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Cisco announced an enterprise-focused tablet based on a 1.6GHz Intel Atom, using Intel's upcoming x86 Android port. Due in the first quarter of 2011, the Cius offers a seven-inch touchscreen, 32GB of flash, 3G and 802.11 a/b/g/n communications, a 720p-capable front-facing videocam, a five-megapixel still camera, plus an optional HD audio docking station equipped with a telephone handset.

The cloud values Internet-based computing above all else, but maybe the comprehensive flexibility of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) would provide a better vision for the future of computing?

Cross-platform efforts to provide interoperability with Windows on Linux systems may cease to be of importance in future as the acceptance of alternative OSes widens, say industry watchers. Linux users have relied on various methods to access Windows programs, one of which is the Wine project. The open source effort offers users a way of running some Windows programs by providing a substitute layer that encompasses APIs (application programming interfaces) and DLLs (dynamic-link libraries) for the Windows kernel.

A guest post from Mårten Mickos in response to Simon Phipps's statement of opposition to so-called "open core" models. Mickos argues that "for an open source company to become commercially successful, it needs to have an unfair advantage against its competition". He is the CEO of cloud start-up Eucalyptus and former CEO of MySQL.

It's common knowledge that Linux has a fair number of file systems. Some of these are unappreciated and can be very useful outside their "comfort zone". OCFS2 is a clustered file system initially contributed by Oracle and can be a great back-end file system for general, shared storage needs.

There are hundreds (at least!) of different Linux-based operating systems. Most people will be familiar with some of the big names — distributions like Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Debian and Mandriva. Most of the well-known Linux distributions are designed to be used as general purpose desktop operating systems or installed on servers. Here are some of the more unusual distros.

Paul Frields, who has been getting his paycheck from Red Hat to run the Fedora development Linux variant since 2008, is moving back inside the company to work on Enterprise Linux, and an outsider named Jared Smith is being brought in as the new Fedora Project Leader. Frields joined Red Hat in February 2008, replacing Max Spevack, another Red Hat employee who ran the open source Linux development product from February 2006 until Frields took over. Smith will take over the FPL position (which is a full-time job with a Red Hat paycheck) to steer the development of Fedora 14, something that Frields already got the ball rolling on.

Red Flag Software has demonstrated a 10.1-inch tablet running its new MeeGo Linux version of Midinux 3.0 on an Intel Moorestown Z6xx processor, says Tech.qq. Equipped with Wi-Fi and 3G, the NPad tablet will go on sale in the third quarter, says the report.

Sugar desktop environment was originally conceptualized to become the default desktop for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. Sugar desktop is designed with the goal of being used by children for learning. The original Sugar desktop environment was repackaged and remixed for Ubuntu and it was called Ubuntu Sugar Remix.

When Red Hat, Synnex and a dozen major open source application providers launched the Open Source Channel Alliance in April 2009, it appeared to be a watershed event. But fast forward to mid-2010, and the Open Source Channel Alliance has been largely silent in recent months. Here’s the update.

If making money from open source was hard, extracting it from clouds might prove to be even more difficult. Particularly when your main rival on the x64 server is none other than Microsoft. Red Hat got its start as Linux magazine publisher that tucked a Linux CD in the back, and then evolved into the largest commercial Linux distributor in the world. The company added middleware from JBoss and created other middleware, such as its Enterprise MRG messaging, grid and realtime Linux variant, and virtualization software for desktops and servers. And now it has to position itself as an alternative to Microsoft as the platform upon which customers can build x64-based clouds.

As a homeschooling parent, I'm a big fan of educational software and I've written quite about about various programs in the past. But, as a programmer, I'm also a big fan of any program that makes computer programming more approachable by younger children. So, when I heard about Scratch, I was pretty enthusiastic.

The grep command is a hugely powerful way to search through files. Like many command line utilities, once you're comfortable using it, you will discover that it is surprisingly fast and accurate. However, many Linux users only bother to learn one or two grep options and then use them as a kind of one-size-fits-all approach to searching. A little time spent learning what grep can do will pay dividends – and there's nothing more satisfying than knowing exactly how to use a command to find something in a jiffy.

Desktop applications for 'Information Management' that go beyond conventional card-index style databases are hard to find. The ideas behind such software are perhaps not that well known, so a prototype program, Knowledge, has been developed to put them firmly into the public domain.

We have to face it. Linux isn’t going to win the desktop war any time soon, but perhaps we don’t need to. With products like MeeGo and Android, Linux is going to complete its domination of the embedded space, and find itself in every single home.

A few of us here at MTE have a bit of a crush on Chrome OS. It’s not just the system itself, it’s the fact that someone is finally taking the concept of an operating system in a new direction. We wrote a brief synopsis of Chrome OS shortly after the first announcement that showed how things stood at the very beginning, then more recently did a manual build guide. Building Chrome OS from source code can take several hours, and can be a somewhat challenging process even for an experienced Linux user. To help solve that problem, some developers have begun releasing custom Chrome OS builds with included installers and software tweaks. This guide will show you where to find the images and how to get the latest Hexxeh release, Flow, on to your netbook or VM from a Linux host.

In the early hours of June 18 the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tor Project released a beta of a Firefox extension dubbed “HTTPS Everywhere” with the intention of providing encryption of user data when visiting certain sites. According to the official announcement, “HTTPS Everywhere” will provide SSL encryption to sites like Google Search, Wikipedia, Twitter and Identi.ca, and Facebook.

Oh the Cloud OS which ever so beautifully floats above the heads of corporate America as the ultimate dream of power and money. It's a chance to truly run the show from entertainment to business and personal information while still being able to advertise whatever they want at their own freewill since we have so eagerly sacrificed our own for what appears to be convenience and mobility of programs and files; All being hosted and housed by our ever so friendly, understanding and ethical corporate entities that we are all familiar with today.

For many enterprises, the server OS presents a quagmire: They don't want to pay too much for the server OS on which they rely, but at the same time, they don't want their server OS makers going out of business. The big question is whether there's enough money in open source software to build strong and stable enterprise OS makers. If you run your business using Microsoft's Windows server OSes, then you really don't have to worry. The Redmond giant is rolling in cash thanks in no small part to the high prices it charges for its desktop and server OSes and the client access licenses it requires to connect one to the other.

In creating Ubuntu Linux, Canonical has focused on ease of use, and this extends to the install procedure. To this end, Ubuntu eschewed many of the detailed questions that had discouraged potential Linux users of an earlier era. However, despite relative improvements in that area, the installation is still peppered with questions. This means that an admin tasked with the deployment of more than three or four computers is doomed to spend an entire morning dashing around, typing in responses to the same questions over and over again.