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The following article will list some of the most important panel applets, also called indicators, for Ubuntu 11.04's Unity interface.

The N9 is the first truly modern smartphone that Nokia has unveiled since the start of finger-friendly interface revolution. Although it's a significant technical achievement, it's sadly a pyrrhic victory for Nokia—the device has arrived a year too late. The Finnish phone giant has already abandoned its Linux platform in favor of Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 operating system.

The Mageia project has announced the arrival of a first preview of a Mageia port for ARM processors. According to the developers, the Mageia ARM port, code-named "arm eabi", will use the hard float feature of Cortex family processors. It currently includes several development tools, basic network services, Firefox and LibreOffice and a full GNOME desktop environment – a minimal version of KDE is also included.

Ubuntu releases are always eagerly awaited, generating feverish debate on the blogosphere, but Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal has received an unprecedented amount of attention because it's different - in more than one sense of the word. This release is about the one area that's often overlooked in the Linux ecosphere, the desktop. Linux has struggled with the desktop; compositing window managers such as Compiz Fusion allowed you to play around with it but it still looked the same. But if you think the Gnome 3 Shell is different, wait till you experience Unity - and there's a lot more to it than glitter.

I have been using Mozilla Firefox 5 since Mozilla developer announced it, firstly when I decide to add this post I was not going to compare between Mozilla Firefox 5 and Google Chrome 12, just to check Firefox 5 enhancements. But when I used couple benchmarks for checking HTML 5, JavaScript, and CSS 3, didn’t expect this result.

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of living things, ranging from microscopic organisms up to the largest known animal, the blue whale. It is divided into many specialized fields including evolution, ecology, zoology, botany, genetics, microbiology and molecular biology. This science examines function, structure, origin, growth, evolution, distribution and taxonomy.

The latest incarnation of the GNOME desktop, version 3. has been out for a while. I'm one of those who is late to the party, one at which there have been very few compliments and loads and loads of complaints. At times, when you get something free, you tend not to value it.

Porteus is an amazing user-friendly Slackware-based live distribution, the successor to Slax. I had a lot of success with the 32-bit version (on a 64-bit laptop), but not the 64-bit version.

In a previous post i’ve presented you 3 space games, today i add one to that list: Oolite. Oolite is a space sim game, inspired by Elite, powered by Objective-C and OpenGL, and designed as a small game that is easy for users to pick up, modify and expand upon. Almost every aspect of the game can be changed by using simple, free graphics packages and text editors.

"System Tray" icons were a great idea in Windows 95, but over the years the concept has been abused. It's not uncommon to get a new Windows PC with a dozen system tray icons, usually serving no purpose other than to advertise the existance of the application to which the icon belongs. Linux machines are not quite as bad, but this hasn't stopped the designers of Gnome 3 from hiding these icons in a hidden bottom bar that appears only when you move the mouse to the bottom of the screen. If you still prefer to have these icons on the screen (and lets face it, the Gnome 3 top bar is mostly empty space anyway), you can use the icon manager extension to selectively move icons from the bottom bar to the top bar.

Twice a year, the Top500 Project publishes its list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. In the last announcement, we continue to see Linux dominating the list. This is nothing new since Linux has been dominating since the mid-2000s. In fact, Linux share in supercomputing looks a lot like Microsoft’s historical share of the desktop market. I thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the performance capability of these computers as a whole and also how the rise of Linux is mirroring the geographical expansion of supercomputers.

For years, Nokia had been working on Linux as a future operating system for its smartphones and mobile devices. Then, the firm did an about-face and chose Windows Phone. Having had no luck with the penguin, the recent release of the N9 smartphone marks the end of an era.

There is absolutely nothing flawed about DistroWatch page hit ranking. It represents page hits on the individual distribution pages, period. Now, if you'd said that the DistroWatch page hit ranking is a flawed way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions, then yes, I would have agreed..

An interview with Bodhi Linux developer Jeff Hoogland about his personal Linux setup. The interview is part of an ongoing series of interviews on how various people use desktop Linux: http://www.mylinuxrig.com/setup

"There was a time when I was obsessed with finding good, free, stable, Adobe Flash animation software, because at the time I was also obsessed with Homestar Runner and other online cartoons and I wanted to make my own. This was before I knew about how much hassle Flash actually is across multiple platforms and long before I knew of the disadvantages of making online animations in proprietary formats."

Depending on your point of view, the daily news delivers up a glass either half empty or half full. In the short term, the negative impression can be particularly powerful, with disasters both natural and man-made arising with distressing regularity. But the glass can also be viewed as half full, and that can lead to a false sense of security.

Virtual desktop computing is a controversial and emotional topic. There’s the fear of change, fear of the Cloud and fear of loss of control.

It’s not the least eventful package installation I’ve ever done in Linux and BSD, but tapping into Debian Backports to install the Document Foundation’s new LibreOffice suite and replace the formerly Oracle-controlled, now-in-limbo OpenOffice is fairly easy if you follow the steps, refrain from panic and just type in the letter “y” a few times.

This week, the 5 links for developers and IT pros looks at how IT can lead innovation, when Agile might not work and 5 Chromebook concerns.

Both GNOME and KDE recently underwent massive redesigns. GNOME 2 morphed into version 3.0 with a radically different look and feel. KDE 4 is also graphically much different from the KDE 3 lineage. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has added Unity to the mix. The future of all will depend on ease-of-use perceptions and end-user hardware.