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With four billion connected mobile phones on the planet - compared to one billion PCs - handhelds offer developers the mother of all opportunities: ubiquity and mass market. But the reward comes at a great price: market fragmentation, thanks to so many different devices using so many different hardware configurations. To bridge them, we've had Java 2 Micro Edition, CLDC, MIDP and the OSDL's Mobile Linux Initiative that promised to abstract away the differences in hardware design or provide a common set of APIs that worked on a large number of platforms. Offered as the next "big answer," they've invariably compounded the problem by adding to the infinite soup of API configurations.

The perl5-porters recently saw a rather acrimonious discussion on how the Red Hat and Fedora distributions choose to package the Perl language and associated modules. Things have calmed down (the parties have essentially agreed to disagree), but an interesting issue remains: what can development projects do if they're unhappy with how distributors are treating their code?

Ubuntu isn't the only Linux operating system, but it's where the dream of a usable, completely free desktop is closest to reality. If every Ubuntu developer were assembled at one place, here are five things we'd ask them to accomplish.

Microsoft has been making overtures to the open source community of late, but suspicion abounds, and it was only heightened by Redmond's legal challenge to TomTom earlier this year. In an effort to stockpile ammunition against Redmond if it should declare war on the FOSS movement, a Linux-friendly group of companies have bought 22 patents Microsoft recently sold to a patent trust.

Ubuntu has a clearly stated mission: to select the best components from open source, to assemble and refine them, to encourage ecosystem development and to provide the best possible experience to our users while avoiding lock-in and the creation of monopolies. Canonical's cloud strategy follows this same mission. Here's how.

Knowing your UNIX network layout will go a long way with understanding your network and how it operates. But what happens when the performance of your UNIX network and the speed at which you can transfer files or connect to services suddenly reduces? How do you diagnose the issues and work out where in your network the problems lie? This article looks at some quick methods for finding and identifying performance issues and the steps to start resolving them.

With the Linux 2.6.32 kernel merge window opening up this month, open-source developers around the world have been busy working on their code that they wish to push into this next major kernel update. There is already 3D and KMS support coming to the R600/700 hardware from ATI with this next kernel release along with the KMS page-flipping ioctl and other graphics-related changes, but now Novell's Greg Kroah-Hartman has written a lengthy message detailing the status of the different drivers in the staging tree for Linux 2.6.32.

Tonight we experienced a world premier - the XO-1.5 laptop from OLPC debuted at the OLPC Learning Club DC - and we broadcast it live via OLPC News on Twitter. This newest laptop from OLPC features the VIA C7-M a 1GHz variable speed processor, which SJ Klein of OLPC says will empower learning in several key ways..

Mark Jason Dominus' Higher-Order Perl book is now available for free download in PDF format by virtue of special permission from the publisher. The book is about functional programming techniques in Perl. It's about how to write functions that can modify and manufacture other functions. That way your code is more flexible and more reusable. Instead of writing ten similar functions, you write a general pattern or framework that can generate the functions you want; then you generate just the functions you need according to the pattern.

Ipoque of Leipzig, Germany has published parts of its deep packet inspection technology under the LGPLv3 open source license. Called OpenDPI, the software library is based on Ipoque's commercial Protocol and Application Classification Engine (PACE), which the vendor says classifies internet traffic.

Chromium Web Browser( Google Chrome for Linux ie ) has already won a lot of accolades among Ubuntu/Linux users. I am so impressed with this new chromium web browser, that i may even use it as my regular browser. Flash support is not available by default, but by a little bit of tweaking, you can enable it too.

TomTom is launching OpenLR™ as royalty-free technology and open Industry Standard, and it invites the ITS Industry to join and adopt it. This step will facilitate new business opportunities in various areas of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) such as traffic information services, map content exchange and Cooperative Systems where precise and compact dynamic location information is needed. The map-agnostic feature of OpenLR™ enables reliable data exchange and cross-referencing using digital maps of different vendors and versions.

[A GPLv2 licensed standard from TomTom? Really? - Scott]

Unless you've been hiding in a cave for the past ten years or so, you know that it takes more than a bit of HTML slight-of-hand to make a modern, dynamic website. The (so-called) Web 2.0 is constructed of a mix of technologies, creatively applied to allow the interactivity we have become accustomed to when surfing the web. Just looking at the front and back covers of Robin Nixon's book, he (and O'Reilly) promises to teach the reader all of the technologies (though I see no mention of CSS) required to bring your Web 2.0 creation to life, and send it out on the Internet. The best bit of news is that, according to the back cover blurb, "No previous programming experience is required." Really? We'll see.

Version 5.9.5 of PLplot has been released. PLplot is a cross-platform, scientific graphics plotting library.

In this article I finish the process we started in the last episode. After all the preparation described in the first part of this article the build process itself is rather anticlimactic. Building from sources with the GNU autotools is this easy..

Microsoft has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars lately trying to "screw" its competitors. It might try concentrating on making quality products instead.

The Microsoft Corporation is striving to maintain its grip on the Computer market by misleading Computer Store Sales Personel. Their plan has back fired. As an annoyed Trainee has posted screen shots of the slides contained in the Microsoft Training session on a Forum. Followed by comments where both the Trainee and other Linux users expose the various falsehoods taught in the training session.

After placing its bets for years on Xen, Red Hat moved recently towards official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel. Here’s a look at what this change might mean for Ubuntu, which has promoted KVM from the beginning.

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield broke a story on Microsoft selling a group of patents to a third party. The end result of this story is good for Linux, even though it doesn’t placate fears of ongoing attacks by Microsoft. Open Invention Network, working with its members and the Linux Foundation, pulled off a coup, managing to acquire some of the very patents that seem to have been at the heart of recent Microsoft FUD campaigns against Linux. Break out your white hats: the good guys won.

Good old-fashioned cron and mail can easily be set up to send yourself email reminders for anything you want. Juliet Kemp shows how.