OStatic

We've been reporting this week on excitement surrounding netbooks running the new Moblin version 2 operating system, and how many different directions Moblin may go in. At the Intel Developer Forum conference this week, Intel showed a smartphone running the operating system, with its own chips powering the phone.? While Intel has officially handed over stewardship of Moblin to The Linux Foundation, the company is demonstrating its belief in Moblin for many types of hardware platforms ranging from netbooks, to smartphones, to Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs).

Intel has a long history of high-profile partnerships with big technology companies such as Microsoft and Dell, and that's why I'm not surprised to see that the first netbook running Moblin version 2 is Dell's very well-liked Mini 10v (shown). It's set to ship with Canonical's Moblin remix of Ubuntu, and is evidence that Dell--the world's number two computer manufacturer--remains committed to shipping Linux-based netbooks.

Google's Chrome plug-in for IE is half-baked. IT organizations are unlikely to adopt the plug-in without enterprise deployment and management tools.

Big IT projects fail. Open source can help. In traditional software sales cycles, it takes forever for the the customer to really get to experience the software.

Why Africa gets the IBM-Ubuntu bundle and you do not. IBM and Ubuntu are partnering on a Linux bundle for Africa, but only there.

Why open-source DNS is the Internet's dirty little secret.? Do Nominum's new Skye cloud DNS services close a key weakness in the Internet?

CodePlex Foundation will help spread use of Mono. The foundation will ensure that there are incentives for open source software developers who embrace Mono.

Why one writer can never be exclusive to Linux and open source on the desktop. The file compatibility of the current productivity stack and the lack of some applications matter.

Open source does not work well for bad guys. While some researchers express fear of malware writers using open source to improve their work, it actually doesn't help them.

OpenID implementation works on mobile platforms. Swedish company Accumulate has implemented a version of the OpenID standard for mobile phones.

Atlanta Linux Fest: Top 9 Ubuntu highlights. Many of the standing-room-only sessions focused on Canonical and Ubuntu.

How one Melburnian spent Software Freedom Day. He introduced an audience to Python.

Attendees at Atlanta Linux Fest's breakout session Ubuntucon were among the first to hear straight from Mark Shuttleworth that the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu's next release -- version 9.10 10.04 -- will be named Lucid Lynx.

This codename in the next in a long line of clever choices that designate versions of Ubuntu releases. Past names include Hardy Heron, Dapper Drake, Breezy Badger, and the most recent, Karmic Koala. According to Shutteworth, the idea for the odd naming scheme originated quite by accident.

UPDATE: As our eagle-eyed readers correctly point out, the next version number will be 10.04 not 9.10.

As Slashdot, Moblin Zone, and ZDNet UK are reporting, the very first netbook preinstalled with Moblin version 2 for Netbooks is likely to launch next week, very probably at Intel's Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, or at Portland's LinuxCon. ZDNet UK did an interview with Imad Sousou, head of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, in which he implied as much. Sousou has also confirmed that Moblin version 2 will be made widely available after that, with many new features.

While Microsoft's Windows 7, due in October, is going to be aggressively pushed in the netbook space, Moblin will join Ubuntu and Google's upcoming Chrome OS in the effort to keep innovative open source operating systems going in the fast-growing netbook space. Intel has handed stewardship of Moblin over to The Linux Foundation, which could help its chances. Netbooks represent an important frontier for open source adoption and innovation, and I have my own guess at who will be shipping the first Moblin v2 netbook.

OpenID is the biggest government boost yet for open source. U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra has announced a pilot program focused on it.

Red Hat challenges Ubuntu with KVM support. After placing its bets for years on Xen, the company has moved toward official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.

Oracle makes promises to Sun customers, but mum on MySQL. The company has much to say to Sun customers in a front-page ad it placed in the European edition of The Wall Street Journal.

he Linux kernel version 2.6.31 has been released. Desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support are among the new additions. Check out more from Linus Torvalds.

Kings of open source monitoring. OpenNMS and Zenoss Enterprise take different paths to rich, scalable, and extensible network and systems monitoring.

Dell ships Ubuntu 9.04 systems ahead of Windows 7 launch. It's available on Mini 10V and Inspiron 15N laptops.

Flexbooks ? a non-braindead way to produce textbooks. Copyright makes the price of textbooks too high, and Flexbooks could be the solution.

DigiKam is an open source photo application with 16-bit mode editing. Check out a visual tour of what it can do.

Firefox 4.0 to arrive in late 2010. Mozilla recently released a product roadmap with a number of new details.

A cloudy future for open source applications. The cloud promises to shift value to services and away from software.

Sprint needs a hit. Sprint, the beleaguered mobile carrier, announced that it will start selling HTC Hero, a touchscreen phone based on Google?s Android OS, on Oct. 11th for $179.

Google Android: Is the party over? It's open source, hardware-agnostic, and developer-friendly, but why are developers unhappy?

Which licence is best: EPL, GPL or BSD? Open source pundits recently held a smackdown debating the merits of various open source licenses, and here were the highlights.

Useful Ubuntu links. After helping a friend switch to Ubuntu, a veteran compiles a list of helpful sites to know about.

Red Hat CEO: Choose flexibility or Larry Ellison. At Red Hat Summit, CEO Jim Whitehurst took on Oracle's inflexibility as his company launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4.