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The cloud hype is getting thicker and smellier every day. All the cloud excitement is coming from those who hope to profit from it, the vendors and breathless tech journalists who can't think of anything worthwhile to write about. They're working very hard to make it sound like a wonderful thing, a miracle of rare device that will transform life as we know it.

In related news, Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Sasquatch, Yeti, and Elvis are all throwing a fabulous party at Graceland and everyone is invited. If you don't live in Memphis they'll send a private jet to pick you up.

Last month saw the opening (and then closing) of the 2.6.33 merge window (the time during which Linus takes potentially ‘intrusive’ patches to the kernel, followed by a period of stabilisation) and with it a flood of patches intended for the 2.6.33 kernel release…

SCO is still drowning in its own fail sauce but hasn't completely suffocated yet. The company's Chapter 11 Trustee has proposed selling off SCO's mobile technology business for some quick cash. The prospective buyer is said to be none other than Darl McBride, the company's much-despised former CEO, according to a report by Groklaw.

Among the important benefits of Linux's permission hierarchy is its ability to keep untrusted users from running amok. The all-or-nothing nature of root access, however, can present headaches when users are trusted, but only so far. That is a problem the sudo utility attempts to solve, and does so fairly well — except for the occasional glitch. A glitch of this sort turned up last week, allowing less-privileged users to skirt around sudo's protections and gain the powers of other users, including the superpowers of root. The advisory notes that impact of the vulnerability is mitigated by the utility's defaults, however. Sudo versions 1.7.2p4 (now superseded by 1.7.2p5) and 1.6.9p21 patch the vulnerability. Mandriva, Red Hat, and Ubuntu have already pushed updated versions out to users.

A former Sun Microsystems' executive has re-assured worried OpenSolaris users the open-source operating system has a future under new owner Oracle. Dan Roberts, Oracle director of product management, has said the database giant will continue to invest in OpenSolaris and will deliver the operating system's next incarnation: OpenSolaris 2010.03.

After figuring out how to get the screen to work on my stable of laptops that use Intel 830m video chips (aka 82830 CGC, also called i830m by many) in Ubuntu Lucid Alpha 2, do you want to know how things "improved" in Alpha 3? There's no improvement. Instead it's a massive fail. Yep, another volley of "improvements" that undoubtedly helped someone had foisted on me the mother of all regressions.

Gentoo is a source based distribution which lets the user decide how to optimize their system in many ways and includes building for a specific CPU architecture. Linux Magazine benchmarks four such options; i486, i686, pentium3, core2, and throws in Ubuntu for good measure.

Sprint and Verizon Wireless have released Palm's upgraded 1.4 version of the Linux-based WebOS for Palm Pre and Palm Pixi smartphones. Ofering much-anticipated video capture and editing functionality plus improved messaging features, WebOS 1.4 arrives shortly after Palm announced lowered investment guidance due to disappointing smartphone sales.

Configure Microsoft Outlook Express with TLS and SMTP_AUTH. This is a common issue that can be overlooked by administrators for users who insist on using Outlook Express. The set up for secure login and sending email is not intuitive.

Several Linux distributors have released updated sudo packages to fix two vulnerabilities that allow users with limited access rights to escalate their privileges. The sudo (super user do) command is intended to allow users to execute certain commands at another user's privilege level - usually root. The contents of the /etc/sudoers file determines whether or not a user is authorised to execute a command at a higher privilege level (by preceding the command with sudo) without further authentication. This allows administrators to give other users the rights required to handle certain management tasks without giving them overall root access.

It's may be a twee name but MeeGo could be the next big thing. It sounds like something a child would say, or the name of a baby's toy, but MeeGo has much bigger aspirations in mind. For those that weren't completely sucked into the Mobile World Congress last week, and consequently missed the announcement, MeeGo is the name of a new - yes another - mobile phone operating system launched at the conference. In truth it's not really so much new as being a new collaboration. In this case between Intel and Nokia and their respective Moblin and Maemo operating systems.

When the SAP Partner Summit started yesterday, Red Hat had a prime sponsorship position at the welcome reception. Read between the lines, and a quiet battle is brewing between Red Hat and Novell; the two leaning Linux service distribution providers are battling for the love and affection of SAP. Here’s why.

The KDE Project has announced the availability of packages for Microsoft Windows, bringing the KDE 4.4 applications to Windows. New in this release, the packages have been broken out from the main KDE modules so it should be easier for users to simply install a single package if they choose. Not everything is available for Windows yet, for instance Amarok is not available for Windows at this time, but most KDE apps should be good to go on Windows with this release.

As with all operating systems, the way a Linux game behaves on a computer is largely dependent on the design of the game, the graphics hardware and drivers the user has, and the settings one chooses. Native Linux games are typically better at supporting the computer’s default resolution without much tweaking, but the way it handles fullscreen display on a a dual-monitor system depends on the game engine employed. After about an hour of trying to configure all of your games, you might very well find yourself drowning in sea of techno-babble and configuration files. But have no fear, MakeTechEasier has come to your rescue yet again.

For many users, the combination of Slackware Linux and the Xfce desktop is the perfect blend of stability and speed, whatever the age of their hardware. But if Slackware itself is too much hard work, why not try one of its derivatives with a friendlier approach to the desktop and with out-of-the-box support for popular hardware and multimedia codecs? Bernard Hoffmann, an experienced Slackware user, has taken three Slackware-based Xfce distributions (Zenwalk Linux, Salix OS and GoblinX) for a test drive to see which one would be a best fit for a blazing fast and powerful home desktop. In the news section, Oracle confirms the continued development of OpenSolaris, Fedora delays the upcoming alpha release of version 13, Mandriva switches to nouveau with the latest kernel update in "Cooker", and Linux Mint prepares for an imminent release of its LXDE edition. Also in this issue, a link to a good summary of bleeding-edge repositories for Kubuntu and a brief talk about zombie processes. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the recipient of the February 2010 DistroWatch.com donation is the Squid project.

Things are hotting up in the USA – following an offer from majority shareholder Ralph Yarro to lend SCO Group more than 2 million dollars for its pending court cases, the administrator Edward Cahn has presented an alternative financing option to the bankruptcy court. None other than Darl McBride, the former SCO chief executive who was sacked by Yarro, wants to purchase and develop the company's mobile arm. As reported on Groklaw, the proposed conditions of sale are extraordinarily generous, with a purchase price of $35,000 being mooted. Licensing fees would be due only when the company's turnover exceeds 1 million dollars annually – they are not expected to exceed 30,000.

Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, is planning to overhaul the desktop panel and integrate social networking features in Ubuntu 10.04, codenamed Lucid Lynx. One of the key components of this effort is the Me Menu, which shipped in the Lucid alpha 3 last week. The Me Menu, which Canonical unveiled in December, provides a unified interface for managing your presence on instant messaging and social networking services. A text box that is embedded in the menu allows users to publish status messages to all of their accounts. The menu also provides easy access to the standard account and identity configuration tools.

A couple weeks back we released Bordeaux 2.0.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris and I posted the news about the release in the OpenSolaris forums. Ian ask if I could check and see if VLC ran in Bordeaux, the Windows client. And sure enough it runs extremely well with just a couple dll overrides

It is hard to believe that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still has the majority of market share in the web browser world (62.12%). I am just glad to see the rising popularity of Mozilla Firefox (24.43%), Google Chrome (5.22%) to even others such as Apple Safari (4.53%), Opera (2.38%), etc. Whenever I spend time to do various Javascript to even CSS development for various dynamic webpages, I am always held back by the non-compliant Internet Explorer. Today I will be picking IE8 as it is the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

The consolidated IT of the city of Munich is reporting at CeBIT 2010 on converting their workstations to Linux and OpenOffice. The migration to the free office package was finalized for Munich. All 15,000 office PCs of the city council will work on OpenOffice, under Linux or Windows.