I can finally release my super secret project to you the lovely community: Project Goblin. You may well be asking "WTF is Goblin?!" and the answer is pretty simple really - our illustrious mascot Geeko + Moblin = Goblin.

Mandriva and Ubuntu both seem to think that companion services to complement their distributions are a good idea, and I agree. These services, which, so far, usually involve paid cloud storage and/or backup,  offer a potential revenue stream for companies that may not otherwise make much money.

Last week I fired up the latest beta of Moblin, the open source netbook/MID/nettop operating system originally spearheaded by Intel, but now shepherded by the Linux Foundation.

Number of Gnote submitters is up sharply .

You might imagine that an application for desktop notes would be too commonplace to generate controversy. Yet when Hubert Figuiere created Gnote, a port of the GNOME application Tomboy to C++, controversy erupted immediately.

Open source may have had a late start in the realm of enterprise virtualisation, but the meticulous and attentive development of this technology has led to better products in the long run. Not only is open source virtualisation now fully enterprise-ready, but it offers greater cost-savings and more flexibility that its proprietary counterparts.

That's a scary headline. Chances are, after seeing that, you might not care about the rest of this article. But hang on for a second: Have an Intel graphics chipset, or use an ATI graphics card (open-source drivers or not)? Then this image might be familiar to you...

Build a trivial program

So I thought of a reasonably trivial program I could write which would still be interesting enough and which can be build upon for a while to build some skill in perl GUI programming.