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ULTILEX stands for Ultimate Linux Experience. This is a live Linux CD compilation which in turn contains several live Linux distributions. You can boot ULTILEX from CD/DVD and USB flash devices.

Microsoft's mobile strategy goes from bad to non-existent. Everyone knows mobile is the next-big-thing. Everyone except Microsoft, that is. The company which has dominated technology for decades has systematically moved over the course of the year from having a deeply flawed mobile strategy to having no strategy at all. Meantime Apple, which has a very aggressive mobile strategy, is snapping up customers left, right and centre. An example of Microsoft's so-called strategy is the Kin debacle. Earlier this week Microsoft confirmed that it was killing development of its Kin phones. That's just six weeks after it first launched the phone.

DuckDuckGo is a new search engine focused on relevant results and respecting user privacy. Actually a mash-up of several other sites like Wikipedia, About, Bing, and Yahoo, DuckDuckGo also uses it's own web crawler, the DuckDuckBot. DuckDuckGo uses what it calls Zero-click search results to try to guess what you are looking for and give it to you directly in your search results. I've been using DuckDuckGo for a few weeks now, and I'm impressed. What further impresses me is that the entire site is built on open source tools, ranging from FreeBSD for the operating system to good old-fashioned Perl for the logic.

Last week, we had the pleasure of talking to Evan Dandrea, Software Engineer on the Foundations Team at Canonical, about the upcoming installer of the Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) operating system.

According to the publication “Kommersant”, the state enterprise “Russian Technologies” has almost completed the acquisition of shares LLC Alt Linux.

[CNews has an interesting article on the Russian investment in Mandriva which became known last week. Google translation here - hkwint].

There's a delightful story that does the rounds regarding one of the founding fathers of Linux. It's said that during the early days of the opensource operating system's development, this fellow took to attending conferences in complete silence. All attempts to communicate via means other than hand gestures were refused. Instead, he pointed at things. Apocryphal or not, the tale remains highly relevant today. Our hero's beef was with the windows-based graphical interface metaphor and its knack for turning us into mouse-pointing morons.

When you are using Squirrelmail for IMAP and using a client like Outlook Express, you will find that the folders do not play well together. You can modify both the client and the Squirrelmail settings to get them to work together.

MediaWiki is the popular wiki engine behind sites like Wikipedia. Its power and flexibility makes it an excellent choice for a community-driven knowledge base. The ease of developing various extensions for MediaWiki is one of the sources of this flexibility. This article will show you how to create different types of extensions for MediaWiki: wiki variables, special pages, and new tags. You'll also get a quick overview of what you'll need to do to create skins for MediaWiki.

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the open core debate, and a popular opinion seems to inflict some sort of excommunication to anyone having a less than pure open source monetization process. Therefore I thought that I would add some unsolicited input to this matter. Now, what is a pure open source monetization process? The answers to that question echo the armchair soccer coaches who have been entertaining the world with their wrong predictions, while teams with less theory and more practice have advanced to better results.

A lot of people have been asking us to write an article on what fonts to use in Ubuntu, so here it is. These are my favourite fonts and among the few I can use but of course that may not be the case for everybody, so you can share your favourite font(s) in the comments!

Do you remember a time when Linux was a niche OS? Beyond college kids and a few converted Unix nerds, Linux was something for hackers, Ham radio operators and ivory tower dwellers. No one would ever put a Linux-based computer into a data center. How times and attitudes have changed. Once known as the "little OS that could," today Linux could take over your data center. No bands will play. No tickertape will fall. And, no pomp or circumstance will surround the event. Linux will seep quietly into your data center through the "cracks" other OSes leave agape.

Although Adobe's Flash technology is still incredibly popular among website designers it is facing a bleak future as developers move to newer HTML5-based media formats. On top of that Apple's Steve Jobs has declared Flash a complete no-go on any future iPhone and iPad products.

My photography workflow is based on two key tools: the digiKam photo management application and a Bubba Two personal Linux-based server.

TeamViewer is a very powerful cross-platform remote desktop sharing tool that has recently been ported to the Linux platform. Sukrit Dhandhania takes it for a test drive…

It's a remarkable success story. Less than two years ago Nokia's Symbian and Windows Mobile ruled the smartphone market and Google was just a search engine, albeit a very popular one. Today Google's Android operating system is one of the most popular smartphone operating systems and has already taken a significant chunk out of Symbian's market share.

Nokia, with the Mobile Runtime for Java Applications (JRT), is enabling development of Java applications for Symbian 3 devices, Nokia officials said Thursday. The company recently contributed JRT to the Symbian Foundation. JRT is available as part of the latest Symbian 3 Product Development Kit, also detailed this week.

If you haven't gotten our subtle hints during the past year or so, IRC certainly is not dead. It really is the best way to get knowledgeable support from the folks who know best. There are a few caveats, however, that may not be obvious to people new to this old-school chat protocol.

Battle beyond Windows, Jobs, and Linux Open...and Shut The desktop is dead. Just ask Microsoft and Apple. Or, better yet, ask Facebook and Google. Sure, we still use our desktops and laptops, mostly Windows PCs and Macs. What else would we use to draft our faxes? But the industry has moved on, and the petty squabbles over Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux no longer resonate like they once did. The twentieth-century desktop has given way to a new breed of "desktop" platform. It's called the web. Have you heard of it?

Reprieved from financial troubles with fresh investments, Mandriva released the final Mandriva Linux 2010 Spring. The latest stable release is touted for offering faster boot times, enhanced "Smart Desktop" file-organization technology, easier printer and wireless configuration, and updates including GNOME 2.30.1 and KDE 4.4.3, says Mandriva.

Linux is blessed with several different package managers, so using a different distribution often means learning a different way to install, update, and remove software. Use Juliet Kemp's handy package manager cheatsheet to get going with a minimum of fuss.