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Google released a Chrome 5 beta build this week that brings a significant boost to the browser's JavaScript performance, improved support for emerging Web standards, and a number of noteworthy enhancements to the browser's cloud synchronization framework. After running the beta for most of the day, I'm convinced that Chrome is reaching a sweet spot of feature richness and leading performance that will make it a real winner.

It seemed like they'd be ice skating in Hades before Apple would bless a real competitor to Safari on the iPhone, but Opera Mini has made its way into the App Store. Now that Opera has sailed past the gatekeepers, what's the verdict?

This is something I have never heard of. I was trying to install Google Chrome in Ubuntu and in the download page a small note came into my notice. It goes something like this "Installing Google Chrome will add the Google repository so your system will automatically keep Google Chrome up to date".

Handbrake is considered the Swiss Army knife of video conversion tools. Running on the three major operating system platforms, Handbrake can open a huge variety of formats, including common ones that others can't handle (like the titles in the MPEG TS structure of a DVD). Handbrake outputs to a small selection of efficient formats, including H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, MPEG-4 ASP and Theora video. It has advanced features including chapter marking, subtitle inclusion and audio selection, plus filters for optimising video. On Linux, Handbrake can make use of the libdvdcss2 library to decrypt CSS-protected DVDs in-place during encoding, saving the need to use DVD Decrypter or another tool, usually through Wine. This article will guide you through the process for building Handbrake, installing it and converting video with it.

The latest release of Ubuntu shows a great deal of promise but still needs time to really shine. Ubuntu 10.04, otherwise known as Lucid Lynx, was released last week and is the third long term support (LTS) release from Canonical. With much hype around the new Ubuntu theme, as well as the new social networking tools, Lucid had much to live up to. We took it for a spin to see how it fared.

Anyone who has taken a class in economics is familiar with the difference between the direct cost of something and its 'opportunity cost'. Developing free software is a great example of this difference. A KDE developer does not have to spend hundreds of dollars on an SDK, he only needs to give up some of his time to develop.

There’s a good chance that if you’re reading this, you’re familiar with VLC, the high quality audio and video player for Linux, Mac, and Windows. Its speed, portability, and built-in support for most common codecs make VLC an extremely popular choice for playing video. While that’s all well and good, VLC can do a lot more than basic video playback, including things like video encoding, DVD ripping, volume normalization and more. Today we’ll look at some of VLC’s most interesting and little-known features that help make this an indispensable application for nearly all desktop platforms.

Due to ongoing issue with virsh compiled against libvirt 0.7.5 when working with Xen 4.0 Hypervisor. I attempted to downgrade libvirt and related stuff to Ubuntu Karmic’s ( well tested version with Xen). Proceed as follows

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski claimed power to regulate companies that provide Internet access, opening a fight with cable and telephone companies and sparking opposition from Republicans. Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and Cablevision Systems Corp., cable operators that sell Web connections, fell more than 5 percent in New York trading. Genachowski’s proposal lays a foundation for net neutrality rules to bar Internet service providers from interfering with users’ traffic. The plan provides “only the modest authority” needed after a U.S. court stripped its power over the Web, Genachowski, a Democrat, said today in a statement.

[Not directly FOSS related but of interest to our readers I think. - Scott]

Recently, Eben Moglen was warning about the threat to freedom that cloud computing services like Facebook represent. He also proposed creating a distributed, free software alternative. Looks like the new Diaspora project has taken him up on that idea.

Apple and Microsoft join to fight Opera and Firefox. The next big evolution of the Internet will be in the realm of video playing. Until now the rapid growth of online video has been built on Adobe's Flash technology. Flash has always been a workable solution but not the best platform because it requires an additional plugin to be installed before users can view video.

Nexenta is a project developing a debian user-land for the OpenSolaris kernel. This provides all of the advantages of apt as a package respoitory (based on the Ubuntu LTS apt repository, currently using 8.04) as well as the advantages of the ZFS filesystem. In the resulting setup every user can have his/her own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol or NFS with read-/write access.

Did you know that businesses don't use Unix anymore? I didn't either until I had an interesting dinner conversation with another computer professional. I need to get out more.

Pandora does not currently make an application for the N900 and nor do they plan on making one any time soon. The community has stepped up to solve the Pandora radio issue on the N900.

Opera has switched its Dragonfly open source debug tool to an Apache 2.0 license to include a promise that users are protected from patents owned by Opera or any other contributor to the project. Dragonfly - similar to Mozilla's Firebug tool - completed its open sourcing in February, when it was moved from Opera servers to BitBucket. It was originally under the BSD license.

To remove Mono from your shiny new desktop installation of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx enter the following command (after taking the usual precautions like backups of your data etc)..

Ten years ago a simple twin panel file manager was released. It had a few small glitches like showing rrr instead of rwx for permissions, had some compatibility issues with Debian and Solaris, did not save keyboard settings, but it was, in spite of many bugs, sort of usable for everyday work. Ten years ago Krusader started on the path to becoming a top file manager for a large range of operating systems and users.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced keynote speakers for LinuxCon, scheduled for August 10-12 in Boston. LinuxCon will feature keynote speakers including Virgin America's Ravi Simhambhatla, GNOME's Stormy Peters (pictured), the SFLC's Eben Moglen, and Forrester Research's Jeffrey S. Hammond, and will host a Linux Kernel Roundtable.

In a post on his blog, Puppy Linux founder Barry Kauler has announced the release of version 1.0 of Quirky. Kauler says that, while the Quirky Linux distribution is in the same family as Puppy Linux, it's a "distinct distro in its own right."

When is open source not really open source? When it's an Android phone. OK, before everyone jumps all over me and screams, "Android is built on Linux!" and "It's more open than the iPhone!" let me say this: Yes, it is built on an open-source platform and it is, indeed, more open than the iPhone. But in the cutthroat world of mobile telephony, Google may have met its match with old-school behavior from telephone service providers and handset makers who aren't so keen on the "open" part of open-source. The Open Handset Alliance isn't so open, nor is it too much of an alliance among Android device makers. It is about handsets, though, so there's that.