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Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth wrote a blog post today pointing out that the popular Linux distribution has seen an increase in enterprise server adoption over the past year. He published a graph which indicates that Ubuntu deployments have surpassed those of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) among the top one million most popular websites.

If you are using, or planning to use Linux, a good incentive is the relative security that is implemented by default. Linux systems are insensitive to a good majority of Windows and Mac OS viruses, and the GNU project in itself assures the authenticity of the software. However, every (paranoid) geek knows that there is no such thing as a completely protected system. Today, we will show you how to beef up your Linux security by making a few changes to your Firewall settings.

Unfortunately legal issues, specially patents lawsuits, are much in the news. From Yahoo suing Facebook to the ongoing battles surrounding Apple and other mobile device providers, my RSS and social media feeds seem to have more and more articles about legal issues everyday.

Near the end of February marked the release of DragonflyBSD 3.0 with multi-core speed boosts and other improvements, but how does this correlate to performance improvements in our usual open-source benchmarks?

Pushed publicly yesterday was the test profile to run benchmarks of the popular Half-Life 2 game under Linux. As a result, coming out soon will be benchmarks of Half-Life 2 on Linux with an assortment of graphics cards and drivers.

As we've reported, the diminutive $25 Linux computer dubbed Raspberry Pi became available for purchase in its first incarnation only days ago, and the first devices sold out in mere seconds. Developers and tinkerers are putting numerous Linux distros on the devices, including Fedora, Debian and Arch Linux, and the next batch of Raspberry Pis is due imminently, and will probably sell out nearly instantly as well. ZDNet U.K. has gone so far as to say that "Raspberry Pi is the Linux punk ethic," and the device has already drawn interest from educational system and technology industry leaders.

Near the end of February marked the release of DragonflyBSD 3.0 with multi-core speed boosts and other improvements, but how does this correlate to performance improvements in our usual open-source benchmarks?

Android developers can now hack code on the move with the beta release of AIDE, the Android developer kit which runs on an Android device to create Android applications. AIDE is at beta version 7, but already allows the editing and compiling of apps, as well as automatic error checking (and fixing) and LogCat visibility. The free application is even compatible with projects started on Eclipse, which is important as one might not want to create an entire commercial app on a mobile phone – but at least with AIDE one theoretically could.

"My concern is that the evolution acceleration curve for technology, specifically how users interact with the interfaces, is too steep, and Ubuntu starts running the risk of being too clever, too quick," said Slashdot blogger yagu. "It's hard to evangelize linux/ubuntu/favorite distro and find out users are too confused to understand and use it because every time they look, it's different."

Here's the first bits of information following Phoronix tests of the "Southern Islands" AMD Radeon HD 7950 graphics card running under Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with the Linux 3.2 kernel and the AMD Catalyst driver.

Standards-based open Web technologies are increasingly capable of delivering interactive multimedia experiences; the kind that used to only be available through plugins or native applications. This trend is creating new opportunities for gaming on the Web. New standards are making it possible for Web applications to implement 3D graphics, handle input from gamepad peripherals, capture and process audio and video in real-time, display graphical elements in a fullscreen window, and use threading for parallelization. Support for mobile gaming has also gotten a boost from features like device orientation APIs and improved support for handling touchscreen interaction.

Every six months, we will do a review of the latest version of Ubuntu and see what features/improvement Canonical has added to the popular distro. The next version of Ubuntu – 12.04, Precise Pangolin is now available in beta and this is particularly important since it is the next Long Term Support (LTS) version. As of all LTS version, the emphasis is always on stability over new features experimentation, so it is interesting to see how the 12.04 will perform. Let’s proceed with the review.

For the first time in decades, the major players in the computing industry are making sweeping changes to the core of how we interact with computers. Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Canonical are reinventing the graphical user interface, leaving the desktop metaphor behind, and moving into a newer, and hopefully simpler, age of computer interaction.

The OpenStreetMap Foundation blog welcomed Apple to the list of existing users of its crowdsourced, open source map data. Apple has, so far, said nothing about apparently using the OSM map data for areas outside the US in the desktop version of iPhoto.

"Nobody likes the idea of having to practically beat their operating system into submission,... but this is the reality with Linux," asserted Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson. "One good idea layered over another good idea added to another good idea sometimes ends up with really bad results. We don't all want to be 'protected from ourselves' by more and more features that assume the user is a dummy. There's another OS for that."

It took several weeks longer than planned, but the “recommended” Linux distribution for the Raspberry Pi, the credit-card sized computer that retails for $35, Raspberry Pi Fedora Remix is finally ready to run. The distribution designer’s Chris Tyler announced the release on March 7th, but the official release came on March 8th. This Linux distribution is based on Fedora 14. This distribution, along with versions of Debian and Arch Linux for the Raspberry Pi, are now available for download.

Mozilla announced a deal with Latin American mobile carrier Telefónica Digital on February 27 to start shipping HTML5-driven smartphones by the end of 2012. Although the press release dubs the new platform "Open Web Device," many Mozilla watchers know it better as Boot To Gecko (B2G), a lightweight Linux-based system that uses Gecko as its primary (if not sole) application framework. B2G has been in development since July 2011, but it has advanced significantly since we last examined it in mid-August.

It's not gravity that makes the Linux Planet go around, it's the continuous process of never-ending code development. This past week saw three major milestone development releases for three of the biggest Linux efforts

Most people today are used to having a nice, intuitive graphical environment when they sit down to use a computer. Gone are the days of using a DOS machine or being lucky enough to have a dial-up account at 300 baud on a UNIX mainframe. Today, most people expect to be able to point and click their way to work nirvana, even when that work is being done on some other machine over a network. In this article, I look at some of the available options, what the relative costs and benefits are, and hopefully by the end, you should have enough information to make a choice as to what would be the best option for you.

Yesterday AMD officially launched the Radeon HD 7800 "Pitcairn" series as the latest hardware in their Southern Islands family to reside between the Radeon HD 7700 series and their flagship Radeon HD 7900 cards. Unfortunately, the open-source support for these latest AMD GPUs remains unavailable...