Software

1. Ubuntu TV: What is it All About?

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, revealed Ubuntu TV, an operating system for smart TVs. Ubuntu TV integrates broadcast, time shift, online box office, personal cloud, apps and disk media experiences under the Unity user interface that was adopted in the latest versions of Ubuntu.

While Gnome meta-morphed into a tablet/touch based desktop environment, which initially created some ripples, KDE has adopted a more mature approach. The free and open source project is working on what is called Plasma Active.

With Plasma Active, KDE project has shown how you can take customize the desktop environment for different class of devices -- while traditional desktop users can use the 'future' perfect and advanced Plasma Desktop, space restricted netbooks can take full advantage of Plasma Netbook, the Plasma Active emerges as a great solution for touch based devices.

A new version of the most popular open source CMS, Wordpress 3.3, has been released under the codename "Sonny", after the late jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt.

"WordPress has had over 65 million downloads since version 3.0 was released, and in this third major iteration we’ve added significant polish around the new user experience, navigation, uploading, and imports", the Wordpress blog reported.

What's new?

While Intel rebrands MeeGo as Tizen and will work with Samsung and the Linux Foundation on development, Nokia is rumored to be developing another open-source OS for its low-end handsets, codenamed Meltemi.

(CC-BY-SA huangjiahui)

Lucid Imagination, the commercial company for Apache Lucene and Solr search technology, announced the latest version of LucidWorks, a platform that accelerates and simplifies the development of highly accurate, scalable and cost-effective search applications.

Although it was strongly marketed as being available only to Google Chrome, you can play Angry Birds on other browsers as well, including Firefox.

LibreOffice will be the default office suite in Ubuntu 11.04. Canonical's CEO, Mark Shuttleworth, earlier has announced that "the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu".

Mozilla released Firefox 3.6.4 which provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash.

Version 3.0 of Wordpress has been released, the latest version dubbed "Thelonious" contains more than 1200 bug fixes and several updates and enhancements released by 280 contributors areound the world.

Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, is considering dropping its current default browser Firefox for Google Chrome. Different industry sources are reporting that "Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.10 might not feature Firefox as the browser of choice, and will instead offer Google's Chrome as the default Internet browser".