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It's going to be Unity all the way for Ubuntu's next major release codenamed Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal". During Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) at Florida, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that the Unity shell will become Ubuntu's default interface not just for netbook editions, but also for Ubuntu desktop editions.

While bad Wi-Fi security is my major Firesheep worry, I know it’s already a major pain in the ass for everyone. Even as I wrote this, I see my fellow ZDNet blogger Ed Bott had his Twitter account hijacked by someone else in the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference press room. Fortunately, it was a friend so it all came out well. Since it wasn’t you that might strike you as funny. Just wait until it happens to you though and someone changes your Twitter or Facebook password on you. You won’t be laughing then.

There are around 90 000 apps in the Android marketplace. We suggest 10 worth looking at. Google's Android operating system is gaining popularity fast and its application marketplace is growing at break-neck speed. Already the marketplace lists around 90 000 applications, not as many as the iPhone's 300 000, but still a pretty impressive count.

Inkscape is an open source SVG graphics editor released under GNU General Public License. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. Here are some useful tutorials for creating amazing vector graphics using Inkscape.

Today is the last UDS-N day and a session about the default application selection in the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is ongoing. Here's what has been discussed so far:

Last Friday, I had a heart attack. As I was rushed to the hospital by the superb ambulance crews and through the operating theatre and onwards to the recovery room by the skilled surgeons, one thing stuck in my mind; how badly open source, and software development in general, has let down health care professionals, who I watched handle bundles of notes and forms which contained the crucial patient care information.

Just earlier today we reported that Wayland is becoming compatible with Nouveau so that users of this open-source NVIDIA driver can begin using this alternative, lightweight display server that leverages the latest Linux graphics technologies. About the only caveat right now is the needed Nouveau page-flipping support, which is here for some hardware but not in the mainline Linux kernel yet and the page-flipping hook-up for the newer NVIDIA GPUs is coming soon. Kristian Høgsberg, the creator of Wayland, also made another announcement today.

A quick look at Tiny Core Linux 3.2. I recently wrote a review over on DLR of Ultimate Edition 2.8, a mega-distro that is packed with umpteen amounts of software. This time around, I thought I’d do a quick look of one of its polar opposites: Tiny Core Linux 3.2. Tiny Core is…well…it’s freaking tiny. I mean really, really tiny! It weighs in at an incredibly petite 10 MB download. It’s clearly designed to give you a functional but totally minimalistic distro.

So, my niece was having a few problems with her laptop and I bought her a new one. The eMachine e527 was on sale at the local MicroCenter for 279.99 and seemed to be a good fit for my accident prone niece. I wasn't sure whether to leave Windows on it, put Linux on it, or put OSX on it. After about 30 minutes, it was a hackintosh and running nicely. Here is what you do.

German software giant SAP conceded Thursday that it allowed or even contributed to a subsidiary's effort to pirate software from archrival Oracle, while SAP lawyers renewed their complaint to a judge that Oracle is turning the case into a "sideshow" and "media circus." Redwood City-based Oracle hailed the concession as a significant development, as both sides gear up for a civil trial next week in Oakland federal court. SAP said it was attempting to narrow the focus of the trial, but Oracle attorneys said they will oppose SAP's move to limit testimony about SAP executives' role in the case.

For whatever reason, flames are neat looking. I’ll leave it to psychologists to explain exactly why that is. All I know is that things on fire usually look cooler than things not on fire. To me, that also includes my wallpaper. As regular readers may know, I like to create my own abstract wallpapers and I’m a fan of the Gimp. Today we’re going to use Gimp to create flame wallpaper for your desktop. This process will work on any system that can run Gimp (Windows, Linux, OSX) without any additional plugins or textures.

I'm running a daily build of Debian Sid (yep, the "unstable" branch, running pretty solidly by the way) in live form from an 8 GB USB flash drive. Debian is fast. It's always been so.

The year was 2001, the tech world was reeling from the effects of the ongoing dot-com bust and Microsoft had recently been deemed a monopoly under US antitrust law. In the midst of the various tribulations came the release of Linux kernel 2.4 on 4 January 2001. Linux kernel guru, Jon Masters, bids it a fond farewell…

Can open source developers create software that directly benefit people, instead of wait for either implementers or the likes of Apple, Google, not to mention Microsoft and Oracle, to do it with our code?

We recently learned that because of the complexities of software licensing, it isn't clear to small business leaders just how straightforward it is to integrate proprietary code and applications with FOSS. None of the main documents on FOSS licensing explain the issues in the kind of clear high-level terms that can guide business people. Hopefully this article can help fill the gap.

Stephen Spector writes, "I am in the process of finalizing a new trademark and legal policy for the OpenStack community and I have been working on the rules that allow anyone to take the software from our open source project and distribute, resell, etc using our OpenStack trademark." He's discovered that the only item a community can own in a legal sense is the trademark, but it gets tricky. What usage of open source software should require the trademark -- and at what point is the code so modified that it shouldn't carry the mark?

Earlier this week I reviewed the Antec 300 case that houses my new home fileserver. Now it's time to talk about what's inside. It's rather minimalistic right now, running headless and using a single 2-terabyte SATA hard drive. There are three desktop PCs and one laptop that will backup to this machine. I don't need a big RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) array, though one of these days I'll move up to a RAID 1 array, using Linux software RAID. Nice simple mirroring with no parity or striping complications. This doesn't need to be complicated because all I want are plain, easily-recoverable copies of the data on all of my home computers.

The Russian government recently made a surprising decision: to create a national operating system based on GNU/Linux. The motivation for this development is crystal clear: escaping the Microsoft Windows monopoly. Russia will gain two other huge advantages due to the shift: lower software expenditures and full access to the operating system's source code. The source code access will allow any discovered security flaws to be quickly fixed. Russia appears to be following China's lead. A few years ago, China also decided to shift to a Linux-based operating system known as Red Flag Linux. In this article, I will discuss some of the underlying issues that are causing countries, institutions, individuals, and governments to defect to GNU/Linux.

The S7 is the first ‘true’ Android tablet finally touches down in the UK, but does it live up to the promise of a bright future for the platform? Russell Barnes investigates…

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on OpenSUSE 11.3 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.