OStatic

Yesterday the GNOME Foundation announced that Sugar Labs is coming onboard as part of GNOME's Advisory Board. Sugar Labs will be represented on the board by executive director Walter Bender.

Tutorial: Setup and configuration of a virtual machine in VirtualBox. Run multiple operating systems simultaneously with Sun's virtualization tool.

Can Linux beat the bloat? Linus Torvalds shocked the group at LinuxCon recently with three words: Linux is bloated.

Shuttleworth: Don't give up on the Linux desktop. Canonical's founder sees bright things ahead for desktop Linux.

A new OLPC laptop dual-boots Sugar and the GNOME desktop. Check out a video of the new system.

Moblin gets its own app store. Moblin Garage has arrived, and it's Intel's effort to deliver one place to get Moblin apps.

Even as a child, I knew that Pixie Sticks were just trouble. The paper tubes loaded with colorful yet mysteriously flavorless sugar weren't particularly tasty, and too many of them led to mom and dad either threatening to pull the car over or hinting ominously about what would happen if they had to tell me again. Parents today know that in addition to the traditional side effects, Pixie Sticks aren't terribly good for USB ports, either.

That's not the case with the other sort of Sugar. Sugar, the kid-friendly open source desktop that was featured first on the OLPC XO laptop is now available (in a beta release) as a liveUSB image. The Sugar on a Stick environment is powered by Fedora 11 and features familiar Sugar desktop applications and functions, as well as new educational and collaborative tools, such as the InfoSlicer online content editor, remixer, and delivery application.

Hindsight, it is said, is always 20/20. The OLPC has traveled a turbulent path for quite some time, with its latest stumble coming in the form of drastic staff and development cuts.

Four years on, many are analyzing the choices the OLPC made, and some contend it was a bad idea all around.

Last Thursday, the OLPC Special Interest Group (SIG) announced the availability of the Fedora Sugar Spin LiveCD. This release incorporates the Sugar Desktop Environment in to a Fedora liveCD.

It's an easy way to try out the Sugar environment and associated applications without touching your existing system.

As we reported last month, Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) effort has had rocky times recently. The company has just announced a partnership with Microsoft to put Windows on OLPC laptops, although Linux-based open source versions of the sub-$200 laptops will stay in production. The laptops are targeted at children in developing nations. Recently, several key executives have left the project, including former president Walter Bender. Questions swirled about Bender's reasons for leaving OLPC, but now, in a surprise twist, he has resurfaced. Bender has announced Sugar Labs, a new foundation focused on taking the Sugar user interface in the OLPC laptops to other hardware platforms.

As Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains, Canonical has always offered commercial support for Linux, though its services largely targeted the enterprise market. Today, Canonical is announcing its plan to extend commercial support services to Ubuntu desktop users: individuals and small- and mid-sized businesses desiring a dedicated helping hand with Ubuntu installation, data migration, and network configuration.

Canonical offers three levels of support -- starter, advanced, and professional (the comparison chart breaks down coverage nicely) -- for one- or three- year periods.

Typical Linux desktop options like KDE and GNOME? limit the way computer users interact with the applications and programs on their systems. There's not much to do beyond opening and closing an app, and moving or resizing a window. The development team behind ?toil? is building a desktop interface that aims to stand that idea on its head and let users create workflows that work best for them.

The GNUstep-based environment is built with lightweight and modular components that allow users to combine project- and document-oriented activities (or, services, as the ?toil? team calls them) more easily.

Fresh out of the Mozilla Labs oven this week is a beta version of Prism, a new incarnation of WebRunner that integrates Web applications with the desktop. The idea behind Prism starts with from the premise that as more people move their computing activities to the cloud, users will become increasingly dependent on Web apps designed to replace locally-based email, calendaring, and word processing.