Linux's gains are Microsoft's losses, and there were both aplenty in the past week, despite the best efforts of the Redmond crowd to tamp down enthusiasm for free OSes. Bloggers across the FLOSS world are speculating over what they see as a building storm headed straight for western Washington.

This guide shows how you can create USB startup disks (on your USB flash drive) from various Linux distributions with UNetbootin. This is useful if you want to install a Linux distribution on a computer that has no CD/DVD drive.

These two games were supposed to be released for Linux (they are already available for Windows platforms) by last Spring, but that never came to fruition... Now it appears that Linux Game Publishing has been involved with porting Shadowgrounds: Survivor to Linux.

Brilliant Brainstorms is a (usually) weekly summary of some of the best/most interesting brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. This week: workspace confusion; optimizing screen real-estate on netbooks; Wubi for Ubuntu Netbook Remix; and giving nautilus folder differentiation.

There were new metrics out this week for both EnterpriseDB's PostgreSQL-centric database business, and Sun Microsystems' MySQL business. These players are at the forefront of challenging pricing for databases and surrounding services from competitors such as Oracle, and both are having strong success with strategies focused on open source databases.

One of the many changes in xserver 1.6 is switching the DontZap option's default so that the ctrl-alt-backspace option does not trigger X to terminate unless the user deliberately configures it to do so.

the Canonical Store’s description says, “This new and improved USB Flash drive not only comes with Ubuntu 8.10 pre-loaded, but can also hold a whopping 4GB of data that can be transferred to virtually any USB equipped machine. Who could say no?”. And indeed, he couldn’t say no, and bought one. Let’s have three cheers for that decision! :)