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What do you get when you cross business logic and 80s arcade video games? An open source Space Invaders clone that's being used to illustrate the power of a business logic integration platform for game design.

Is Ubuntu actually good or merely popular? "It is either so bleeding edge it is a miracle the CD doesn't have stigmata, or it is really old packages that are never updated," blogger hairyfeet asserted. "Ubuntu has done more for Linux acceptance than any other distribution," countered blogger Martin Espinoza. "I'm a bit disenchanted with distros in general," said Slashdot blogger David Masover.

The open source software turned 18 last year, and its maturity is evident to hackers and corporate types alike.

[A slideshow with some debatable facts inside. - Scott]

One of the most common complaints I hear about Linux is that it’s just no good for gaming. Some complain about hardware support, others the lack of titles, others that it’s just too complicated. It’s true that Linux probably isn’t the first platform that comes to mind when I think about PC gaming, but some parts of that reputation are inaccurate or outdated. Sabayon Gaming DVD takes on that myth to see just what a Linux gaming system can do. It’s got a fast Gentoo base, built-in codecs and 3D driver support, Compiz, and many of the best games available for Linux. On top of the usual Gnome games, you get such titles as Neverball, Battle for Wesnoth, OpenArena, Tremulous, Warsow, Nexuiz, and Warzone 2100, all playable from the live DVD.

To get a sense of how the health of the Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) community is in general and to monitor the interest in FOSS and Linux in the region in particular and at the 36-hour mark before the expo starts, pre-registrations for SCALE 8X are running over 30 percent higher than at this time last year. Friday marks the start of SCALE, highlighted by the Women In Open Source (WIOS) and Open Source Software in Educaction (OSSIE) segments.

There has been a sea change in public opinion. Google is now seen as the evil empire. Microsoft, they’re the feisty little guys up in Washington state. The change has also been marked by a new attitude toward open source. Google’s delivery of open source code for Living Stories is treated as ho-hum. The donation of $2 million to Wikimedia is quickly followed by snark. Is that all they’re giving? Well, their search engine likes Wikipedia best.

The SIM cards in cellular telephones might be smaller than a postage stamp and less than a millimeter thick but that hasn't stopped South Korea's SK Telecom from cramming all the major components needed to run Google's Android OS inside one of them. The carrier's Android SIM, a prototype of which is on show at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, includes an ARM-based processor, companion memory and 1GB of flash memory to store the OS and other data.

Aava Mobile announced an "open" Aava smartphone reference design that employs Intel's "Moorestown" CPU, with current or planned support for Moblin Linux 2.1, Android, and MeeGo. Meanwhile, LG will port its Moorestown- and Moblin-based GW990 phone to MeeGo, says an industry report.

Remember this little guy, the orangish icon that appears in your upper GNOME panel in Debian Lenny when you have software updates? Ubuntu has a similar yet different icon. Or had it, I guess. Now that the Ubuntu Project decided to completely change the way users are notified of software updates, opening an update window either in the foreground or background at some point during the week the update is released, the cheery orange (or whatever color it used to be in Ubuntu) icon doesn't get much play.

From the "Maemo, to Moblin to LiPS' files: There have been multiple efforts from multiple vendor groups over the last 5 years to develop a successful mobile Linux operating system. Now we've got another one with MeeGo that my colleague Andy Patrizio reported on yesterday. The pairing of Nokia's Maemo with Intel's Moblin was a bit surprising to me initially, but in many ways it does make sense. To be blunt, Nokia's Maemo Linux platform was going nowhere fast.

The first free Unix-like operating system available on the IBM PC was 386BSD, of which Linus Torvalds said in 1993: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never have happened..."

Alarm bells have started ringing inside the former Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris community over the project's potential future with database giant Oracle. OpenSolaris developers have complained they've been "completely ignored" by Oracle despite reaching out, with their questions over the project's future going unanswered.

Last month we published benchmarks of EXT4 comparing this file-system's performance when it was first marked stable in the mainline kernel and then where it is at now in the Linux kernel while testing every major release in between. This article was followed up by a Btrfs versus EXT4 comparison using the Linux 2.6.33 kernel to see how the two most talked about Linux file-systems are battling it out with the latest kernel. After those Linux file-system benchmarks were published, we received a request from Canonical to look at the EXT3 performance too. With that said, we have done just that and have published EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs benchmarks from Ubuntu 9.10 and a Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot from an Intel Atom netbook.

The nouveau project has done it! Finally, an open source 3D driver for NVIDIA video cards has arrived and will ship with Fedora 13. Let’s take a look (including a few benchmarks).

The Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) was recently held in Newport Beach, California. FOSS 2010 was an invitation-only workshop aimed at identifying the key research projects and challenges for free and open source software. FOSS is funded by the Computing Research Association and the National Science Foundation, and hosted by the Institute for Software Research at UC Irvine.

The Twitter microblogging service has created a Twitter loves open source page, listing the projects it has released or contributed to. The page lists programs written in Ruby, Scala, Java and C/C++ and some tools.

When Novell Brainshare 2010 kicks off March 21 in Salt Lake City, the company will put several initiatives in the spotlight. Among the top two priorities. Promoting Novell Pulse (a real-time communication and social messaging platform for enterprises) and promoting SUSE Linux software partners. Here are the details.

Sikuli is a visual technology to search and automate graphical user interfaces (GUI) using images (screenshots). Basically, you can use Sikuli to automate tasks using screenshots, like taking screenshots of buttons which you need Sikuli to press, etc.

Is Canonical partnering with any search engine that’s willing to pay, and selling the default to the highest bidder? I sure hope so! It makes great business sense. Bring on Bing! If it makes Canonical cash that they can use to fund Linux development, I’m all for them taking MS money too. As long as they give you a choice, people will have their favorite search engine, and Canonical makes money – win win.

I worry that modern Americans have lost both manual skills and the curiosity to explore how things work. I probably worry too much, but look how computers have progressed: from a text command prompt, to all kinds of rich GUis, to smartphones and PDAs, culminating in the iPad. The iPad doesn't even use a keyboard, all you do is grunt and point.