"Offering Fedora on Amazon EC2 is a way to deploy Fedora on a wider scale. Anyone will be able to have multiple Fedora virtual machines at his or her fingertips quickly," said Garrett Holmstrom, a Fedora Cloud SIG community member. "On the opposite end of the spectrum, this will give faster and easier access to a dedicated Fedora instance that is accessible from anywhere in the world. People without persistent Internet access will be able to host their web sites using Fedora. Anyone will be able to try out Fedora from a server perspective without needing to install, boot, or even download it themselves."

Fedora 14 is based on Linux Kernel 2.6.35, which introduces graphics stack improvements and the ability to spread incoming network loads across CPUs.  GNOME 2.32 is its default desktop environment, but KDE 4.5 can be selected as an alternative during the installation. To provide an improved experience on netbooks and small devices, the latest distro includes a subset of the MeeGo software.

"I'm very proud of the work that has been put into Fedora 14," said Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith in a statement. "A myriad of contributors have helped to make free and open source software more pervasive with this release."

The Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments, or Spice for short, provides users with an enhanced remote desktop experience. It provides the foundation to take advantage of accelerated 2D graphics, encryption, and hardware cursor support. Users of Windows clients will appreciate that Spice offers some video drivers and tools right out of the box. Fedora 14 also includes an updated technology preview of the Gnome shell environment which is part of the upcoming 3.0 release of the Gnome desktop software. A feature called libjpeg-turbo nearly halves the amount of time it takes to load and save JPEG images.

Developers will appreciate that Fedora 14 supports D, an emerging systems programming language that combines the performance of C and C++ with the productivity of modern languages such as Ruby and Python. The system python 2 stack has been upgraded to 2.7. The new "gdb-heap" package adds a new "heap" command to /usr/bin/gdb which allows you to get a breakdown of how a process is using dynamic memory. Netbeans 6.9, an integrated development environment, and Eclipse, an IDE with tooling for various languages, are included.

Another technology that makes its debut in the new release is OpenSCAP, an open source of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) framework implementation. It allows administrators to leverage security services and standards and audit systems to make sure that they are compliant with existing policies. The Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) provides support for remote and out-of-band management.

A complete list of Fedora 14 features is available on the Fedora community's release announcement. The latest distribution is available for 32- and 64- bit environments and can be downloaded here. Tutorials, tips and tricks to get the most out of Fedora 14 are available here.

Additional links to open source software that has been tested and deployed are available here.

The cloud based file sharing service Ubuntu One Basic allows users to synchronize files, notes, contacts, and bookmarks by utilizing up to 2 GB of free storage. A paid version, called Ubuntu One Mobile, extends synchronization features to Apple’s iPhone and devices powered by Google’s Android operating system. The service costs $3.99 per month or $39.99 annually.

"Ubuntu 10.10 for desktops and netbooks is our most consumer-friendly release yet," said Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical. “Ubuntu One’s personal cloud services will put Ubuntu at the heart of many users’ computing worlds even when they need or prefer to use other platforms. Unity has the opportunity to change how we think about our use of computers and the Software Centre will bridge Ubuntu with the applications users need to switch to the world’s best OS.”

The Ubuntu Software Centre gives users access to applications, games and tools. Offerings are extended and include commercial applications for purchase. Ubuntu hopes that the addition of commercial software will attract more application developers and software publishers.

The latest server edition makes it easier to configure, update and run both development and deployment environments of public clouds, Canonical says. A configuration tool called ‘CloudInit’ allows administrators to set a default locale and hostname, generate and set up SSH private keys, and set up mount points. IT professionals can also run custom commands and scripts on initial startup or on each reboot.

The new version upgrades the kernel, and more configuration options at boot time plus the ability to run the Amazon Machine Image (AMI) off-line on a KVM-virtualized machine have been added. Users can now test and develop on local servers before pushing to the public cloud, which results in true hybrid cloud computing, according to Canonical.

All clients can share authentication, swap files and access services, while Open LDAP, Likewise-Open and PAM authentication all come as standard. Many services such as mail, web, DNS, file, virtualization, Java application, cloud infrastructure or database servers are pre-configured and secured. A granular approach to security allows administrators to fine-tune user and program permissions.

"With Ubuntu 10.10 Server Edition we continue to make Ubuntu the default open-source choice for cloud computing," said Neil Levine, VP of Corporate Services at Canonical. "We are adding features and functions that extend our lead in the public cloud and bridge the gap to hybrid and local computing environments. The infrastructure layer is the enabler of cloud computing and Ubuntu 10.10 is leading the way to put open source at the heart of those efforts."

Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud adds virtio support, a new interface for administrators, eased deployment for developers and the ability to run UEC from a USB stick. Eucalyptus 2.0, the latest version of the core cloud technology in UEC, is included. GlusterFS and Ceph have been integrated into the core product and the groundwork has been laid for many cloud-focused enterprise-scale applications to be introduced over the life cycle of Ubuntu 10.10 and the current LTS version (10.04) of Ubuntu Server.

Ubuntu says that anyone interested in cloud computing will be able to try out the Server Edition on Amazon EC2 for one hour free of charge. The desktop and server editions are available in 32 and 64 bit versions. They are available for download here.

The picture shows a screenshot taken from the Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition desktop.

"In their short history, the netbook category has experienced impressive growth," said Erik Reid, director of marketing for mobile platforms at Intel. "Having shipped about 70 million Intel Atom chips for netbooks since our launch of the category in 2008, there is obviously a great market for these devices around the world."

Netbooks based on the dual-core Intel Atom N550 will allow users to play games and use Adobe Flash to access more Web pages including online hotel booking systems and multimedia sites such as YouTube and Hulu. Intel says that the N550 will yield battery life similar to the single-core Intel Atom processor N450.

Netbooks are usually low-cost (compared to laptops) PC’s with smalls screens (10 inch plus) and keyboards. They are primarily designed to allow users to surf the Internet and run basic applications. While very popular, they have been criticized for week graphics and slow performance.

AMD plans to ship an Atom competitor code-named Ontario in the fourth quarter of 2010.

The processor is able to run 1080p HD video playback and 3D graphics. Connection to the outside world will be possible via Wi-Fi and 3G.  The device will feature two 5-megapixel cameras, one facing front and one facing back. It will most likely run on BlackBerry OS 6.0. RIM released a video demonstrating some of the capabilities of the new WebKit based browser.

"Research In Motion is trying to pull forward the launch of the 7-inch touchscreen tablet from early next year to year end … with a marginal point of differentiation being the front- and back-facing cameras for videoconferencing," says Kumar in the report.

Earlier reports said that RIM is aiming for a release date early in 2011. It seems now that the company wants to capitalize on pre-holiday sales to catch-up to Apple's iPad. "Demand continues to chase supply for iPhones and iPads. In both instances, panels and touchscreen remain the supply bottleneck. While increased capacity and higher yields should improve availability of retinal screens from LG Display, it is unlikely to completely satiate global iPhone demand for remainder of the year," Kumar says.

A YouTube video shows a technology demo Armada Marvel family of processors.

Photo: ip-192.com

Ubuntu is simple and elegant, Dell says. "If you’re the kind of person who likes your computer to simply work, Ubuntu is right for you. It's based on stable, secure, easy-to-use software that’s been around for a long time." Dell claims that Ubuntu is social from the start. "The people who make Ubuntu designed it to be very social-media centric. Do you use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or any of the other dozens of popular social networking sites? Ubuntu 9.10 works very well with these websites. And beginning with Ubuntu 10.04, these websites will be integrated into the Ubuntu OS itself for your convenience."

While Ubuntu is available on Dell PC's, Laptops, and Netbooks since 2007, the new push for open source software comes as Dell preparers to ship Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (long term support) on several systems. Dell claims that dramatically improved boot times and thousands of free software programs including OpenOffice ultimately make Ubuntu a better operating system. "Do you need to open Microsoft Office documents? What about Adobe Acrobat? Ubuntu comes with the award-winning OpenOffice software. With it, not only can you create word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and even drawings, but it can also open and save documents in Microsoft Office format. Do you ever get .pdf files emailed to you—no problem!"

A video on YouTube demonstrates the multimedia, 3-D and Windows desktop capabilities of Ubuntu 10.04 here.