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YouTube and Vimeo is kicking Adobe's Flash to the curb in favor of the sharp new HTML5. Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced that they are launching HTML5-based players on their video streaming sites, thus booting out the long-standing champ of multimedia delivery, Adobe Flash. With recent security issues plaguing Adobe products, it's no surprise that media giants such as YouTube are jumping ship. What makes HTML5 special is that the new Web standard doesn't require Adobe's software to stream content to viewers.

Shortly after the European Union approved Oracle’s takeover of Sun Microsystems (and MySQL), I interviewed Ingres President and CEO Roger Burkhardt about his views on the Oracle-MySQL combo. Here are his thoughts.

Firefox 3.6 was released yesterday, after over six months since the last major release, version 3.5. Firefox 3.6 ships with versions for over 70 languages, support for Personas, an add-on allowing you to change the appearance of the tab bar and choose from thousands of themes, improvements to the open video support (like the fullscreen mode), improved JavaScript performance and start-up time, support for the new DOM and HTML5 specs.

The San Francisco Committee on Information Technology has published a new software evaluation policy that requires departments of the city government to consider open source software solutions alongside proprietary commercial offerings.

Obviously, I've spent a good amount of time trying to think of a suitable intro to this column. But I couldn't find anything appropriate to express my disgust and disappointment at Ubuntu's missed opportunity. So I'll state it plainly – Ubuntu, you got us this far and then, just when it mattered, you blew it for all of us. Unlike many, I'm not ranting about Karmic Koala's technical glitches. In fact, it's still one of the best options for the desktop, and it's technically superior to the new Windows OS that its release coincided with. But this is where it hurts. For the first time ever, the mainstream tech press mentioned an upcoming Linux release in a Windows preview article. And what did Ubuntu do to capitalise on this new-found exposure? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Except for those operating systems that are still gaining their foothold (Haiku, Syllable, ReactOS), it seems as though we are becoming increasingly platform independent.

What's happened to innovation for KDE and GNOME? Would the developers prefer that we use the command line?

A few members of the GNOME Foundation have submitted a petition to the board, asking for a referendum to be held on making the Foundation's mailing list archives private and limited to its members only.

User interfaces are the last great Linux problem. What really makes Linux user-friendly-- is it limited options and loads of eye candy? What about functionality, and depths of riches to explore?

It is much less expensive for hardware vendors to support Linux. If you want to build a device driver, a great place to start is by looking at existing shipping device drivers, an opportunity that Linux offers to everyone. A proprietary “Device Driver Toolkit” with its sample code is never as good as production code. Those expensive kits contain documentation, but not source code — so you sometimes have to guess at what is happening down below.

This document describes how to install Ailurus on Fedora 10, 11 or 12. Ailurus is an application which aims at making Linux easier to use. It provides these features: install some software which is not provided in official repository; enable/disable some third-party repositories; change some system settings; help you study Linux skills.

Dell no longer has desktop systems available on their Linux system page. Only laptop and netbook systems are now available. This is the second time in the past few months that Dell has dropped Linux desktop systems. Attempts to contact Dell to ask about the status of desktop Linux systems have so far been unsuccessful.

Firefox 3.6 final is out in the wild and yet again, most Ubuntu users are not able to upgrade their resident Firefox 3.5 to this latest release. Let's cut the chase. All you need to do is to get the latest version of Ubuntuzilla, a python script which pretty much gets the job done without any hassles.

(English summary by hkwint:)

Quick stats for period between July / Dec '09:
IE loses the most in Ireland (7%), Greece, UK and the Czech Republic.
FF still around 30%, Chrome from 2 to 4%, Opera stable at ~2%, Safari from 4 to 5%.
Follow the link 'Full story' to see the full report.

English translation of the entire article will probably follow later.

Skype for Linux 2.1.0.81 Beta 2 is released. This popular instant message & voice/video-chat software makes it possible to communicate with a wide variety of platforms (including MS Windows & Apple OSX).

The WhisperingWulf is a fully functional totally quiet personal HPC cluster. This project was originally started as a quest for a small and silent HTPC (Home Theater Personal Computer).

X@FOSDEM 2011? Forget about it. It is to much disappointment that we have to report this evening that the X@FOSDEM DevRoom will be ending this year, after the X.Org project has consistently held a development room at Europe's largest free software event for years. Two days ago we reported on the sad state of this year's X@FOSDEM schedule. Only half the schedule is filled and there is just two weeks left until the Free Open-Source Developers' European Meeting.

Schools should be looking to open source for students, both for lower cost and far greater learning potential, and there are a number of excellent education-oriented Linux distributions. Paul Ferrill takes openSUSE For Schools (Linux For Education) for a spin.

The third day of talks at Camp KDE was somewhat shorter, due to the afternoon Cmake training provided by Marcus Hanwell of Kitware. However, in order to provide complete coverage of the talks for the readers of the dot, summaries of the third day's technical talks are provided within.

Around 75 per cent of Linux developers raked in cash from their code crunching in the past year. It's a figure that in many ways comes as little surprise, given that Linux usage has become so widespread across industries, government and the public sector in recent years.