Today IBM announced that it has teamed with Canonical and Virtual Bridges to offer a Linux-based virtual desktop computing environment. With this product, IBM hopes to emphasize and increase adoption of its Lotus collaboration software, as well as promote the use of Linux (Canonical's Ubuntu) by way of Virtual Bridges' VERDE desktop virtualization platform.

One of the top executives at SugarCRM has moved on to join Pentaho, where he's now building the open source BI company's partner program. Here's the scoop, from The VAR Guy.

My Thoughts: "In a previous article I addressed how to compile a kernel for Ubuntu Intrepid using git and in a follow up article I explained how to compile a new release if you already compiled your own custom kernel using git."

IBM announced the availability of a "Microsoft alternative" virtual desktop that uses virtualization technology from Virtual Bridges and incorporates Canonical's Ubuntu Linux and IBM's Lotus applications. Based on Virtual Bridges's Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment (VERDE), the desktop environment is far more affordable than running Microsoft desktops, claims IBM.

An analytics site finds traffic from Google.com obfuscates the operating system being used.

Ubuntu has once again opened up a call for submissions to anyone interested in being a part of the Ubuntu Free Culture Showcase. If you're a musician, artist, photographer, or all-around creative genius and would like to enter your work in the current competition, you've got until February 9, 2009 to submit something to the judges.

The fourth iteration of the K Desktop Environment saw its first release in January of this year; while it generated a lot of hype in the community, its release disappointed many folks whom were expecting to be able to jump headlong into a brand new, next-generation....

Linutop: "If you usually work on several machines (e.g., a desktop machine at home and a notebook on the move), the Dropbox service can help you to keep your files and documents in sync with minimum fuss."

PC/OS aims to be an easy-to-use Linux distribution right out of the box. Being Ubuntu-based, it has a head start on being user-friendly, but PC/OS goes above and beyond Ubuntu's measures to ensure ease of use by having common third-party non-GPL software included in the install.

In a long-term project, the OpenOffice team wants to thoroughly rework the free office software's user interface. This was already widely expected to happen with version 3.0, which no longer looks contemporary in many users' eyes. In addition, the office suite's menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to locate certain functions – a problem Microsoft addressed with the ribbon feature in Office 2007. Ribbons have replaced the classic menus of Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint in the latest Office, and will come to Paint and Wordpad in Windows 7.

Sun Microsystems, it is generally felt, lost the desktop to Microsoft a long time ago. Aware of this, Sun in recent years evangelized mobile as Java's habitat - mobile is, after all, where Microsoft's at its weakest. It's with great ceremony, then, that Sun's marking the fact it comprehensively missed that JavaFX Mobile deadline by returning to the desktop with the scheduled launch today of JavaFX Desktop 1.0 - now just JavaFX 1.0. Linux, meanwhile, is the new Java for mobile it seems. Linux looks set to grow in the mobile space, with ABI Research last year predicting there'd be more than 127 million devices using Linux by 2012, up from 8.1 million in 2007.

Bouncing along the bottom of a recession is not where most people think of doing long term planning. But open source doesn’t think first about money, so the Open World Forum has taken a long, hard look into the deep future of the year 2020. (I will be 64 when that year opens, hence the headline.)

The ToyBox: "Does Google use more bandwidth than it pays for? Google is by far the largest user of Internet bandwidth, its share of bandwidth usage is rising rapidly, and its bandwidth use is orders of magnitude greater than its payment for its cost..."

The FTP team at the Debian project have decided that the Affero GPL version 3 licensing (AGPLv3) is consistent enough with the guidelines of the Linux distro that software with the licensing can go into Debian's main archive.

There is no doubt that people are leaving Windows, many going to the Mac and some are turning to Linux. This is partly due in part to dissatisfaction with Vista. The reason isn’t important. What is happening to the Linux community is. We see that Windows users are having an impact on the Linux community that we may not have anticipated. Windows users aren’t used to choice. For them the array of choices that Linux presents is confusing.

OStatic: "Joi Ito and the Creative Commons need help getting the word out -- and defined...One of the gray areas Creative Commons has been grappling with is how exactly one defines "non-commercial."

What are the chances you'll actually watch a DVD/Blu-ray more than once or twice?

From the "it's not Linux, but it's got the same apps" files: Sun has rolled opensolaris 2008.11, loaded with open source applications that are well known to Linux distribution users

If you use GUI then you can right-click on the pictures and see properties. But can you see the image properties (or metadata) from command line interface? Yes! you can do that using identify command. Here is how.

• How KDE 4 is blocking Qt 4.5

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• PCLinuxOS on the Dell Inspiron 1526
• Want Your Friend to Switch?
• RandR 1.2 Coming To NVIDIA's Binary Driver
• gOS Cloud instant-on OS shown on video
• Learn and Use a Good, Free OS: Linux - PCLinuxOS
• Password stealing malware masquerades as Firefox add-on
• Linux comparison: Introduction and Ubuntu
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• Linus Torvalds: Debugging hell
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• Actuate's Open Source Survey Says...
• Moving to Linux — slowly
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• The reality of being Root
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