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Ubuntu 11.04 was released on April 28 with a brand new interface and a couple default application changes. But all the talk is about Unity, that brand new interface. As one might predict, reactions are all over the spectrum. The Unity interface has taken design cues from popular mobile systems with the focus being on saving screen space and making everything readily accessible from within that limited space. It appears designers were shooting for easy and beautiful, but some users are finding adjustment during these early days a bit challenging.

Mozilla Firefox 4.0 was released in March with many new features, including GPU-based acceleration, but on the Linux side this support was disabled. The Mozilla developers found the Linux GPU driver support to be a problem, even with the open-source solutions. It looks like though by Firefox 6 the Linux GPU acceleration will be in better standing.

IDC indicated in an announcement that it has begun tracking PC microprocessor shipments by architecture, such as x86 and ARM, for the first time. The research firm now predicts that ARM will grab 13 percent of the PC microprocessor market by 2015.

This was my 5th year attending and it was their 11th annual LinuxFest Northwest conference at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington. As usual, I took my camcorder along and recorded all (8) of the presentations I attended and took a lot of pictures. Haven't ever attended LinuxFest Northwest? Here's your chance to learn about it.

The latest Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is probably the most dramatic Ubuntu release to date, and the key to this is its new Unity default user interface. Unity marks several important shifts from Ubuntu. ... Good ideas that aren’t executed well, however, wont bear fruit, and this is what this review is about.

This comes from a very cool site – wondermark.com. As a hacker of computers and gadgets – in the true sense of the word hacker, not the media hijacked sense of the word – this is a set of rules I can stand behind.

Bitcoin is different: It wholly replaces state-backed currencies with a digital version that's tougher to forge, cuts across international boundaries, can be stored on your hard drive instead of in a bank, and--perhaps most importantly to many of Bitcoin's users--isn't subject to the inflationary whim of whatever Federal Reserve chief decides to print more money.

The very first person that I ever spoke with about Ubuntu was Matt Zimmerman. Zimmerman happily helped a hapless journo (me) in IRC no less, when I first started to write about Ubuntu back in 2005. Ubuntu didn't have real PR at the time, but Zimmerman was there as CTO answering my questions without a PR/marketing filter with exceptional clarity. Last year (even with Ubuntu having real PR), I had lunch with Zimmerman in Boston, where we chatted about Unity and the future of Ubuntu. Zimmerman is now leaving Ubuntu.

The Sabily developers proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the new and improved Sabily 11.04 operating system.

Open Source software development has drawn increasing attention as its importance has grown. Open source communities have been able to challenge and often outperform proprietary software by enabling better reliability, lower costs, shorter development times, and a higher quality of code.

SABnzbd+ 0.6.0 was released a couple of days ago and is already available via JCFP's SABnzbd+ private package archive (PPA). Considering the maturity of the project, SABnzbd+ 0.6.0 brings with it an impressive array of changes and updates. The most noticeable one (visually), is undoubtedly the change from using the Smpl skin as the default to using the updated and expanded Plush. With this change, the SABnzbd+ developers have decided to focus solely on Plush and may even possibly phase out the other skins entirely.

Free and open source Real Time Strategy (RTS) and Simulation Game Unknown Horizons have been updated to a new version that brings many new features and fixes. The game emphasizes on maintaining an economy and city building. You can expand your small settlement to a strong and wealthy colony, collect taxes and supply your inhabitants with valuable goods. The aim is to increase your power and create a well balanced economy with strategic trade and diplomacy. Both single player and multi player games modes are available.

Announced just hours ago on the X.Org development mailing list is recent work to create the xf86-video-nested driver. As implied by the name of the driver and the title of this news post, this is an X.Org video driver designed to run nested X.Org servers. In other words, X.Org on top of X.Org...

The Outercurve Foundation's (formerly CodePlex) Stephan Walli offers some interesting perspective on the future of Mono and SuSE. He writes: "I've written about Novell's SuSE positioning over the years and their need to be more than 'We're not Red Hat.' Mono was always been a potentially excellent strategic differentiator. But first you need to understand how Microsoft dropped the ball."

Natty Narwhal herding no more Matt Zimmerman, chief technology officer at commercial Linux distributor Canonical, is stepping down.…

Sure, an SF fan might consider going to a con just to hear a favorite author speak or to participate in the costume contests. But developers and other computer techies can justify attending for business reasons, too. (Even if you don't program in Klingon++.)

The Linux Foundation has announced the keynote speakers for its LinuxCon Japan 2011 conference taking place from 1 to 3 June 2011 at the Pacifico Yokohama in Yokohama, Japan. The welcoming remarks will be presented by Noriaki Fukuyasu, Director at Linux Foundation Japan, and followed by a keynote from Linux creator Linus Torvalds, who will discuss the 20th anniversary of the Linux operating system.

As tech lead of the Google Linux Storage Team I get to see how Linux runs on tens of thousands machines in Google's cloud. Over the last year our team migrated this super system from ext2 to ext4, an educational and exciting experience to say the least. We learned a lot about the impact of the Linux file system on Google.

This guide will walk through the instructions on how to create an API script to create an ftp user in ISPConfig 3. It will give you the knowledge to develop scripts for any function available in ISPConfig 3.

The KDE team has just announced a few minutes ago the third maintenance release for KDE Software Compilation 4.6. This is a minor update, focusing on bug fixing and translation updates.