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Providing another indication of convergence between open source and the cloud, Evans Data researchers are reporting today that nearly half of developers working on open source projects plan to offer applications as web services via cloud providers.

The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia's LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year's linux.conf.au conference in Hobart, Canonical's David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year in that it now includes netbook devices in addition to MIDs and the ARM port.

A new GNUmed live CD is out. With the help of this CD one can test drive GNUmed without altering the currently running environment such as operating system. No installation necessary. Just download the CD image and either burn it to a CD or set up VirtualBox, Vmware/Vmplayer, QEmu or the likes to accept the CD image as a virtual CD drive. Just boot the CD in your physical or virtual PC/Mac and testdrive GNUmed. GNUmed client 0.3.9 is included and configured to connect to either the public GNUmed server via the internet or connect to a GNUmed server included with the CD. No setup needed. Have fun and please let us know how it works for you.

Fred Grott, a programmer who specializes in smartphone applications, has two models for his business: He can write specialized applications in native code that take advantage of all of the features of a specific smartphone, or he can write a Web application that works in the Web browsers of all of the top devices. "Guess which one of those business models [needs] $15K in seed capital and [which] one is in the $250,000 range?" he asks. Given the economics, Grott's choice is simple. Take a standard Web application, add a bit of logic that tests the type of Web browser and then send back slightly customized versions formatted to the screens of smaller handsets.

A quick look at the security vulnerabilities fixed between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 and 5.3 including metrics and mitigations. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release and to date, every critical vulnerability has had an update available to address it available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.

OpenSimulator, sometimes described as the "the Apache of virtual worlds." The open source project originated as a reverse-engineered spinoff of Second Life's GPL-licensed viewer code, and continues growing and evolving far beyond it. Especially with the recent addition of an important feature: the "Hypergrid", a new core OpenSim network architecture which may well establish the HTTP protocol of the metaverse.

One key issue that RHEL 5.3 addresses is Windows Vista interoperability. Red Hat has updated and improved the Samba (define), Linux to Window file sharing technology so that it will support Window Vista. "We have seen demand for Vista compatibility in 2008 and it became a problem that we didn't have really good support for," Riek admitted. "We did some changes on the Samba side to get the new Vista enablement there we also did some work on CIFS (define) side so Linux can work as a client to Windows servers."

CherryPal announced an Atom-based "Bing" netbook that runs Linux or Windows XP, and offers a claimed five hours of battery life. The company also announced an upgraded version of its Linux-based nettop, the CherryPal C114, and launched a "Green Maraschino" open-source Linux distribution supporting the Bing.

Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer Shuttle has released a series of mini-desktops running Linux. The next generation will have power-efficient VIA Nano processors.

The South African State IT Agency’s (SITA) Free and Open Source Software Programme Office (FPO) will host the second annual chief information officers (CIO) workshop on February 24. The one-day workshop will bring together all government IT decision makers to share ideas and experiences regarding FOSS implementation in government.

Enrico Zini is a long time Fellow of the FSFE and a prominent Debian developer. He has been involved in many different projects relating to Free Software and is deeply concerned about social issues. I had a nice chat with Enrico and asked him about some of his favourite causes.

The incoming president of an alliance of open-source companies hopes he can persuade big-name proprietary ISVs to join rivals in his group to further interoperability. Recently named Open Solutions Alliance president Anthony Gold told The Reg that his goal is to take the two-year-old organization to the "next level" by turning it into a destination for practical advice on interoperability between proprietary and closed-source software. To get there, Gold hopes he can persuade Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, and others to join the group, even though the OSA membership includes JasperSoft, Ingres, and Talend, that challenge Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM in business intelligence, databases, and integration.

Opengear, which develops open source-based network management tools, plans to double the size of its channel partner program in 2009. Here's how, reports The VAR Guy.

Canonical has released its third alpha version of Ubuntu 9.04. It brings a few new features to test, including notification settings in the user interface and the much publicized ext4 filesystem support.

Inspired by the wonderful Enigma desktop by Kaelri, featured at Lifehacker, I decided to port at least some of the beautiful design to my Linux desktop.

Opera 10 is the next generation of the popular, closed-source web browser built in Qt, and available on UNIX (including both Linux and FreeBSD), Mac and Windows platforms. In this review I used the Qt 4 version of Opera 10 alpha, build 4102 (the .tar.gz package), but Opera 10 will be available using both Qt 3 and Qt 4 toolkits, so you can choose which one you prefer. I ran Opera in Debian Lenny (KDE 3.5.10) with all the updates to date.

Apple has had marked success with the 'I'm a Mac' advertising campaigns, and Microsoft is back banging it's head against a seeming brick wall of indifference with the ongoing 'I'm a PC' marketing drive that has featured both Bill Gates and Steve 'Monkey Dancer' Ballmer. Now, it would appear, that the Linux Foundation is feeling left out and so has decided to join in the fun with an 'I'm Linux' advertising run.

The latest stable release of the GNU Restricted User Shell (Rush), version 1.5, includes new configuration offerings and a notification feature.

"Buying a ready to ship Linux machine" ... "Shipped with the Linux distribution & additional programs of your choice pre-installed. That can also be shipped customized to be a web server or personal computer." Sounds pretty good.

Linux is a powerhouse audio production platform, and while you have to shop carefully, there is a lot of good-quality audio recording hardware that works well with Linux. The M-Audio MobilePre USB is popular with Linux users; Carla Schroder takes a look to see why.