The past few days we have been reporting on Valve's Steam client coming to Linux (and some of the Source Engine games too) soon as we had found Linux references within the Steam Mac OS X client and then other Linux references. We even ended up finding the unreleased Linux files on the Valve servers.

Recently I was involved with a conversation on a Linux mailing list regarding the current state of the operating system... one of the issues that was brought up was emulation. Because it is so simple to configure the Linux desktop to look and behave like either Windows or OS X, there are many that espouse doing so.

Surveys suggest that up to 90% of home computer users do not back up their data. That is a pretty frightening statistic bearing in mind how valuable and precious users' files are. Computer users who do not backup their files are at risk of losing all of their personal and irreplaceable documents. The hard drive in a PC can malfunction at any time, sometimes without any warning at all.

The final version of the Procurement and Open Source Software Guideline has been published on OSOR.eu. The study, commissioned by the European Commission as part of the "Dissemination of good practice in Open Source Software (GPOSS)" measure under the IDABC programme, gives guidelines for public administration on how and why publicly acquire open source software.

Linux is armed with Intelligent Input Bus (IBus) now. This is an input method (IM) framework for multilingual input in *nix like operating systems. Having a bus like architecture it is called I"Bus" Two major components of IBus are Input method engine (IME) and ibus-daemon. ibus-daemon provides a system tray configuration utility to select the Input method engine (IME) and then the language.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx is slated for release later this week and arrives as the harbinger of a new look for the distribution. ZDNet Australia has installed the release candidate to give you a peek.

No one told me I couldn’t use Linux, only that I couldn’t change it to suit my beliefs. I was free to try it and use it and endorse it, but if my own perspective differed from the originators, I should keep my mouth shut and learn to live with things as they had been created, decades ago.

It's a big week in Linux Land as Lucid Lynx is released on Thursday (4/29). I've been doing this long enough, and things went well enough on the test machine, I decided to jump the gun and upgrade to the final.