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The Open-PC project, which developed an open source Linux PC based on community survey requests, says its KDE-flavored nettop will ship next month. The Open-PC is equipped with a 1.6GHz dual-core Atom N330 with 3GB RAM, but the nettop's high $500 price has stirred some controversy.

Originally, I strongly believed Canonical needed to build rock-solid relationships with traditional server vendors like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM. But fast forward to the present and my thought process is changing. In fact, I think Canonical has found a back door into the server market. It's cloud computing. Here's what I mean.

Back in 2007, Adobe's Mike Melanson, who is responsible for much of the Linux work on the Adobe Flash Player, had blogged about the jungle of audio output methods. Linux audio has been a mess with so many choices and each project like PulseAudio having its advantages and disadvantages. Things have improved somewhat over the past three years, but Mike is now focusing his attention on the Linux video acceleration APIs. Melanson has published a new blog post not calling the video APIs a jungle, but rather a thicket.

Google has announced the official release on Windows of Chrome 4, an updated version of the company's Web browser. It offers a handful of significant improvements, including support for extensions and bookmark synchronization. Due to Chrome's rolling development model, these features have been widely used by testers for quite some time. The official release means that the new functionality will be rolled out to regular end users through the stable channel. In addition to the major feature enhancements, Chrome 4 also brings a performance boost. Its score in the Dromeo DOM benchmarks is a 45 percent improvement over the previous version.

This situation really doesn't sit right with me. I understand that Canonical needs to be creative in acquiring new revenue streams. The stumbling block for me is. Isn't Google using mostly Ubuntu guts/code under the hood of its upcoming Chrome OS? You would have thought that their must have been some sort of communication between Google from Canonical after Yahoo approached them with their offer. Did Google not counter offer?

This is an aspect of FOSS that is regaining some measure of interest: for years, it was considered that writing production-ready FOSS meant lean and mean software. However, recent events have shown that, in the case of the Linux kernel, this is no longer exactly true: performance is dropping slowly yet steadily. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Novell has come up with an integrated software solution that makes data storage easier and more economical to manage.

The KDE team is getting very close to a final release of KDE 4.4. The second release candidate came out yesterday as a testing platform for users and developers to find and squash bugs before the final release date of February 9th.

SourceForge has confirmed that it is now blocking access from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan and Syria to its open source project hosting site. The access blocks come as a result of the company moving to comply with US export restrictions, which make it illegal to transfer or export certain technologies to countries on the US government's sanction list. Failure to comply with the sanctions list can incur penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment.

The Obama Administration has forced Sourceforge to deny service to its anti-terrorism sanction list. In practical terms this means people in Cuba, North Korea, the Sudan, Syria and Iran get “403 forbidden” messages when they try to access sourceforge.org addresses. (Here’s how the Armenian Private School in Toronto, Canada displays 403 errors.)

On January 27, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison will share his vision for the Oracle-Sun Microsystems business combination. But before the Oracle webcast kicks off, industry rivals and partners are offering a key piece of advice to Ellison: Don’t mess up Sun’s Java programming language. Here’s the scoop — including perspectives from Red Hat’s middleware team.

"Nautilus Columns" adds new columns to Nautilus, so you can view such MP3 and FLAC metadata and also JPEG EXIF shooting data.

I have had the N900 to play with for a solid month I would like to highlight what I feel are the pros and cons of the device. As I know most people just give these articles a quick scan in the first place, for reference I am just going to post my thoughts in an easy to read bulleted list.

To date, Novell has had strong usage of its online SUSE Studio Linux appliance development service, with over 250,000 software appliances built. Even with that success, Novell (NASDAQ: NOVL) sees a need to expand the effort with a new SUSE Appliance Toolkit providing an on-premises version of SUSE Studio, as well as a new Lifecycle Management Server to manage appliance updates.

Canonical's Rick Spencer has written about two small changes that are happening to Mozilla Firefox in Ubuntu 10.04. The first is the default Ubuntu home-page with its search box in Firefox will now follow whatever the user has set as their default search engine in Firefox. The second change is that Canonical is changing the default search engine for Firefox in Ubuntu to Yahoo.

Appcelerator - the Silicon Valley outfit whose open source Titanium platform lets you build desktop and mobile apps with web-happy development tools - has announced that the platform will soon generate native runtimes for "the new Apple tablet." On Wednesday, Steve Jobs and company will unveil "a major new product," and according to countless reports, this is the long-rumored Apple tablet. Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie declined to provide specific information about Titanium's embrace of the as-yet-unannounced tablet - or about the tablet itself. But he did say that Appcelerator would release additional details on Thursday and that Titanium's Apple tablet APIs will arrive "very soon."

A log file grows without limits unless some action is taken. Growing log files pose many problems - larger files are very difficult to manipulate and file systems can run out of space. Thus there is a need for a solution to prevent the log files from growing beyond a certain size…

Linux users users have several good personal finance managers, like KMyMoney, which has matured into a feature-full, easy-to-use application. Eric Geier covers automatic updating, check printing, plugins, and other useful features.

From its humble beginning a decade ago, Mozilla Firefox is now a force to reckon with. Firefox 3.5 is now the most popular web browser in the world. Check out this nice collection of 15 awesome Firefox wallpapers.

The Linux Foundation announced a free webinar series on topics ranging from Linux administration to performance tuning. The Linux Training Webinar Series will launch with a webinar on Linux contributions on Mar. 1 by Jon Corbet, while future sessions feature leading Linux kernel maintainers and developers.