ubuntu

One of our listeners is stunned that you can buy a song from John Cage in the iTunes store that is 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. In other Apple news, Tim Cook thinks Netbooks suck. And Time Warner says, "Fine, if you don't want to pay our outrageous data fees we won't give you faster Internet. So there."

MySpace CEO to step down http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10225519-93.html

Microsoft in “much better place,” oversight extended to 2011 http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/04/antitrust-oversight-of-microsoft-extended-to-may-2011.ars… Read more

In case you were concerned that Linux didn't have enough of a presence in pop culture, you can now read English translations of Ubunchu, a Japanese Manga comic series about three students in a sys admin club who are getting into Ubuntu.

I await the episode where Mark Shuttleworth flies his open-source spaceship to Japan to meet the students.

Via BoingBoing

Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom

The next version of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, code-named Jaunty Jackalope, went into beta phase late Thursday.

Ubuntu 9.04, as it is more properly known, includes a range of enhancements over its predecessor, Intrepid Ibex, or Ubuntu 8.10. These include a new notifications system, changes to the start-up process, and the distribution's first foray into cloud computing.

The new version of the operating system also includes updates to the Gnome interface (now version 2.26, which comes with the Brasero all-in-one CD-burning application and offers improved handling of multiple monitors), the Linux kernel (now version 2.6.… Read more

Add Canonical to the roster of companies offering technology to help enterprise customers build their own cloud-computing setups. But unlike most of the better-known players in this nascent market, the twist here is that the technology will be supplied by an open-source shop.

Canonical is best known as being the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu operating system, a computer operating system based on Debian GNU/Linux. With 8 million to 10 million users, Ubuntu has enjoyed success in no small part because of its ease of use.

Next month the company will offer the first details on plans to roll … Read more

For more than two decades, personal computing has been anything but inexpensive. To be sure, prices for the average computer have dropped substantially since the 1980s. But with the exception of the occasional bargain or bare-bones configuration, the price of a good computer system still takes quite a bite out of the family budget.

That iron calculation no longer applies and shoppers can now find low-end systems in the $300 range running Celeron or Sempron processors. But the more intriguing development is the emergence of Intel's Atom chip and what it might suggest about the Netbook's ability to … Read more

Revolutions don't always roil and boil toward a noisy, violent fracas. Sometimes they don't even ripple the surface.

Such is the Ubuntu Netbook revolution, which makes waves in the Linux community--and really nowhere else. Not publicly, at least.

I was fortunate to spend two hours on Tuesday night with Chris Kenyon, head of Canonical's Ubuntu business for original-equipment manufacturing, or OEM. Kenyon, in addition to being a fellow Arsenal fanatic, is also Ubuntu's point man for its quiet, but nonetheless dramatic, Netbook revolution.

Kenyon, who appeared a placid, affable chap when we first met outside Arsenal stadium … Read more

Linux long ago became the "furniture" of open source: essential infrastructure to most of the Fortune 500 and somewhat mundane in its predictable, ever-increasing adoption.

Despite its impressive rise, however, Linux still has a long, long way to go. While results of an IDC survey published this week found that 55 percent of the 300 IT executives surveyed already had Linux systems in use, a full 97 percent were running Windows.

Linux, in other words, still has a long way to go to reach full adoption and, importantly, the vendors that sell it have even further to go … Read more

While evangelists of Linux distributions built for personal computers (i.e., "Linux desktops") point to Netbooks as an indication of renewed life in their chances to compete for consumers, new data suggests that this may be a fool's hope.

Instead, such advocates would do well to follow the leads of Canonical and Red Hat, as they respectively extend the desktop with cloud services and deliver desktop functionality from the cloud.

Although it's true that roughly 30 percent of Dell Inspiron 9s Netbooks run Ubuntu Linux, it's equally true that about 90 percent of Netbooks run … Read more

Linux guru Keir Thomas, in a blog post for PC World, argues that the Linux distribution and Mozilla's Firefox browser have forgotten themselves in the rush to popularity. Or, rather, they've forgotten their core values which, in both cases, translates into forgetting the importance of end users.

I can't agree.

Thomas' biggest complaint about Firefox is that it has slowed down, which seems an odd complaint, given how much faster Firefox 3 is (and Firefox Minefield is mind-numbingly fast).

But his complaints about Ubuntu seem even wider off the mark:

It seems there will be almost no … Read more