Last week, the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah finally granted Novell's request for declaratory judgment and ruled against SCO's last frantic attempts to keep any of its claims going. Or, to quote Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw and top expert on SCO's endless anti-Linux lawsuits: "The door has slammed shut on the SCO litigation machine."

An Ubuntu-based Linux distro identical in look and feel to Microsoft's Windows XP's been updated.

At first glance, it will be difficult for Canonical and Ubuntu to compete with Apple's dominant iPad in the tablet market. But now that I've had some time to really think about the situation, I think the iPad will help to re-ignite Ubuntu's Mobile Internet Device (MID) effort against Microsoft Windows. Here's why.

The Khronos Group announced version 1.1 of OpenCL, the multiprocessor programming standard. OpenCL 1.1 features a variety of enhancements, the one that really caught my eye was Improved OpenGL interoperability through efficient sharing of images and buffers by linking OpenCL event objects to OpenGL fence sync object. That'll come in handy.

You've likely heard this one already, but here it is again: over the weekend, the UnrealIRCd team discovered the "Unreal3.2.8.1.tar.gz file on our mirrors has been replaced quite a while ago with a version with a backdoor (trojan) in it." Yeek.

Most users interact with OpenOffice.org on the desktop. But what if you need to do a selective restore on the files that store custom gradients or colors? Troubleshoot why an extension won't install? Share resources with other users? For these kinds of tasks, you need to know a bit about where OpenOffice.org stores its files, and what you can do with them.

The Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) recently elected a new executive which will sit for two years until the Idlelo 5 conference in 2012. Tectonic spoke to the newly elected officials about the successes of the past, new challenges and hopes for the future.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth is bullish on PCs exposing millions of consumers to Linux – despite the industry succumbing to Jobsian tablet fever. Shuttleworth reckons that Ubuntu is approaching a tipping point among the ordinary PC-buying public, with the distro shipping on a record (for Ubuntu) five million machines this year.