The final beta of Ubuntu 13.04 has been made available for download.

There were some confusions regarding the release of next Ubuntu release. But overtime, all the apprehensions were laid to rest. Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" will be released as per schedule. User Interface Freeze is already a done deal. Final beta release should also be arrived by now. And the final release will happen on April 25th. In plain language, Ubuntu 13.04 is almost ready.

We’re here with cake and an interview. We’re Alan Pope, Mark Johnson, Tony Whitmore, and The Podcats. We’re here in Studio A for the sixth episode of Season (Series) Six of the Ubuntu Podcast from the UK LoCo Team!

At the GPU Technology Conference, Valve recently talked about their experience of porting Source Engine to Linux.

Microsoft’s long-held dominance over the computing sector is coming to an end, say market experts Gartner.

The industry analysts expect Microsoft’s roost to shrink by over 7% this year alone. And, in further research they’ve conducted, go as far as as to predict the Windows’ makers share slipping as little as 14% by 2017.

New items have been added to the official Ubuntu Shop, including the obligatory ‘new release’ t-shirts.

Canonical update their range of branded goods around one every 6 months, typically before the release of the latest Ubuntu version.

QupZilla is a new and very fast QtWebKit browser. It aims to be a lightweight web browser available through all major platforms. This project has been originally started only for educational purposes. But from its start, QupZilla has grown into a feature-rich browser.

QupZilla has all standard functions you expect from a web browser.

 Ubuntu 13.04′s Unity desktop will not ship with a new in-Dash payment feature as originally proposed. 

I’m going to mention a certain infamous social networking site and I don’t want you to pelt me with rotten fruit for doing so. Agreed? Awesome. Yes, it’s Facebook app time again.

In-Dash App Purchase Transaction. Image credit: alecu83

Ubuntu 13.04 wants to let users buy music from the Ubuntu One Music Store directly from the Dash – no web-browser transactions needed.

WUBI, the Windows-side installer for Ubuntu, is likely to be dropped from Ubuntu 13.04.

Ever wondered how you can reset Unity and Compiz back to their default settings? 

Providing you are confident enough with the command line you’ll find that it’s a pretty easy thing to do.

If I said you could have 5 GB of online storage for free, with the option to earn a bit extra by persuading others to sign up; be able to share you files publicly, and could sync files straight from the Ubuntu desktop – what would you say?

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.

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Twitter clients for Linux. Once upon there were a swathe of them. Like Mogwai fed after midnight, newer ones seemed to appear with crazy frequency.

Hands up if you watched the return of Doctor Who yesterday, in the tech-laden episode ‘The Bells of St. John’?

That’s a lot of hands.

Now put your hands up if you think you spotted Ubuntu’s Unity desktop being used by Miss Kislet‘s shady soul-snatching organisation?

Fewer hands. But I can see why you’d think that…

Thanks to TiZ, who has been working on the Xfce panel port for some time, DockBarX can now be used as an Xfce panel plugin and with it, users can get an icon-only application switcher / taskbar with grouping and group manipulation, pin applications to the panel and, of course, take advantage of the DockBarX plugins: get Unity quicklists, counters and progress bars as wel