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The KDE Promo team has just wrapped up a busy weekend at their sprint in Southampton, England. The group set out with an aggressive agenda and accomplished many of their goals throughout the weekend. read more

Two weeks back I broke the news that Attachmate was laying off all of the Mono developers following their recent acquisition of Novell and SUSE. Today this news has been confirmed by the Mono creator himself, Miguel de Icaza, in announcing the formation of a new company to further drive Mono into the new future...

The Ubuntu Developer Summit in Budapest was not the only European Linux event taking place last week. From Wednesday through Saturday was LinuxTag back in Berlin at their Messe Fairgrounds...

NVIDIA's Optimus multi-GPU technology now works under Linux. Well, at least for some notebooks, it's been hacked together by an open-source developer and in fact is working to use both Intel and NVIDIA graphics processors simultaneously with the respective drivers. This is the best Linux implementation we've seen yet with NVIDIA Corp still not announcing plans to officially support this technology under non-Microsoft operating systems...

Attachmate completed their acquisition of Novell last week and turned the assets into the Novell and SUSE business units. This morning the first signs of changes were announced when over one-hundred employees would be losing their jobs as part of the streamlining process. Later on in the day I was then to first break the news -- a rumor at the time -- via my Twitter feed that all of Mono's developers would be losing their positions...

Sandia National Laboratories is demonstrating its latest mini supercomputer at ESC Silicon Valley this week, incorporating 196 TI OMAP3530-based Overo Tide modules running Linux. Being used for botnet research as part of Sandia's MegaTux project, the StrongBox product combines 28 Gumstix Stagecoach boards, each with seven Gumstix Overo Tide computer modules....

Canonical has taken the wraps off a morale-boosting deal that has seen German insurance giant LVM Versicherungen convert 10,000 PCs to use Ubuntu Linux across the company's operations. The project included the conversion of 3,000 desktop and laptop computers in LVM's Muenster HQ with a further 7,000 in the company's agencies around Germany. The core software used by the company is LAS, a Java-based claims-processing application of its own design, backed by Lotus Notes, Adobe's Reader and the OpenOffice suite.

PhpMyAdmin is the one of the most popular tools for MySQL database administration. A major reason for this is its portability--phpMyAdmin runs in a Web browser, so you can access it from almost any computer. The program is also robust; phpMyAdmin has enough functionality that you can probably create and run a Web site without knowing any SQL. Being free and open-source never hurt anybody, either.

The axe-holder now is a certain Red Hat, the company supplying the OS behind Google's search engine services has taken Bedrock to court. The allegations now are that the patent right that Bedrock owns is invalid.

Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" is set to be released on Thursday and while there are a number of new features to talk about in this latest release, the Phoronix Test Suite software has been busy analyzing the performance of this latest release. There is open-source graphics driver improvements leading to some performance improvements (such as Radeon KMS page-flipping), the famous ~200 line Linux kernel patch to improve responsiveness, and various other enhancements that catch our fancy in Ubuntu 11.04. However, one area where there is a frightening regression in Ubuntu 11.04 is with its power consumption. For mobile devices in many workloads, Ubuntu 11.04 is consuming noticeably more power than in any of the past Ubuntu Linux releases. Sadly, no one seems to have noticed in time since continuous integration testing on Linux seems to happen so haphazardly right now.

For those that follow my personal Twitter feed will know that for the past week I've been closely testing Ubuntu 11.04 and all Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 8.04 on many mobile devices in the office. The overall system performance, power consumption, and boot performance have been the principal targets. However, late this week I discovered a glaring regression: Ubuntu 11.04 is viciously going through power. Compared to Ubuntu 10.10, the power consumption on Ubuntu 11.04 for mobile devices is up about 10% on average but under some workloads, I am seeing the power consumption up by nearly 30%. This is happening on many mobile systems spanning multiple generations of Intel CPUs and with Intel / ATI / NVIDIA graphics. This issue has been tracked down to a frightening kernel regression in the mainline tree that is still not addressed.

Canonical confirmed that it will ship Ubuntu 11.04 ("Natty Narwhal") on April 28, and announced a new online trial version of the Linux operating system. The U.K.-based company also announced some new details of its server edition, including easier provisioning and a fully certified J2EE stack.

$10 to $20 a month for web happy hardware Google will sell Chrome OS notebooks and accompanying software services for a $10 to $20 monthly subscription fee, according to a report citing a "reliable source".…

For four days, starting on Friday April 15th, about half a dozen souls gathered in the hive01 headquarters in Stuttgart. The goal of this very first ownCloud sprint was to discuss, plan and of course hack on the web services project. To kickoff we had a brainstorming session and discussion of the topics that were to be dealt with over the following days. We extensively debated fundamental things concerning the future directions of ownCloud.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences demonstrated a quadruped robot intended to test gait control and locomotion -- and eventually mimic the movement of a triceratops. The flexibly jointed, 3.1-foot FROG-I robot runs Linux on an Intel Xscale PXA270 processor, communicating via Wi-Fi with a host computer, while lower-level functions are controlled by two Texas Instruments DSPs....

The DoJ and FCO have jointly agreed that Novell's patents are a threat to open source that needs neutralising.

This week's Linux Top 5: SCO gets new ownership, Oracle call its quits on OpenOffice as Novell releases last major update for SLES 10, and more.

Smartphones? Not until next year Intel's president and chief executive Paul Otellini says his company is hard at work porting Google's tablet-specific Android 3.0, aka Honeycomb, to the x86 architecture.…

With Canonical ditching the GNOME 3.0 Shell in favor of their custom-developed Unity Desktop, one of the first Linux distributions where you'll see GNOME 3.0 shipping in full "out of the box" is Fedora 15. Fedora 15 is set to be released at the end of May, but a beta release happens to be coming out today. Additionally, this Thursday they're looking for your help in testing out GNOME 3.0...

GIMP 2.7.2 was released last week as a development stop in the road to GIMP 2.8, which itself was supposed to be released last December. But with the single-window user-interface lagging behind along with other work, GIMP 2.8 development dragged along with its limited number of core developers. It looked like it would just be a few more months until 2.8 was released, but with v2.7.2 just arriving, that's not likely to happen. Based upon a new tool developed by one of the GIMP developers, the 2.8 release isn't estimated to occur until the end of November...