This morning a call for testing went out to try out the new pm-utils-powersave-policy package that should be making its way into the Lucid Lynx repository in time for the release of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS next month. This package offers up several fixes and new power savings features that should help those mobile users running Ubuntu 10.04 to prolong their battery life. We tested out this new package with a notebook and netbook to see how it changes the power game for Ubuntu 10.04 along with whether it's much of an improvement over the current Ubuntu 9.10 release. Read More

Last week we featured a review on two MSI WindBox Atom 330 NetTops that we had purchased to add to our testing farm, which as you may now know went into our Phoromatic Ubuntu Tracker setup that is monitoring the performance of the latest Ubuntu development packages on a daily basis. Before devoting this hardware to the farm, we ran a few benchmarks comparing the performance of NVIDIA's ION GeForce 9400M graphics processor to the ATI Radeon HD 4330 graphics processor found on the MSI 6667BB-004US and several other Atom-powered devices. Read More

This post is supposed to make it clear why Kubuntu is what it is. Writing this down is necessary because people constantly get the wrong picture.
Entities
Let me start to explain the relationships of entities around Ubuntu.
First and foremost there is the Ubuntu project, it is this large monster that includes Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu and some other stuff. One could think of the Ubuntu project as an umbrella spanning across most (semi-)official activities surrounding Ubuntu. Packaging KDE software would be such an activity, so even as Kubuntu developer you are contributor to Ubuntu at large. Read More

There's hardly a piece of software more important for a desktop operating system these days than the web browser. Even the most casual of users will end up employing one several times per day. You could argue that Linux has always had a wide variety of browsers to choose from and, if you just look at the numbers you're definitely right. But, with the risk of getting a lot of people aggravated, I'll say that there has been only one real option for Linux users and that is Mozilla Firefox. Everything else, from Konqueror to Opera, just doesn't stack up and not for lack of trying. Read More

There has been a lot of talk about the 'cloud' lately and, though the term is largely misused and perhaps a little too hyped, there's definitely something to this new way of thinking about online applications and the infrastructure to serve them, the so-called cloud computing. Canonical, the company behind the very popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, recognizes the potential of the emerging market and has partnered with Intel and Eucalyptus to promote its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) offering as part of Intel's Cloud Builder program. Read More

Advanced Micro Devices plans to release a processor in its "Fusion" line that will be positioned for the netbook market, putting it in competition with the Intel Atom, and, to a lesser degree, the ARM processor.

The "Fusion" program is AMD's (NYSE: AMD) long-term project to integrate its CPU cores with graphics processor cores from ATI, which it acquired in 2006. The first Fusion processors are expected some time early next year. Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) has its own integrated processors, the Westmere family of Core i5/i7 chips, which feature integrated graphics in dual-core CPUs. Read More

Do you want to remove bloat from your Linux installation? Are you looking to enable extra features that aren't provided by your distro? Fancy trying some of the cutting-edge patches doing the rounds? You'll need to recompile your kernel, and while it might look like black magic if you've never done it before, it's actually pretty straightforward. Read on for everything you need to know... Read More

Text-to-Speech Software for Linux: If you've been using Mac OS X or Windows Vista before, you may be a bit disappointed to learn that there's no speech synthesizer or text-to-speech (TTS) application that is installed by default on your Linux distribution. For those of you who don't know what a speech synthesizer is, it's simply a computer program that converts normal language text into speech. Text-to-speech software can be of great help particularly for people who are visually impaired and those who are mute. Read More

Google's Chrome OS Netbook will feature a host of built-in security technologies designed to protect users from malware and other threats, a Google engineer said at the RSA Conference Thursday.

Will Drewry, a Google software security engineer, said the fact that the company's Chrome OS is an open source project allows for constant feedback from developers regarding security design. This, he said, should reassure those acquiring a Google Netbook about the product's security.

Google plans to release a consumer version later this year and a business version featuring more management muscle in 2011, Drewry said. Read More

This week NVIDIA had to pull its latest WHQL-certified graphics drivers on Windows due to a bug that would cause the fan controller to not respond correctly to the current conditions of the GPU workload and in some cases would even turn the GPU's fan off. This bug could potentially kill the NVIDIA graphics card due to overheating. It turns out this potentially fatal bug is also present in their newest 195.36.08 and 195.36.03 Linux drivers. Read More <