Hello everbody. The title says it all. The good people at SCALE (Southern California Linux Expo offered our readers a super-discount: just mention the coupon code FSM8X and receive a 40% (forty percent!) discount on your SCALE tickets!
Merry Christmas, and enjoy SCALE!

Some might say that the mission of Ubuntu is to cleanse the upstream projects of the "sins" that make them hard to deal with from the vantage point of the average user. Put more plainly: Whether it's true or not, I think many users out there (myself included) somehow expect Ubuntu to fix every d@mn thing that's broken in the Linux user experience. The problem is that Ubuntu is not Linux.

Want to know what's in store for the next few months or years in technology? Here's your chance to see the forecast.

Nathan Torkington is one developer who's at ease no matter whether he's coding with his peers, consulting, or teaching children how to sink their teeth into programming using free and open source software.

2010 is going to be a good year for Linux on the desktop. No, tens of millions of Windows users aren’t going to see the light and suddenly switch. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Linux will continue to make steady gains.

I believe that at this point there no use anymore in asking the question “Is Linux ready for the desktop?”. It is, and it works so well it’s boring.

As Mark Shuttleworth transitions Canonical’s CEO crown to Jane Silber, The VAR Guy believes there are at least nine major Ubuntu priorities that Silber will need to address. Here’s a look at the challenges — and opportunities — awaiting Silber when she assumes all of Canonical’s CEO responsibilities in March 2010. Take a look.

The next Linux I'm trying on the Acer Aspire One is Fedora. Judging from their information page, Fedora 10, 11, and 12 all work on the Aspire One, with different limitations. Fedora 12 has a few too many unresolved issues at this time, so I've downloaded Fedora 11.