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The upcoming release of Ubuntu 10.04 is on the way and with its new theme, looks simply stunning. With an online music store built in, integrated cloud backup services and a strong focus on social networking, could this finally be the release consumers have been waiting for?

Hundreds of organizations that develop and promote standards have been formed using a legal and governance model that leads them to be referred to as "consortia." But think for a moment and tell me if you know what kind of model would be wise to use to set up an organization to support any other type of largely virtual activity?

Package installation for Linux distributions has traditionally separated libraries and application binaries into different packages, so that only one version of a library would be installed and it would be shared by applications that use it. Other operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS X) often bundle a particular version of a library with each application, which can lead to many copies and versions of the same library co-existing on the system. While each model has its advocates, the Linux method is seen by many as superior because a security fix in a particular commonly-used library doesn't require updating multiple different applications—not to mention the space savings. But, it would seem that both Mozilla and Google may be causing distributions to switch to library-bundling mode in order to support the Firefox and Chromium web browsers.

Alexander Reichle-Schmehl is working hard to revitalize the Debian Project News with a group of volunteers – see what you can do to help them!

Claims Linux would be as easy or easier.

Mark Shuttleworth and I have a forth and back on the Ubuntu / Debian relationship.

It was not long ago when Microsoft Windows had a tight stranglehold on the operating system market. Walk into a Circuit City or Staples, it seemed, and virtually any computer you took home would be running the most current flavor of Windows. Ditto for computers ordered direct from a manufacturer. In the last decade, though, the operating system market has begun to change. Slightly more than 5% of all computers now run Mac, according to NetMarketShare.com. Linux is hovering just beneath 1% of the overall market share in operating systems. And although that might sound like a small number, Linux is far more than just a fringe OS. In fact, it's running in quite a few more places than you probably suspect.

Still deeper into the dot (.) with an dive into access permissions. Study up because there’s going to be a quiz. In the previous article we saw how the hidden directory entries named . (dot) and .. (dot dot) tie the filesystem together. Those names are hard links that reference the actual filesystem object through the index number. A directory always has at least two names: . and its given name. You can always reach the parent directory through the .. entry.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is reaching towards its goal of hitting $1bn in sales. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010, the company had double digit revenue growth and posted record billings for the services backing its Enterprise Linux and related products, and it finished off the year with overall sales up 14.7 per cent, to $748.2m, and net earnings up 10.8 per cent, to $87.3m. Not too shabby considering the global economy was melting down during the first half of Red Hat's fiscal year and is only now showing some signs of stability.

High dynamic range imaging (HDR) is an important technology for photographers. It is a collection of techniques that allow a wider dynamic range of luminances between the lightest and darkest areas of an image.

There are several categories of zones that must be configured. You need to have forward lookup zones, which allow the nameserver to match names to IP Addresses. You’ll define these zones in the /etc/bind directory, in files with the “db” prefix.

When it comes to learning about computers, one operating system has the edge. Productivity, however, is a different story.

The surprise to most people isn’t that I do not believe that software should be patentable. Given my long term interest in and coverage of free and open source software, I’m supposed to be at least mildly anti-establishment. It is also statistically unlikely that I would be in favor of patents, because industry sentiment is overwhelmingly against them at the present time.

Execs from "the combined Sun and Oracle" tag-teamed at this year's EclipseCon to talk about the future of Java in a turn that was full of team spirit, but few details on Oracle's plans. Longtime Oracle face Steve Harris, senior vice president of the giant's application server group, was joined by the ex-vice president of Sun Microsystems client software turned vice president of Oracle's client software development group, for some geeky banter, some traditional tech-show T-shirt lobbing, and what amounted to hints about how "the power of the Java community will be strengthened" under the stewardship of Big O.

Oracle has announced an updated version of its embedded open-source database for Google's Android, during a three-way wrestling match for the affections of Eclipse developers. On Tuesday, the database giant used the annual EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California to unveil Berkeley DB 11g Release 2, which introduces support for Android. Oracle is a member of Eclipse, and Berkley DB 11g Release 2 is due on March 31.

The Italian ICT industry is in dire straits. In order to save it, Assinform (association of the bigger Italian ICT companies, whose members include Microsoft Italy and many other multinationals) just proposed a public incentives program to "finance the replacement of obsolete software with advanced applications made to order for the actual needs of the "Made in Italy" companies" No, thanks. Unless you do it in a way that does bring lots of work to Italian programmers and make their customers and all taxpayers save much more money than any other incentive program: mandating the adoption of non proprietary formats and protocols.

Recently, Nagios, an open source application for network, server and application monitoring, has been the subject of a dispute. The operators of the French Nagios site nagios-fr.org claimed that Nagios Enterprises was forcing them to give up the domain because of postings about ICINGA, a fork of Nagios. At the centre of the dispute is Ethan Galstad, creator of Nagios and CEO of Nagios Enterprises. The H talked to him about what had happened and asked how he plans to take the Nagios community forward.

Our friends over at Unigine Corp love to push the bounds of graphics realism in their Unigine Engine, which continues to be one of the most advanced commercial game engines, and right now is certainly the most advanced game engine for Linux. While there are not many game studios actually shipping products based on Unigine's technology right now, Unigine Corp is known for producing a couple technology demos and working with us on the Phoronix Test Suite. Their Unigine Sanctuary benchmark was phenomenal, their Unigine Tropics benchmark was even better yet and set a new Linux OpenGL precedent, and now Unigine Heaven takes it unbelievably further.

The OpenOffice Scribblers PPA was finally updated and it now hosts the latest OpenOffice.org 3.2 packages for Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) for now.

Last month, I predicted most users would depend on 20 different computers by about 2015. Now, here's the flip-side of the argument: By 2010, perhaps you'll only need a single computer to handle all of your business, personal and communications tasks. Here's why.