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Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers. Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme—a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu's visual identity.

The annual DrupalCon conference is coming up, April 19th to 21st at San Francisco's Moscone Center. Drupal, of course, is the increasingly popular open source content management system founded by Dries Buytaert, and OStatic itself runs on the platform. There will be many movers and shakers from the Drupal world at the conference, including representatives from The Commerce Guys, which helps companies and organizations deliver useful Drupal-based e-commerce sites and solutions. In advance of the conference, we caught up with Ryan Szrama, a developer with The Commerce Guys, and the original developer of Ubercart, an open source e-commerce package. Here are some of his thoughts on where Drupal-based commerce is headed.

A week ago we reported on open-source GPU offloading, which allowed multiple GPUs from different vendors that were backed by open-source graphics drivers to offload the 3D rendering work to a secondary GPU and then to pass the rendered result back to the primary GPU driving the display. This open-source work referred to as PRIME was based on NVIDIA's Optimus Technology. This work was done by David Airlie just as a proof of concept and he doesn't intend to get the work completed and shipped in the upstream packages, but is hoping to hand off this task to someone else.

According to this press release, Marvell is announcing the $99 Moby Tablet for Education. You've seen my video of Marvell's 4.3? Tablet prototype shown at CES based on the Marvell Armada 600 processor. The Moby tablet is based on the same Armada 600 platform but comes with a larger screen (probably 10?).

Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu and so on are getting lots of attention but it seems everybody is forgetting about Xubuntu so I decided to make a screenshot tour of Xubuntu. I never used XFCE so my notes are from the point of view of someone used to Gnome (so I'll underline the difference between XFCE and Gnome too - or Ubuntu and Xubuntu if you want).

Six months ago I got a request to check what Microsoft had said in a report about Italian public administrations rejecting OpenDocument as mandatory format, so I tried to contact MS Italy to know more. Since I'm still waiting for them, and in general Microsoft asking for "file format neutrality" is a bit ridiculous, I've decided to ask again, in public

On February 9th 2010 the KDE community released the a new major version of the KDE Software Compilation to the world. As this provided an excellent excuse for throwing a good party, the last 7 weeks have seen hundreds of KDE enthusiasts gather at over thirty release parties around the world. Most parties featured demos and talks about the new release and the majority included beer, other drinks, food (including KDE cake!), some had karaoke and all of them were about meeting cool people and having some fun.

A Berlin-based software company is preparing an Intel Atom N450-based e-reader that runs Linux with Android extensions. Billed as the "tablet PC for publishing houses," Neofonie GmbH's "WePad" tablet sports an 11.6-inch touchscreen, 16GB of flash storage, a SD card, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, and a webcam, says Neofonie.

The second week in the Salt Lake City jury trial between the SCO Group and Novell about the copyright to Unix has uncovered further surprising details of this never-ending story. First, SCO's former CEO Darl McBride, who was called as a witness, confirmed that SCO didn't need the debated copyrights for the development of its family of operating systems, and that the copyrights were only required for the licensing business of the vendor's SCOSource division. Then the previously unaware jury members were informed that a judge had already delivered a ruling in this matter, but that his decision had been overturned. The trial will go into its third week while, at the same time, Novell's Brainshare conference will be held in Salt Lake City.

Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx Beta 1 was released and because it features so many visual changes, I decided to make an article with most of them (fresh new screenshots of course), even though I already posted most of them.

Wikipedia has become famous, or perhaps infamous, for its intolerance of new content. That is to say, there's a dedicated group within Wikipedia's community that prides itself on pruning content from Wikipedia rather than being inclusionist on new content. The deletionists are getting renewed attention after proposing that the dwm entry be deleted because it's a a "non-notable window manager." While dwm may less notable than other desktop environments and window managers, most users would probably find it more useful than not to have an entry describing dwm in Wikipedia.

"As a developer you want your product to be useful, not only to yourself, but also to your community. It may be a vanity thing, but that's how it works." ... "When I slowly constructed my project and my community I delved deeply into the way FOSS works. I learned a lot from Linus and the way he makes his kernel tick."

The Wine development release 1.1.41 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

The search for the next-generation video codec for the open web has reached an impasse. Few of the options are truly open or free, and those that are free are not being pushed by the major forces.

There are again some rumors about LiMux' dead here in Munich. I don't want to comment on the origin of them, but to the responsible company: This doesn't work out. LiMux is more alive than ever and the story goes on very well....LiMux has achieved one very important goal. The open standard Open Document Format (ODF) is now Munich's primary used internal document exchange standard, beside of PDF for non-editable documents. Congratulations to all, who made this great success happen! Our standard office workplace consists now of OpenOffice.org (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw), Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird and many other sometimes needed apps like e.g. GIMP.

Lucid Lynx, Ubuntu 10.04 that Friday entered the beta stage, looks to be taking the popular distro to an entirely new - and very consumer-oriented - level. Between Canonical's web-based syncing service Ubuntu One - unveiled last year - the coming U1 music store, and the new Me Menu, Lucid Lynx is looking less like the stoic Linux desktops of yesteryear and more like like, well, what everyday consumers want in an operating system.

This entry is a continuation of one published in May of 2009. In fact it is relating to a comment made earlier today which I responded to in brief words. I am now taking the time to offer my viewpoint on the whole ZFS licensing under the CDDL and the reasoning for it. It wasn’t until I started working with the OpenSolaris kernel and by working I mean, modifying code and going through the build process that I finally realized why OpenSolaris was licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, recently spoke about large screen Android Tablets at the Abu Dhabi Media Summit keynote (at timecode 10 minutes and 39 seconds). It’s a nice way of Eric Schmidt to indirectly confirm that Google is definitely going to support the development of Android based Tablets as alternatives on the market to the upcoming iPad.

Shuttle announced a compact, all-in-one PC featuring a 15.6-inch touchscreen and a dual-core Intel Atom D510 available with SUSE Linux. The X50V2 includes a 1366 x 768 display, webcam, 4-in-1 card reader, a 2.5-inch hard drive bay, and up to 4GB of RAM, says the company. The X50V2 resembles Shuttle's recently announced XS35 desktop in that it is available in a "barebone" configuration without memory, a hard disk drive (HDD), or operating system. It will also be available preconfigured with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB HDD, loaded with either SUSE Linux or Windows 7 Home Premium, the company says.

Virtualization has come to be the hot pick for consolidating and cutting hardware costs. All those machines within machines raise questions about the safety of what's inside, though, and according to a recent study, some are seriously lacking in good answers. The analysts at Gartner have been pondering virtualization lately, with particular emphasis on how migration affects security. According to their research, that effect is considerable: They estimate that some sixty percent of virtual servers are less secure than the original boxes.