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It’s official: Ubuntu 10.04 Long Term Support arrives April 29, and this particular blogger was privy to the press conference about it. Canonical Chairman Mark Shuttleworth and CEO Jane Silber discussed the plans and progress of new operating system, and then fielded some Q and A. The key news: More than 80 ISVs are supporting Ubuntu. But here’s what it means for the desktop users and Canonical as a whole...

Last month Mozilla Labs announced a new concept series on online identity. As part of this exploration, we developed the Account Manager. The Account Manager makes it incredibly easy for users to create new accounts with optional randomly generated passwords, and log into and out of them with just a click. As a web developer, adding support for this feature could take as little as fifteen minutes of hacking (in fact, we’ll mention the first 5 people to add support – read below to learn more.). We want to make signing into websites easier for all Firefox users, and are looking to ship this feature as soon as possible in Firefox.

The bash man page has long had the following bug listed: "It's too big and too slow" (at the very bottom of the man page). If you agree with that, then you probably won't want to read about the "new" associative arrays that were added in version 4.0 of bash. On the other hand, if you've ever used any modern Office Suite and seen code-bloat at it's finest and just think the bash folks are exaggerating a bit, then read on.

On Tuesday, the LLVM team announced the availability of its 2.7 release. LLVM is an open source project with a license similar to BSD's; it offers front ends for a number of programming languages, compiling them to intermediate code that can be interpreted by a Just-in-Time compiler or immediately compiled into native code. The 2.7 release marks a major milestone for LLVM, as it's the first time that its C language compiler, Clang, has sufficient C++ support to self-host, meaning that it can compile a functional version of itself.

As a file manager, Gnome Commander has the look and feel of early workhorses like Norton Commander and Midnight Commander. Among its many talents, Gnome Commander is a life-saver when it comes to synchronizing files. Something I wish were available in more apps I use is the ability to do advanced renaming of files, and GC does this with support for various types of meta-data.

As I look through DistroWatch's list, I see a trend. The top ten at the moment are: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Arch, and MEPIS. Strangely, we find two relatively non-n00b distributions in there: Arch, Debian. The other 8 distributions aim to be relatively easy to use, while Debian and Arch are not.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Mandriva 2010.0) to one large storage server (distributed storage) with GlusterFS. The client system (Mandriva 2010.0 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Things need to change and Apple needs to be seen for what it really is: a threat to innovation and freedom. For as long as anyone can remember Microsoft has been seen as the primary enemy of free and open source software (FOSS). Free software advocates over the years have held Microsoft up as the pre-eminent example of how software should not be produced and distributed; an example of how they did not want it to be.

"... for a while now, I've been asked the same question on many occasions, a question I did not previously have a good answer to, "Can I use IrfanView with Debian [Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.]". Before recently my answer was always "You can't use IrfanView, as it's only available for Windows, and there isn't a good IrfanView equivalent for GNU/Linux." Well, I'm happy to say as of version 2.11.3 that I can now tell people that gThumb is as good as IrfanView, if not better."

aTunes is a full-featured audio player and manager, developed in Java programming language, so it can be executed on different platforms: Windows, Linux and Unix-like systems.Currently plays mp3, ogg, wma, wav, flac, mp4 and radio streaming, allowing users to easily edit tags, organize music and rip Audio CDs.

Apps, apps, apps! They make or break an operating system (mobile or otherwise). The following are my top five application picks that are not included on the N900 by default.

The final release of Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx will be out tomorrow, for customisation here are top things to do after installing Lucid Lynx

I'm no friend to Windows. I know the operating system too well to trust it. But, I did think that even though Windows is defective by design, you could keep it relatively safe by installing patches quickly and using anti-virus software religiously. I was wrong. First, it turns out that one of Microsoft's latest Windows patches just flat out didn't work. Whoops! This isn't the first time that this has happened. But, what really caught my attention this go-around was that at just about the same time the news broke that a flawed McAfee Antivirus update knocked out millions of Windows XP computers. Talk about sloppy quality assurance! How the heck can a Windows anti-virus company release an update that locks XP computers into an endless reboot cycle?

Microsoft and HTC have signed a patent agreement protecting the handset maker from Microsoft patent lawsuits over its industry-leading Android smartphones. HTC will pay royalties to Microsoft, which for the first time is enforcing its alleged Linux-related patents on an Android-based product -- yet the agreement may help HTC defend against Apple's Android-related lawsuit.

Facebook's latest moves to control the heart of the Web are worrying many people. Luckily, Mozilla has just announced a new Firefox project to manage identity that may be just what we need: a free software alternative to Facebook's plans. Will the next big battle between open and closed be fought between Firefox and Facebook?

SCO has filed its "renewed" motion for judgment "as a matter of law", with its supporting memorandum. They ask the judge to rule over the heads of the jury and decide that the jury "simply got it wrong" when it ruled that SCO didn't get the copyrights in 1995 from Novell. In the alternative, they'd like a new trial. See, this is the problem with loaning money to SCO. They don't ever want this dance to end. The rest of the world gets it. SCO lost, by judge (Dale Kimball) and now by jury. They'd like this to be over. And us, the musicians, so to speak, at the dance? We're tired and we want SCO to stop already so we can pack up and go home and get some sleep. And no, this isn't normal, stretching a case that was hopeless from day one into what looks to become a more than decade-long event. And can you imagine the international outcry if the judge were to grant a request like this?

HTC has agreed to pay Microsoft a royalty when it sells a mobile phone running Google's Android operating system. But why does Microsoft make money from Google's software? Android is based on open source software - and Microsoft has long raised fears that aspects of Linux may infringe on its patents.

The Mono team is proud to bring you a preview of C# 5.0 a few years before our friends in Building 41 do. A snapshot of the code is available in the demo-repl.zip file. This contains the csharp.exe C# REPL shell and the Mono.CSharp.dll compiler-as-a-service assembly.

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Crashing machines, slow boot times, and agony dealing with technical support have Digital Age people suffering from Computer Stress Syndrome, a study available online Tuesday found. "Today's digitally-dependent consumers are increasingly overwhelmed and upset with technical glitches and problems in their daily lives," a communications industry think tank said in a report entitled "Combating Computer Stress Syndrome." The report identified sources of peoples' pain as "frustrating, complex computers and devices, technical failures, viral infections, and long waits to resolve support issues."

[I know my computer related stress has gone down permanently since switching to Linux and becoming my own tech support.. - Scott]

Andy Updegrove may have cracked the code on Oracle's seemingly insane decision to start charging $90 for the formerly free ODF plugin for Microsoft Office. That's $90 in a minimum pack of 100, plus a 22% support fees for updates. Does Oracle really think that this will fly with companies, is Oracle trying to kill off the product entirely? The ODF plugin was developed to allow Microsoft Office users to exchange documents with OpenOffice.org users. It works for spreadsheets, presentations, and word processing docs and Sun gave it away for years. So why has Oracle so suddenly decided to charge for it? Whatever Oracle's strategy, the company isn't talking.