often an unsung hero in the online gaming universe. Game engines are complex applications with core functionalities provided by numerous modules. These include a rendering engine for 2-D or 3-D graphics and a physics engine or collision detection and response calculator.

Ubuntu has taken some heat over the years for its relationship with upstream projects, but the distribution seems determined to change that impression. To that end, Ubuntu has started by looking at bugs and bug reporting between the distribution and upstream projects. The visible result is the beta release of the Ubuntu Upstream Report, which displays the progress of getting bugs upstream. Users of Ubuntu report lots of bugs in the software they use but, for the most part, those bugs aren't in any way specific to Ubuntu; they tend to also exist in the upstream project.

Yesterday we reported on Canonical shipping an unreleased ATI Catalyst driver with the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10. This driver labeled fglrx 8.54.3 adds support for X Server 1.5 / X.Org 7.4 and the Linux 2.6.27 kernel. Later in the day then, AMD did go ahead and release Catalyst 8.10. However, this isn't the same driver as what's found in Ubuntu.

During last year's Give One Get One, the lead OLPC reporter for Laptop Magazine, a beautiful Joanna Stern, asked me about starting a OLPC pilot in Mali. Laughing at the complexity of such an adventure, I told her it would be possible, but surely a voyage of discovery for her and Laptop Magazine.

Animation is one of the less-known features in OpenOffice.org Impress. Its most obvious uses are for transitions for individual objects on a slide (rather than for the entire slide), or for dramatic emphasis and calling attention to objects. But it can also be used for more serious purposes, such as illustrating a procedure that is clearer if you can see it in motion -- for instance, one of the most effective animations I saw showed was on a Society for Creative Anachronism site that explained how the links in chain mail fitted together.