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If you're wondering why I'm wearing dark sunglasses, a fake moustache, and a baseball cap (featuring the logo of professional curling team, The Floating Stones), I'm on the lam. I'm dodging black remote-controlled helicopters, pasty-white systems administrators, and the combined forces of many daemons to bring you some of the best-kept secrets of UNIX® power users. Don your aluminum foil hat and read on.

'One day, Google says, it will merge Android and Chrome OS. But at the moment, despite Android's ever-expanding influence, the web colossus is intent on delivering Chrome OS before the end of the year, complete with its inability to run local applications or store local data. "Chrome is part of our strategy to make the web more powerful," Google vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra told reporters last week at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco, referring to the Chrome browser, the basis for Chrome OS.

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced the availability of Fedora 13, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 13 Screenshots

I genuinely like Ubuntu. I agree with its stated mission, and I believe it's the best hope we have for general uptake of Linux/Unix as a desktop operating system. Right now I'm happy with how my Lucid install is performing. I'm using the "social desktop" features even though their design and implementation leave much to be desired. The Ubuntu community, from developer to forum participant, doesn't have to do anything I suggest, implore or cajole. (There may be some transitivity issues in that last sentence, but I'm just letting it flow.) I'm just a user. But don't dismiss me because I'm critical.

Mmmm…. bacon. This article examines two mechanisms to prevent data loss — write barriers and check summing. Both can be particularly important for drives with larger and larger caches. Pay attention: This can save your data bacon.

No matter how good your camera is, taking a well-exposed photo of a high-contrast scene like a black bird on snow can be really tricky.

I'm going to start this Ubuntu-User blog entry with an apology combined with a bit of an explanation. I'm going to talk about Facebook. Yes, me too -- I'm sorry.You all know what Facebook is, of course.With nearly 3 out of ever 4 intelligent beings in the known universe having their own Facebook page, it's a social networking behemoth. Facebook is so cool and so popular, everyone has either done it, is doing it, or plans on doing it. But a cursory scan of the news will tell you that it's not all rosy for Facebook.

New release of Openvirt based on Ubuntu 10.04 Server LTS introduces new virtualization features. Today Digital Networks released Openvirt 2.0. Openvirt provides a full virtualization platform for Linux, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD virtual machines.

KDE SC 4.5 is in feature freeze right now. Therefore, I decide to share some of early screenshots with you. In General there are no major changes. It is all about polishing and fixing bugs. There is a lot of under-hood changes in libs which as enduser we cannot see. KDE SC will be release in August 2010. Now I will let you enjoy the screenshots.

There was an IRC meeting yesterday regarding the Nautilus UI and a lot of design as well as functionality changes were proposed. Some of these are already confirmed as TO DO such as:

When Novell announces quarterly results on May 27, The VAR Guy wonders: Will Novell provide a status report on the potential sale of the company? Here’s an update for Novell's partners and customers, and some educated guesses about what Novell will say on May 27.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 10.04 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Kubuntu 10.04 is derived from Ubuntu 10.04 and uses the KDE desktop instead of the GNOME desktop.

Almost nine months after Slackware Linux 13 was released, the Slackware developers have announced the availability of the first point update for version 13 of their popular Linux distribution. Discussing the new release, the developers say that, "We've done our best to bring the latest technology to Slackware while still maintaining the stability and security that you have come to expect".

Can't bring yourself to love logs? You should take a second look. The lowly and lonely log files sit there day after day gathering dust and events as your system purrs along without issue. That is, until something bad happens. Then you scramble to find out why the system rebooted or had a memory problem. Maybe it was a network denial of service attack. Or was it a runaway process? Or worse still, a hacker after your MP3 collection. How will you know? If you said, “Look at the logs”, then you’re halfway to a resolution. In most cases, those lowly log files are your best friends. Disasters, system anomalies, user error and careless hackers all leaves tracks in the logs. If you know where to look and what to look for, you’re that much better off.

The announcement last week at Google IO of the creation of the WebM project and the release of the VP8 codec was a positive and welcome development, finally offering an alternative for online media to the royalty-liable H.264 and to Theora. WebM arises from Google's purchase of ON2 last year and had been widely anticipated. Google did their homework, securing endorsements from competing browser vendors Opera and Mozilla and even from Adobe (possibly in exchange for Google's endorsement of Flash on their TV platform) and, weakly, from Microsoft. The parade is now in full swing, and we can expect many more announcements of support like the one from the Miro Project. Only Apple was painfully absent, pushing the Google-Apple tension further into the spotlight

A board member with the Open Source Initiative (OSI) — the organization that approves open source licenses — has warned that there are "some serious questions" surrounding Google's swashbuckling efforts to create an open and royalty-free codec for web video. Hoping to defend the VP8 codec against patent attack, Google has open sourced the technology under a new license that includes some patent-centric language, but it has yet to submit the license for OSI approval. With a Monday blog post, OSI director Simon Phipps questioned whether there's a hole in the license that could expose users to third-party patent holders, and he urged Google to join hands with the OSI on the project, saying that before it does so, the codec cannot be considered open source.

Microsoft appears to be serious about making Outlook more accessible to open source developers. On May 24, the Redmond, Wash software giant announced two new open source projects designed to complement its recently released technical documentation for Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (.pst). The two open source projects — dubbed .pst Data Structure View Tool and .pst File Format Software Development Kit — will make it easier for developers to access data stored in digital formats created by Microsoft Outlook and use that data in cross platform solutions.

Apple Macs are secure because they don't get computer viruses, and because OS X, the operating system they run, is based on the rock-solid and highly secure BSD UNIX. These are two popular misconceptions which make many Mac users underestimate the security risk of allowing their computers onto a corporate network. In a presentation at the EICAR conference in Paris this month David Harley, Research Fellow & Director of Malware Intelligence at anti-virus company ESET, his colleague Pierre-Marc Bureau and Andrew Lee of security outfit K7 Computing pointed out that underestimating the risks presented by Macs can make them less secure than Windows machines.

One of the most interesting things to happen in the past couple of years, is Microsoft's embrace of Open Source. This means different things to various people I've spoken with at Microsoft. Some seem genuinely sincere. Some seem less so. What hasn't changed is Microsoft's behavior to the Open Source community at large.

Things in my personal world of Ubuntu Lucid 10.04 are starting to work themselves out, but it hasn't exactly been a smooth ride on my main laptop. If you read to the bottom, you'll find that the hacky-as-hell solution to a bug that has plagued my own desktop is followed by my thoughts (not all good) on what exactly Canonical was thinking about when deciding what goes into a long-term-support release.