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Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2 doesn't come with drastic visual changes, but there are quite a few minor improvements and tweaks. In this post I'll try to cover all the changes made since Beta 1. If you've installed Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Alpha or Beta 1 and kept upgrading, you already have all the changes in this post. If not, here is what's new (visually) in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 2:

While it’s hard to make the claim that there aren’t enough Linux distros out there, it’s also hard to escape the fact that no distribution is all things to all people. There are all kinds of reasons to consider rolling your own, but many people never make the attempt because it seems like such a huge undertaking. Fortunately, with modern software we can create new distros, remixes, and custom configurations in a matter of minutes instead of months. Here, we’ll showcase some of the current software tools that make this so easy.

The Linux Foundation's CEO, Jim Zemlin, has published a statement from IBM's Daniel Frye in which he reasserts IBM's patent pledge. Zemlin says, on the basis of this statement "Fortunately, all of us can breathe easy - IBM remains true to their word". Frye says that "IBM stands by this 2005 Non-Assertion Pledge as strongly as it did then. IBM will not sue for the infringement of any of those 500 patents by any Open Source Software".

MySQL has an interesting architecture that sets it apart from some other enterprise database systems. It allows you to plug in different modules to handle storage. What that means to end users is that it is quite flexible, offering an interesting array of different storage engines with different features, strengths, and tradeoffs. In Survey of MySQL Storage Engines, we discussed some of the more common storage engines, MyISAM the default, InnoDB, Archive, Merge, Memory, CSV and NDB. This time we'll cover some of the newest and more exotic storage engines, and even some that are still in development.

The past weeks gave me much to think about with regards to the future of Linux. Every year we always hear that “this is the year of Linux Desktop” and yet are surprised that nothing has changed from the years prior. Sure Linux is growing on the end user base but it is a very small growth; almost unnoticeable.

Ubuntu developers invented Upstart as a replacement for the hoary old SysV init system, with the aim of meeting the complex demands of booting modern Linux systems. Upstart is being adopted by Fedora, Debian, and openSUSE. Akkana Peck introduces us to this Ubuntu success story.

A few minutes ago, the Ubuntu development team unleashed the second and final Beta release of the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx) operating system, due for launch at the end of this month. As usual, we've downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up-to-date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 10.04 LTS development.

It’s never nice to hear about the demise of a piece of simply brilliant software. when I discovered that get_iplayer was being pulled by its developer I was, to use a cliche, gutted. The potential loss of a piece of software that did just what it said on the tin is bad enough but it was impeccably free and open. What’s more, it was an example to the BBC about how things should be done. It was the work of one lone, unpaid developer, not the product of professional developers subsidised by the BBC licence. What happened exemplifies everything that is wrong with proprietary software. Read the full article at Freesoftware Magazine.

For those of us that have worked for years in open source, rumors in the press of IBM “breaking its open source patent pledge” were met with a bit of dismay. IBM is one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and dozens of critical open source projects. For more than a decade IBM has been a good citizen in the open source community. To get to the bottom of things I contacted Dan Frye, VP of Open Systems Development at IBM and member of the Linux Foundations board of directors, to “say it wasn’t so.” Fortunately all of us can breathe easy - IBM remains true to their word.

Starting July 3rd 2010, hundreds of KDE community members, employees of companies working with us and many other Free Software enthusiasts will gather at Tampere, Finland. There, at the University of Tampere, the annual Akademy summit 2010 will take place. For a full week, Tampere will be the place where stunning new technology is demonstrated, hundreds of prominent Free Software contributors walk the corridors and new plans for the future of the Free Desktop emerge.

There are few things more aggravating than going out to a coworker's office to work on their computer and finding that to fix it you need a CD that is sitting in your office. If you have ever experienced that, or would simply like to no longer need to tote that book of CDs with you every day, then this article is for you.

Drupal is a great CMS but is a bit hefty when you host it on bargain-basement shared hosting, and virtual private servers are great but memory-constrained at the low-end. Apache can be a big offender when it comes to resource usage, so a nice alternative is nginx, a fast, light-weight and efficient http server that supports PHP via PHP-FastCGI. So this is a pretty slick setup for hosting Drupal, and I've taken a few different howtos and forum posts to put together this guide, which should have all you need in one stop, including a working URL rewrite config.

The next major update of Ubuntu code named Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is scheduled to arrive in April 2010. This is going to be an LTS edition, which means updates will be available for three years in desktop and five years in Servers. Even though Ubuntu 10.04 is going to be an LTS release, a complete overhaul is on the cards. Lets take a peek at what's coming in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx.

Texas Instruments has spun a new IP camera system-on-chip (SoC) that enables 1080p video and analytics for the video surveillance market. The TMS320DMVA1 SoC combines an ARM9 core, a new Vision analytics co-processor, and a codec co-processor, and is offered in a Linux-ready DMVA1 IP camera reference design, says TI.

Noted iPhone and PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz, or GeoHot, told the gaming community not to update their systems until he was able to release custom firmware allowing them to continue using their Linux partitions, and it looks as if he's close to his goal. A new video posted today shows the hack, although a release date hasn't been given for the rest of us to download his work.

The Ubuntu developers have announced that Ubuntu 10.04 will be abandoning its switch to Yahoo search as the default search provider on the Ubuntu desktop and returning to use Google's search. The switch to Yahoo was announced in January and lauded as part of a revenue sharing deal which would provide "revenue [which] will help Canonical to provide developers and resources to continue the open development of Ubuntu and the Ubuntu Platform".

The FreeBSD Handbook appeared cryptic on how exactly to update packages and ports. I'm sure the answer is in there, but I just couldn't find it. However, I do have Dru Lavigne's new book, "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD," and I'm following her instructions on pages 247-251 on how to use csup and portupgrade to update both packages and ports on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation.

If you need network services, there is little need to build up your own hardware. Try using cloud services and bring your infrastructure into the cloud. You need an in-house infrastructure? Try Eucalyptus…

The Horde open source messaging and groupware project is gearing up for the first major release of its application suite and development environment in years with version 4, which is due to arrive in mid-2010. Horde has a long history since the first release of the framework over a decade ago. Version 3 first appeared in late 2004 and since then a large ecosystem of applications has flourished around it -- from Web-based PIM to photo management.

Last week, to the surprise of patent lawyers and the biotechnology industry, advocates for technological freedom won an enormous victory against socially harmful distortions of patent law. The Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York held invalid patents owned by Myriad Genetics on diagnostic testing for genetic susceptibility to the most common hereditary forms of breast and ovarian cancer. By "patenting" the right to determine whether the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes are present in the relevant mutated form in a women's genome, Myriad Genetics has been able to exclude all other laboratories from conducting the test. Patients and their insurers have paid much more, and women and their families have waited crucial weeks longer than necessary for information relevant to treatment and potentially affecting survival.