FLOSS News

Yesterday I received a great prize from the people at Miserware for helping with the Beta trial of their power saving software for Linux computers; a new and very shiny Asus 1008HA netbook PC.

Our friends at Canonical have been busy working on a new software as a service offering called Ubuntu One. This news was broken today by the VAR guy, but we thought we would dig a little deeper into what it is all about. Ubuntu One is in short a utility for synchronising stuff between desktop computers running the favourite operating system of you and me. The home URL of the service is https://ubuntuone.com/ and if you go there it will add your launchpad account to the list of people who want to join the beta.

I would like to announce the launch of a new social networking site, specifically catering to the needs of people called Alan*.

The idea came to me after a Friday night in my local pub, and being told by one of our colleagues at Canonical, that we are now simply known as “The Alans”. Funnily the chaps at Elonex usually call us that too…

The creators and owners of the Open Source Firefox web browser seem to have ignited a bit of a war in the last few days.

In Ubuntu’s next development version (Intrepid Ibex) due for release next Month, Mozilla have demanded that for Ubuntu to continue to distribute Firefox, they must display an EULA.

This is the ONLY EULA I believe that is currently present in the “main” repository of Ubuntu and certainly the only one that a user would be required to accept in the default Ubuntu Desktop configuration as is currently supplied.