Ubuntu Look

The operator of the popular Wikipedia website has reportedly standardized its 400 servers on Ubuntu. San Francisco based Wikimedia Foundation, which employs five geographically distributed IT staff, and serves two million pages daily, says the move will simplify server maintenance, according to a report.

ComputerWorld’s Todd R. Weiss reports that Wikimedia began the transformation in 2006, starting with caching proxy servers. Prior to that, the infrastructure expanded “haphazardly,” with a mix of Red Hat and Fedora servers, Weiss wrote.

Weiss quotes market analyst Gordon Haff as saying the choice of Ubuntu may be due to its free and commercial versions being identical. Other commercial Linux vendors, notably Red Hat, offer added functionality in their paid products, Haff is quoted as having said.

Read more at Linux Watch

After more than one year of development, the first beta of Hiweed Linux 2.0, a Chinese community distribution based on Ubuntu 8.10, was released. This version cannot be upgraded from the previous Hiweed 1.0 but can only be installed from scratch, and it does not include the brand new OpenOffice.org 3.0 so that the ISO image can be reduced to only 400 MB in size.

Read more at DistroWatch

* News about Mint

Lots of improvements leading up to Mint 6 Felicia

mintUpload to support FTP

mintNanny introduced - a simple tool to prevent children from accessing certain websites

Three new commands - search, apt contains and apt content.

Mint is now to be on the major distributions page on Distrowatch

* News about Linux

Bruce Perens: A Big Change for Open Source - An appeals court has erased most of the doubt around Open Source licensing, permanently in a decision

Michael Robertson sued over Linspires missing cash

New releases recently

Mandriva Linux 2009 and Puppy Linux 4.1

Debian Lenny was not released - What you can do for “Lenny”

Ubuntu Confirms Linux Netbook Returns Higher than Anticipated

A Guide Through The Linux Sound API Jungle

Mono 2.0 has been released

The Ubuntu Upstream Report

LinuxWorld will relaunch as the OpenSource World Conference & Expo

How PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, and Five-Second Boot Improve Desktop Linux

Read more at Linux Mint Blog