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Every six months, we will do a review of the latest version of Ubuntu and see what features/improvement Canonical has added to the popular distro. The next version of Ubuntu – 12.04, Precise Pangolin is now available in beta and this is particularly important since it is the next Long Term Support (LTS) version. As of all LTS version, the emphasis is always on stability over new features experimentation, so it is interesting to see how the 12.04 will perform. Let’s proceed with the review.

For the first time in decades, the major players in the computing industry are making sweeping changes to the core of how we interact with computers. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Canonical are reinventing the graphical user interface, leaving the desktop metaphor behind, and moving into a newer, and hopefully simpler, age of computer interaction.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation blog welcomed Apple to the list of existing users of its crowdsourced, open source map data. Apple has, so far, said nothing about apparently using the OSM map data for areas outside the US in the desktop version of iPhoto.

"Nobody likes the idea of having to practically beat their operating system into submission,... but this is the reality with Linux," asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. "One good idea layered over another good idea added to another good idea sometimes ends up with really bad results. We don't all want to be 'protected from ourselves' by more and more features that assume the user is a dummy. There's another OS for that."

It took several weeks longer than planned, but the “recommended” Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer that retails for $35, Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is finally ready to run. The distribution designer’s Chris Tyler announced the release on March 7th, but the official release came on March 8th. This Linux distribution is based on Fedora 14. This distribution, along with versions of Debian and Arch Linux for the Raspberry Pi, are now available for download.

Mozilla announced a deal with Latin American mobile carrier Telefónica Digital on February 27 to start shipping HTML5-driven smartphones by the end of 2012. Although the press release dubs the new platform "Open Web Device," many Mozilla watchers know it better as Boot To Gecko (B2G), a lightweight Linux-based system that uses Gecko as its primary (if not sole) application framework. B2G has been in development since July 2011, but it has advanced significantly since we last examined it in mid-August.

It's not gravity that makes the Linux Planet go around, it's the continuous process of never-ending code development. This past week saw three major milestone development releases for three of the biggest Linux efforts

Most people today are used to having a nice, intuitive graphical environment when they sit down to use a computer. Gone are the days of using a DOS machine or being lucky enough to have a dial-up account at 300 baud on a UNIX mainframe. Today, most people expect to be able to point and click their way to work nirvana, even when that work is being done on some other machine over a network. In this article, I look at some of the available options, what the relative costs and benefits are, and hopefully by the end, you should have enough information to make a choice as to what would be the best option for you.

Yesterday AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 7800 "Pitcairn" series as the latest hardware in their Southern Islands family to reside between the Radeon HD 7700 series and their flagship Radeon HD 7900 cards. Unfortunately, the open-source support for these latest AMD GPUs remains unavailable...

This is the Doro 740, announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last week and expected to ship in the summer. While other Android phone manufacturers are struggling to differentiate their phones, this one has no problems: it’s aimed at older folk.

The new Unity Launcher is a new and very significant part of the desktop environment. After logging into your system the Launcher will automatically appear along the left edge of your screen. The Launcher can be used to store and run all of your favorite applications.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: In Calligra: Kexi's welcome status bar fetches GUI updates from the server if available; WPS file support; updates and fixes in the text undo/redo framework Improved synchronization view in Lokalize Improvements in C++ and C++11 in KDevelop More configurable tab and window title in Konsole read more

The Linux 3.3 kernel release might be imminent. In releasing the Linux 3.3-rc6 kernel, which Linus says is just made up of small fixes and clean-ups, he says this could be the last release candidate...

Hewlett-Packard continues to dismantle its webOS engineering team by handing nearly half of the remaining 600 techies their pink slips. The cuts began in September when HP's axe fell on 525 webOS employees following the decision to shutter the hardware unit that designed the now defunct TouchPad and Pre3 devices.

For some results that are more interesting than the recent RHEL / Oracle / CentOS / Scientific Linux comparison, here are some benchmarks pitting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 against a development snapshot of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on three different systems.

Apache Pig is a high-level procedural language for querying large semi-structured data sets using Hadoop and the MapReduce Platform. Pig simplifies the use of Hadoop by allowing SQL-like queries to a distributed dataset. Explore the language behind Pig and discover its use in a simple Hadoop cluster.

At the beginning of this year a DMCA takedown notice was used, almost certainly for the the first time, against an open source project: OpenDDR. Glyn Moody looks at the background to this story and the issues that it raises.

FXI is preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

Coverity's latest Coverity Scan Open Source Report has found that the quality of open source code is equal to, or even better than that of proprietary software. This is the third open source report from Coverity since it took over producing the report in 2009. The project was originally founded by the US Department of Homeland Security in conjunction with Coverity in 2006. Coverity's conclusion is that the assumption that open source software is of lower quality should not be considered a valid reason for avoiding open source.

For a long time now, Mozilla has been talking up its plans to become a serious player in the mobile operating system and smartphone arenas. We've covered the company's Boot to Gecko platform, an open, web-centric operating environment centered on the Gecko rendering engine, and Mozilla is slated to show off its new app store at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. Now, Mozilla is in an alliance with Telefonica and Qualcomm that could make its smartphone ambitions reality.