And apparently a lot more money, thanks to Zuck & Co.

Linux server and cluster maker Penguin Computing is a member of the Open Compute Project started by Facebook to create open source data center gear, and now it is an official "solution provider".

The first installment of The Iron Penguin!

Why is the Robot rampaging through Tokyo? (Actually, why does just about every giant robot and monster rampage through Tokyo, or live deep in the ocean just off the coast?)

Who will save the day?

These questions and possibly more will be answered soon...

I hope to see some of you at LinuxCon Japan and the Automotive Linux Summit this year.

How to protect yourself online with the TAILS privacy distro.

Half-Life 2 Now Available for Linux

Valve’s lauded first-person shooter Half-Life 2 has finally arrived on Linux.

The Half-Life 2 series’ debut for Linux through Steam comes just after Valve’s release of Portal for Linux last week.

Though originally released for the PC back in 2004, Half-Life 2 has lived on with additional “episodes” and a growing collection of mods to tide over the series’ fans whilst Valve take their time on the next title in the series.

The Future

Valve head Gabe Newell confirmed the company’s work on the second iteration of the Source engine – the engine currently powering Steam titles for Linux like Team Fortress 2, Portal, and the Half-Life 2 series.

Whether Valve debut their new engine with another Half-Life title or something completely different, their continued investment in Linux bodes well for a new Valve release coming much sooner to our platform than the nine-year lag for the original HL2 or the six years for Portal, TF2, and HL2: Episode Two.

Get Half-Life 2

Steam is available from both the Steam website and the Ubuntu Software Center.

Steam on the Ubuntu Software Center

Download and Install Steam

Half-Life 2 on Steam

‘Half-Life 2′ Hits Linux, Available on Steam OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

Including IE8 remote code execution hole that pwned US nuke lab

Microsoft has promised to fix a high-profile vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8, among other holes, in this month's Patch Tuesday rollout of security updates.

Does Linux really need another application packaging and installment system? Ubuntu will be adding another one for its Ubuntu Touch smartphones and tablets.

Comment Clowns, beef, ringleaders, fire brigades... PAH! - HDS

How do you avoid a snakebite from the ViPR that EMC has let loose in the storage jungle? El Reg storage desk has spoken to some of its competitors about their "software-defined" antidotes.

Updated Debian 7.0 wheezes in as GCEL hobbles out

Google is moving the default software for its rentable cloud servers from a custom version of Linux to Debian.

“Samsung are making the first Ubuntu Phone!” screams the subject field of the latest e-mail to arrive in the OMG! tips inbox.

“I can’t believe you haven’t mentioned the U1000!!” the sender protests – albeit with more capitalisation than I’m willing to convey, but adding to an ant-sized avalanche of mail along similar lines.

What’s stoking their enthusiasm? This:

Copyright: Suman Chatterjee

It’s called the Samsung U1000 and, if half of the internet is to be believed it’s the first officially announced mobile handset to run Ubuntu Touch.

Only, that’s not the case.

The U1000 is a concept phone designed by one Suman Chatterjee. Suman is nothing if not prolific. Recent designs by him include a Facebook Tablet, a Nexus 5 design, and interesting concept for a dual-OS phone running Android on one screen and Windows Phone 8 on the reverse.

Suman’s design is nothing to do with Samsung. It’s not a real phone. The story has simply snowballed from an original posting by the Concept Phones website, in which Suman goes into detail about what hardware his concept “runs”, to what we have today: people throwing money at their screen hoping it will stick.

Of course, this isn’t to say that Samsung aren’t working on an Ubuntu Phone. Despite making a mint from flogging Android handsets a “well known industry rumour” suggests that the company are looking to start placing eggs in another basket.

So while this Samsung Ubuntu Phone might be a load of old cobblers, the idea of one possibly isn’t.

The Samsung U1000 Ubuntu Phone Isn’t Real OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

"CrunchBang Linux is a Debian based distro with the Openbox window manager on top of it. So it is Debian under the hood with Openbox on the surface," says distro supporter Larry Cafiero. A glance through the #! (CrunchBang) forums showed an exceptionally fast response rate to problems posted there, so even if you haven't heard of #! (it's not in the DistroWatch Top 10), it has a strong and dedicated user community -- which is one of the major keys to success for any open source project. In order to learn more about #! Linux (and to share what he learned), Timothy Lord pointed his camcorder at Larry during LinuxFest Northwest and made this video record of their conversation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The open source cloud discussion has noticeably shifted over the past year, away from whether the industry needs an open source alternative to the Amazon Web Services API and toward providing services that Amazon doesn't offer.

Support for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop and Ubuntu 11.10 officially ends today.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS – released back in April 2010 – and Ubuntu 11.10 – made available in October of 2011 – will no longer receive bug fixes, updated packages or critical security updates.

For this reason Ubuntu say that they ‘highly recommend’ all those using these releases upgrade to a more recent version of Ubuntu.

The good news for you if you’re using Lucid Lynx or Oneiric Ocelot is that Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is available as a direct upgrade from Ubuntu’s Update Manager.

At the time of the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS release we wrote about our experience of a direct upgrade from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.

Milestones

Both releases were memorable ones.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS brought with it an entirely new set of artwork; introduced the boot-time technology ‘Plymouth’; and added the Me Menu to the default install.

Ubuntu 11.10 removed the Me Menu; saw Lenses moved from the Unity Launcher to the Unity Dash; and introduced LightDM as Ubuntu’s default login screen.

Desktop Support for Ubuntu 10.04 LTS & 11.10 Officially Ends OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

Faster, less clunky than old-school Linux installers

In a move that could see Ubuntu veer even further away from the Linux mainstream, Canonical has proposed a new software packaging format designed to make it easier for developers to publish apps for Ubuntu's tablet and phone–friendly future incarnations.

Lighttpd, Nginx variants also discovered

A mysterious backdoor that has been used to drive traffic to malicious websites may be more widespread than previously thought, security researchers say, and it affects more web servers than just Apache.

An anonymous reader writes "While complementing Debian APT/DPKG, Canonical is now developing their own package format. The new package format has promised highlights of having no dependencies between applications, each package would install to its own directory, root support wouldn't always be required, and overall a more self-contained and easier approach for developers than it stands now for Debian/Ubuntu packages. The primary users of the new packaging system would be those distributing applications built on the Ubuntu Touch/Phone SDK. The initial proof-of-concept package management system is written in Python and uses JSON representation." This quote from the post by Canonical's Colin Watson bears repeating: "We'll continue to use dpkg and apt for building the Ubuntu operating system, syncing with Debian, and so on."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ubuntu Touch for Phones will be in a usable enough state for daily use by the end of the month.

Announcing the ‘end of may’ goal on his blog, Canonical’s Director of Ubuntu Engineering Rick Spencer argues that ‘progress accelerates when people are using, in addition to building, software’.

Adding that this ‘dog-fooding’ allows developers to ‘….really know how far there is between where you are, and a shippable state’.

To this end both Spencer’s team, and others within Canonical, will be aiming to ensure key task of the everyday phone experience will be working by the deadline.

So what kind of ‘useable state’ is being aimed for?

• Ability to make and receive calls and text messages
• Browse the internet via 3G & WiFi
• Ability to import, edit and add contacts 
• Working proximity sensors for screen dimming
• Ability to update the phone without losing data

These key parts of the core phone experience will allow developers working on it, as well as those developing apps for it, to see better gauge priorities, feature needs, and so on.

While the end of May deadline is a soft goal (one that I’m fairly certain will be reached) Ubuntu Touch still won’t be quite ready for the prime time on user handsets.

But on that front you shouldn’t have too long to wait: Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon has recently said that Canonical are aiming to have a ’1.0 Ubuntu Touch platform …ready for October so it can then be delivered to customers for deployment on handsets in Q1/Q2 2014.’

Ubuntu Touch for Phones To Be Usable ‘By End Of May’ OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.

With its new Silvermont architecture, it looks like Intel has finally leaped forward in mobile. But whether it can ward off ARM'S upcoming 64-bit ARMv8 processors is another story.

Microsoft has had trouble getting people to use its Windows Phone operating systems, however, it might make as much as $3.4 billion on Android phones.

More than 60 Linux-related projects are currently listed on Kickstarter. Here's a small sampling of some particularly compelling examples.

There was a time when I, probably like many of you, would change my desktop theme more often than I’d change my socks.

Then Ubuntu went and did something awful: it delivered a default theme that was not only “good” but acceptable to virtually everyone’s tastes!

It wasn’t gaudy, or boring; not too dark, or too light. It was, and I appreciate it will sound sickly, very ‘Ubuntu’.

But in honour of addictions past it’s time for me to highlight some desktop themes again. And there is no better choice to start with than ZonColor – an all-in-one theme pack oozing options…

ZonColor – Even Makes The New Nautilus Look Nice!

ZonColor Themes

ZonColor by Zon Saja is a set of 16 themes (though not all can be used in Unity), 21 icon theme variants (mostly different coloured folders), and some matching wallpapers. This wide range of simple, well-made components allows you to mix-and-match different elements until you come up with something you like.

The GTK3 themes themselves cover a wide range of styles – from the Ambiance-like ‘Audience‘ and ‘ZonColor Hard‘ themes to the striking colours of ‘Birdycloud’ and ‘Zoncolor’.

Once you’ve chosen a theme you can set an icon set to match it. Again, these vary from the colourful and flat, to the glossy and shiny.

Install ZonColor

To install Zoncolor theme pack in Ubuntu you’ll first need to grab the latest release from its official homepage.

Download ZonColor Theme Set

Once the Zoncolour archive has fully downloaded you’ll need to ‘unzip’ it. In Ubuntu this is as simple as right-clicking on the archive icon, and selecting ‘extract here’ from the menu that appears.

After extraction enter the folder and run the ‘install.sh’ file inside by double-clicking on it. If you don’t see a prompt appear you may need right click on the install.sh file, go to Properties > Permissions, and check the box next to ‘allow executing file as programme’.

Once you’ve launched the installer you’ll see this screen:

It’s up to you to choose whether you only want the theme, or whether you want the ‘zoncolour’ app installed too (the app allows you to apply customizations to each theme). I choose ‘Install themes only’.

Once the installer has done its bit, it’s over to you. To switch between/set themes/icons you’ll need to use a third-party app like Unity Tweak Tool.

Ubuntu 13.04 users can grab this straight from the Ubuntu Software Center:

Install Unity Tweak Tool from Ubuntu Software Center

Ubuntu 12.10 or 12.04 users will need to use an alternative tool from the Software Center, like Unsettings.

One thing I will note is that Unity (for me at least) has a quirk where, after applying a new theme, some elements won’t take effect until I’ve logged out and back in (it mostly affects menus and highlight colors). Bear this in mind if you find yourself looking at a blue theme with orange highlights ;)

Liven Up Your Ubuntu Desktop With ZonColor Themes OMG! Ubuntu! - Everything Ubuntu. Daily.