by Paul O'Brien on October 2, 2009 at 08:10 AM

The Beta release of Canonical's new baby, Ubuntu 9.10 'Karmic Koala', is now available for download.
As well as the usual host of version updates to each of the components (including Firefox finally getting an official update to 3.5), changes in 9.10 include a visual refresh, a boot sequence improved in both appearance and performance, inclusion of the new 'Ubuntu Software Center' (which ...
by Brad Linder on October 1, 2009 at 03:32 PM

Canonical is launching a new icon set called Humanity for Ubuntu 9.10. The new operating system should be available to download in a couple of weeks, but if you can't wait that long and don't want to download a pre-release alpha version of Ubuntu 9.10 you can download the Humanity icon set and use it on earlier versions of Ubuntu. You can also install the icon set by opening a terminal and ...
by Lee Mathews on September 28, 2009 at 03:00 PM

While I haven't made the switch to Linux full time, I find myself spending more and more time experimenting of late. In particular, I'm enjoying projects like Moblin and the Ubuntu Netbook Remix.
If you're still using Windows for your primary OS there are tons of ways to get your feet wet like a true penguin without making any serious commitments. Here are ten ways to play with Linux ...
by Lee Mathews on September 28, 2009 at 12:00 PM

Venerable Linux distro Gentoo will hit the decade mark this December, and they're celebrating the milestone with a new live DVD release.
Born as Enoch Linux in 1999, the distribution has slipped a bit in popularity over the years, yet it still provides a solid foundation for other distros. Like Debian was supplanted by Ubuntu, Sabayon - which is Gentoo-based - maintains a spot in the top ten ...
by Lee Mathews on September 26, 2009 at 06:00 PM

Gnome 2.28 was released this week, and one of the more interesting changes was the switch taking place in Epiphany, Gnome's default web browser. There's been a change under the hood, with Mozilla Gecko being replaced by Webkit. Webkit has made some serious gains this year in terms of browser market share. Already providing the powerplant for Safari, Google Chrome, and Maxthon 3 (as well as ...
by Brad Linder on September 23, 2009 at 05:00 PM

Microsoft has announced plans to bring its Silverlight technology to Moblin Linux. This is the first time the company has mentioned anything about Silverlight running on any Linux distribution. Up until now the only way to access Silverlight content including web video and interactive web media on a Linux system was to use Moonlight, an open-source implementation of Silverlight developed by ...
by Paul O'Brien on September 22, 2009 at 07:00 PM

When netbooks first started hitting the market, they were low on raw power, storage and profit margins, meaning that they were ideal candidates for running the Linux OS.
Asus, who arguably kicked off the whole netbook market with their Eee PC machines, originally shipped their devices with a variant of Xandros Linux and robust SSD drives. As the market matured, Asus moved to match their ...
by Nik Fletcher on September 21, 2009 at 07:00 PM

Twitter's phenomenal growth means that people are posting updates to the service faster than ever. Earlier in the year, the number of tweets posted to the service hit a wall: more specifically the number 2147483647 which was the maximum size of an integer in a fair few programming languages. Tomorrow morning, however, Twitter will be forcing through Twitpocalypse II where the number of tweets ...
by Brad Linder on September 21, 2009 at 08:30 AM
![Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx coming next year]()
The folks at Canonical are putting the final touches on Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala which should be available next month. But in one of the first steps toward looking even further ahead, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced the alliterative codename for Ubuntu 10.04 which will be released in April: Lucid Lynx. Ubuntu comes out on a six month schedule, which means that you get a major ...
by Paul O'Brien on September 18, 2009 at 11:00 AM

Palringo, the multi platform rich messaging client for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux (via WINE), Windows Mobile, Android, iPhone, Symbian, Blackberry and Java (phew!), that we first covered back in 2007, has just received an update to it's Windows and Windows Mobile iterations. Palringo is an IM client with a twist - as well as supporting a multitude of instant messaging services (Windows Live, AIM, ...
by Lee Mathews on September 18, 2009 at 10:30 AM
![Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 adds software store, improves boot speed]()
Canonical has some pretty ambitious goals for Karmic Koala: faster startup times, tight cloud integration, an improved experience for netbooks, a Ubuntu software store, and much more. Some of these changes in recent alpha builds and yesterday's 9.10 alpha 6 continues to bring things into focus. As you can see from the header clip, the old usplash boot animation has been replaced by xsplash which ...
by Lee Mathews on September 17, 2009 at 04:00 PM

A lot of new Ubuntu users are put off by the default color scheme. "Brown and orange? Those are colors a non-winning football franchise would pick." (you know I love you, Browns!) Well, it's really not all that hard to tweak your interface to something more "you" in Ubuntu -- and soon there will be some more default options available. Four new community-developed themes are now available, and ...
by Lee Mathews on September 14, 2009 at 01:30 PM

While I like Google Chrome, there are plenty of Webkit-based alternatives out there. One I enjoy using on my Crunchbang system is Midori - an efficient and highly customizable browser that made the jump to Windows just a couple months ago. It's important to note that Midori is still in the alpha stage - recently hitting 0.1.10 on Linux and the Windows binaries now on 0.1.8. If you're after ...
by Paul O'Brien on September 14, 2009 at 01:00 PM

While the Apple App Store is without doubt the largest available medium for a mobile developer to get their app in the hands of the users, for developers new to development using C / Objective C, the barrier to entry can be quite significant. Many developers working with other platforms (particularly Windows / Windows Mobile) have made significant investment into products developed in the .net ...
by Lee Mathews on September 11, 2009 at 01:00 PM

Getting on the Free Software Foundation's page of acceptable Linux distros isn't the easiest task in the world. Stallman and Co. have very particular requirements about what can and can't be included. A first glance at the page might put you off -- there aren't any big name distros like Ubuntu, Suse, or Fedora.
Trisquel, however, is definitely worth a closer look. It's Ubuntu-based and ships ...