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Man, is this week a-killin' me. Enjoy the photos and funnies.

The Ubuntu Server Edition revolution is starting but it doesn’t involve traditional on-premise servers. A few hours ago I mentioned Turnkey Linux was putting Ubuntu Server software appliances in the cloud. But WorksWithU overlooked another major story: RightScale — a well-known cloud computing company — today announced “full support” for Ubuntu as part of the RightScale Cloud Management platform. It’s big news. Here’s why.

Unreal Tournament 3 was released back on the 17th of November in 2007. Nearly a year and a half later, we still have no UT3 Linux client -- nor do we know the reason(s) behind this massive delay. Ryan Gordon, the widely-known Linux game developer that was contracted by Epic Games to port UT3 over to Linux and Mac OS X, has provided a brief update on the matter.

Microsoft organised a competition "to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility." The result? A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS. But isn't that weakening LAMP by boosting the Windows stack? So why are open source coders taking part in this kind of thing?

Kodak has released a free scanner application for Linux called ScanTWAIN that promises "production quality scanning." The software is released under the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) version 2 and comes with a complete GUI that supports all of the options of its Windows counterpart. Support is included for duplex scanning with automatic feeding of multiple pages through an Automatic Document Feeder (ADF).

The Open Source Initiative (OSI), one of the principal advocacy organisations on open source software, has unanimously approved the European Union Public Licence (EUPL) version 1.1 as an open source licence, on 4 March. "This is very good news", commented Karel De Vriendt, head of the European Commission's e-Government program (Idabc) that is responsible for the development and maintenance of the open source licence. "OSI's decision certifies that the EUPL is 100 percent compliant with their definition of open source. This will help to convince European public administrations which are developing software for their e-Government systems, that the EUPL is a true open source licence." Version 1.1 of the EUPL was published by the European Commission on 9 January. The licence is available in all official languages of the European Union, and all these 22 linguistic versions have identical value. This means that developers who want to use the licence can pick whichever language version they prefer.

For those of you whom use GNU/Linux, you might know of a little program called Cinelerra. Cinelerra is free software, licensed on the GNU General Public License. Some of you may have seen this video on YouTube… If not, you should watch it, and then continue reading on. Here is the video I’ll be working with…

A well-regarded security consultant has shown just how easy it can be to take illicit control of Mac OS X. Security consultant Dino Dai Zovi has given a demonstration to the SOURCE security, business and technology conference in Boston in which he broke into a Mac and took photos with its iSight camera. Dai Zovi explained that Mac OS X's heap memory is poorly protected, and that it is relatively easy to find the location of various libraries.

Ubuntu is converging quickly with cloud services. A prime example: Turnkey Linux is launching 12 Ubuntu Server Edition software appliances that users can deploy in various cloud services. The news comes only a few weeks after Canonical said Ubuntu 9.10 will leap into Amazon.com’s cloud. Here's the scoop.

Why is FREE! the world's best-selling noun, verb, adjective and adverb, yet so hard to credit as a foundation for business in the Internet Age? And what will happen when business folk finally grok the abundant opportunities that FREE! provides? Dictionary.com lists 49 meanings for the word free. Here in the World of Linux, there are two main ones: 1) the presence of liberty, 2) the absence of price. Or, as Richard M. Stallman drew the distinction, free-as-in-freedom and free-as-in-beer. Both kinds contributed enormously to the development not only of free and open source code, but to the Internet — the place where most of that code was written and on which most of it runs.

Where do you want to learn today? Think again. Ah yes, there's that all too familiar sound of tightening budgets and the tossing aside of those things perceived as non-essential. Training's death knell reverberates in my head like the sound of an ill-tuned vesper bell. Your dilemma is that you need to learn Linux but you have no money to buy training — what do you do — wait indefinitely for money to return to the coffers, download Linux and fumble through it on your own? Or, do you take the initiative and find some inexpensive or free learning resources?

WordPress is the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. Learn how easy it is to use Eclipse tools to extend WordPress functionality

Several leading systems integrators -- including Levementum and OpenBI -- are pushing open source applications like Compiere, Pentaho and SugarCRM into Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Here's what's driving the trend for open source in the cloud.

Congress has apparently listened to the public's complaints about lack of convenient access to government data. The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes a section, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-California), that would mark the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways.

Anyone who was lucky enough to grab a GrandCentral account during one of the short spans when they were available to grab can testify that it is an interesting service, to say the least. As interesting as it may be, though, it has been plagued with technical and customer service issues that had some declaring that Google had left the platform for dead. A reasonable assumption — until this morning, that is.

Being an open source advocate apparently can be dangerous to your health -- or at least your hair. That's what Helios' Ken Starks found, anyway, when a field technician took issue with the threat of FOSS to his livelihood. Then there are the tips, lots of Linux tips.

So you're not a programmer, you say? If you can string a few shell commands together, it's not much of a step from there to programming. To demonstrate that, Akkana Peck will take you through the steps of writing a very simple web gallery script: one that will take your images and build a little web page to show them off.

Despite the recession, open source companies are marketing forward with major partner and customer conferences. The latest examples involve Pentaho (the open source BI specialist), Openbravo (ERP and POS) and MySQL. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

After two years, the relatively popular PCLinuxOS distribution has finally put out a new major release, imaginatively called PCLinuxOS 2009.1. PCLinuxOS is a release originally based on Mandrake (now Mandriva), but which has taken on a life of its own. The distribution has one selling point (for some, at least) few other popular distributions have: it eschews KDE4 (for now).

Operating Debian and getting things done within it is just as simple as in Windows. Those Microsoft commercials depicting a little girl "amazing" the crowd with her click-and-drag-prowess don't have anything over on Debian.