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Welcome to my new ComputerWorldUK blog, where I'll aim to bring you regular dispatches from the front lines of the free and open source software revolution. Starting out with news seems smart, so I'll use this post to announce my new job. Throughout the five years I spent as the chief open source officer for Sun Microsystems, I had the great pleasure of liberating the source code behind many great products. During my tenure Sun open sourced the Java platform, Solaris Unix, the UltraSPARC processor and much more.

Dan Kegel has been running some DirectX and OpenGL benchmarks on Ubuntu + Wine and Windows Vista, Here is the results of Dans recent benchmark test. Yagmarkdata now has data from five different benchmarks: 3dmark 2000, 2001, 2006 and heaven2_opengl, d3d9, and running on a semi-whimpy e8400 dual core box with an nvidia gt 220 card, on both Vista and Ubuntu+Wine.

The new Kubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) has just been released. This guide shows how you can upgrade your Kubuntu 9.10 desktop installation to Kubuntu 10.04.

There's always something noteworthy happening in Linux audio development. This week's news includes reports about a new Linux audio blog, music made by particle acceleration, how to use a laptop as a virtual music stand, synth emulation from the terminal command prompt, and watching the Linux Audio Conference on-line.

LXer Feature: 10-May-2010

In the Roundup this week we have a Faster and better Chrome 5 as well as 5 things you didn’t know VLC could do, Why rejecting Microsoft’s OSS contributions is counter-productive, Upgrading your distro should come with a warning and more. Enjoy!

Hi folks! We have some pretty big changes today, with an update to the latest KDE SC 4.4.3, and the addition of support for ConsoleKit and PolicyKit which have been enhanced to use shadow authentication. Thanks to Andrew Psaltis for doing some great work on polkit-1, and to Robby Workman for spending months following the sometimes random developments coming from the CK/PK camp. :-) Thanks to Eric Hameleers for leading the KDE 4.4.x Slackware development and handling the out-of-tree testing through http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/. And with that, we're calling this Slackware 13.1 BETA1. A stable release should be just around the corner...

Mark Shuttleworth just announced a version of Ubuntu for the dual-boot called Unity and a range of Light versions of Ubuntu, both netbook and desktop, that are optimised for dual-boot scenarios. These "Light" Ubuntu versions are optimized for the web.

Gnome 3.0 is coming to give the Linux desktop a boost. Gnome, the desktop environment favoured by the likes of Ubuntu Linux, is getting an overhaul. For users this means a number of things, including a new way of interacting with files and a new way of launching and managing applications.

I recently read through a post on "The Blog of Helios". The article was about the troubles of porting Osmos to Linux. There were apparently many struggles with audio and video support, due to the variety of platforms. This isn't surprising when we consider that variety is Linux's main selling point. Don't like [insert feature] in Ubuntu? Try Arch. Don't like [insert feature] in Arch? Try Slackware, ad infinitum. Yet, this hurts developers who are not part of the community and are writing software for a profit. Which distributions should they support? Which audio systems? Which DEs? Which WMs? Which graphics drivers? Which GUI toolkits? And these problems can be more serious than they at first appear. If you make the wrong choices with Linux, you may not just fail to sell the software, you could anger the Linux community and lose sales with other products as well (**cough** KDE4 **cough**).

Buggy kernel mode drivers in desktop security products from major vendors threaten to make mockery of the concept of Windows security.

I spent plenty of time running Puppy Linux, Damn Small Linux and other small live distros during my "early" days (2007-08) with free, open-source operating systems. In the past couple of years I've settled into the routine of using "big" OSes, meaning full-fledged distros/projects installed to the hard drive in the traditional way — you know, Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. I've been thinking about getting back to the small projects for some time. Today I burned a Slitaz disc. Couldn't get X to start. (And no, none of the vga=xxx boot codes would help.) So I turned to Tiny Core Linux.

In the last three years, Microsoft claims to have entered into over 600 licensing agreements with companies small and large over alleged patent violations in "Linux".

We've spent some time talking with Dave Burke. Dave is the originating author of Osmos. As we announced albeit a bit late Osmos is now ported to Linux and it's quite an entertaining game. Dave speaks with us about some of his history in gaming and why he ported it to Linux. And possibly why others do or will not.

Having covered what script links and space handlers are in the previous article, we will take the discussion further on how Python can be used in Blender. Although softbody and cloth simulators that are available in Blender do an excellent job in many situations, sometimes you want to have more control over the way a mesh is deformed or simulate some specific behavior that is not quite covered by Blender's built-in simulators. This article shows how to calculate the deformation of a mesh that is touched, but not penetrated by another mesh.

Elizabeth shares what she learned at the 4th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and the Open Source Business Conference about emerging best practices for contributing to FOSS. Namely, openly engage and work with the community.

Last week we delivered the first of our Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu 10.04 benchmarks to much anticipation, but now we have the results for Apple's Mac OS X 10.6.3 operating system to tack in too. In the first part of that Windows 7 vs. Ubuntu Linux performance examination, we looked closely at the OpenGL gaming performance across six different systems and a whole slew of tests. More articles are on the way looking at the performance and later in the week we already delivered some initial disk benchmarks. However, now it is time to see how Microsoft Windows 7 Professional x64, Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and Apple Mac OS X 10.6.3 compete with one another.

Not sure if this is an issue with the Lynx or with the fact that it's a VM (VMware Workstation 7). I've noticed over the past few days that networking's been spotty at best. Web pages take forever to load or the pages don't load and the connection times out. Same for twitter in twittergadget and Gwibber. Tried both the Firefox and Chromium browsers thinking it would make a difference but nada, tostada.

If you have been wondering: What's all the fuss about VistA? Where can I learn more about VistA? Who is the VistA Community? Can I use VistA in my hospital, clinic etc? How can I contribute to the improvement of VistA? Then plan on attending the 21st VistA Community Meeting, June 8 to 11, 2010 at George Mason University, Fairfax Virgina.

In the beginning, there was word processing. Then, simply, Word. Spreadsheets became Excel. Presentation software, if it was ever known by such a name, was simply PowerPoint. Long before Google's preeminence in search, Microsoft dominated business and personal software with a suite known as Office. The company launches its latest version, Office 2010, on Wednesday in New York — and the stakes couldn't be higher. The lucrative franchise is threatened by a changing market spouting a four-letter word: free. The biggest threat comes from Google, specifically Google Docs, Web applications accessible from any computer. Because of Google, Microsoft has been forced to make a free ad-supported version called Office Web Apps.

The GNOME Web browser Epiphany — formerly based on Mozilla's Gecko engine and now based on Webkit — doesn't ship with Ubuntu (though it does with Debian and most GNOME-based distros/projects). But if you're running GNOME, I recommend you add it via your favorite package manager. What Epiphany offers is a streamlined, faster, less-resource-intensive browsing experience.