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Microsofts new Gazelle concept is the greatest thing to hit Linux or the computer industry as a whole ever. According to Microsoft, Gazelle is a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. I never thought I would live to see the day that Microsoft announces its own suicide.

As Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) nears its April 2010 launch, Canonical is taking steps to make Ubuntu Linux more attractive to business customers. The efforts include new support pricing plus closer relationships with application developers. Here’s some analysis.

The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future. Mako explored the concept of anti-features as deliberately included functionality or a lack of functionality that users hate so much they will pay to have them removed. Some classic examples included the gator spyware that was included with free version of p2p software on the windows platform - with a spyware-free version available for a fee.

GNOME Activity Journal is not a File Browser but an Activity Browser. It uses Zeitgeist to get information on what files/websites/contacts/etc. you worked with and Tracker to get information about the current state of the files and all sorts of meta-data

My initial reaction was, "yeah right". You see, over the years, I have seem many geek attempts to stretch the capabilities of a platform with "proof of concept" type products.

Last week, David Coursey reported that Microsoft entertainment and devices boss Robbie Bach made the prediction in an analyst briefing that Linux on mobile will lose. Why? It’s choice is a bad thing for customers and that there is too much Linux in the mobile marketplace. By Bach’s count there are 17 variants of Linux available on mobile phones. He sees this as a bad thing for customers. We, unsurprisingly, see this as a bad thing for Microsoft.

Canonical's Tim Gardner is seeking comments regarding a new build of Ubuntu Server that he is proposing. Canonical is considering another build of Ubuntu Server (there is already Ubuntu Server 32-bit and 64-bit along with specialized builds for cloud computing with Amazon EC2 and UEC), but this one would be specialized for just 64-bit platforms that have low-latency requirements and on power consumptive systems.

Create Custom Ubuntu Live-CD With Remastersys in Karmic. Remastersys is a tool that can be used to do 2 things with an existing Klikit or Ubuntu or derivative installation.It can make a full system backup including personal data to a live cd or dvd that you can use anywhere and install. It can make a distributable copy you can share with friends. This will not have any of your personal user data in it.

Google announced that it was delaying the launch of two Android phones in China due to a dispute with the Chinese government over censorship issues. The delay will affect Google-endorsed Android phones from Samsung and Motorola that were to be carried by China Unicom, says an eWEEK story.

Digium this week is officially launching Asterisk Exchange — an online marketplace that allows customers and partners to piece together solutions involving Asterisk (the open source IP PBX). If successful, Asterisk Exchange could expand the ecosystem for alternative VoIP and unified communication solutions. Here’s the scoop, including an interview with Digium CEO Danny Windham.

Sauce Labs has released Sauce IDE, a record and playback system for Selenium tests that allows individuals new to Selenium do automated application functional testing on multiple browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera and multiple operating systems, all without writing any code.

The idea of getting an operating system free is still one that amazingly few people have wrapped their heads around (see also: Skype). Why is that? Simon Brew thinks we could make 2010 a revolutionary year for Linux simply by speaking up about its benefits – all 10 million of us…

This is a project to port the Android open source project to the x86 platform. The original plan was to host different patches for Android x86, but a few months after creating the project, the developers decided to fork the code base that will provide Android x86 support on different x86 platforms. View Android-x86 1.6 creenshots at My SEO Company

Today we’re officially announcing the brand new jQuery Forum. We’ve been using mailing lists, and subsequently Google Groups, over the past 4 years to manage the discussion and community around jQuery. That particular solution has simply not been able to scale to our discussion requirements both in terms of participation and in managing spam.

On any list of lightweight Linux window managers, you’ll find Fluxbox. Originally a fork of Blackbox, Flux is well known as a fast, light, highly configurable desktop. Unfortunately, Fluxbox’s emphasis on text files for nearly all configuration often acts as a roadblock for those first trying it out. There is a GUI which provides some of the basic config options, but the bulk of it (menus, colors, keybindings) is found in text files. In this article, we’ll go over most of Fluxbox’s config files and how to tweak them to your needs.

Google has received a patent for the technique known as MapReduce. The patent, number 7,650,331 applied for in 2004, is entitled "System and method for efficient large-scale data processing" and covers the process of mapping work to multiple processors and then reducing the intermediate results from these processors to a final result. The technique is used widely by data mining companies, for example, in Yahoo's search infrastructure, Amazon's Elastic MapReduce service and IBM's M2 platform. The Apache Hadoop project is the most prominent open source implementation of the technique.

We're losing a friend. Last week, I was notified that a long-time Linux Advocate is dying. His name is Bruno Knaapen and he has brain cancer.

On the last day of November, 2009, after the initial rush of excitement around Google's Chrome OS launch had quieted a bit, Ryan Paul and I sat down with Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, and Eitan Bencuya, from Google PR. I had done my best to sort out the why's and wherefore's of Google's first consumer OS effort in my initial launch coverage but I still had many questions about the past, present, and future of the project.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to set up ProFTPd with TLS on an Ubuntu 9.10 server.

Former JBoss chief Marc Fleury has weighed in on MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius' campaign to stop Oracle's ownership of the open-source database. Fleury has reprimanded Widenius publicly in his blog, calling the MySQL "situation" a "disgrace" that's hurting Sun and could damage the future of open source software.