This past year was a fantastic one for the Android community. The year started out strong with the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and quickly got better with fantastic offerings from HTC, Motorola and LG.

Smart Scopes will not ship as part of the Ubuntu 13.04 desktop as originally planned. 

Does Linux really need yet another video player? Probably not. But is it cool to have yet another anyway? For sure!

Every day we walk past and interact with machines that run Linux, without ever noticing. 

But every now and then these machines go wrong, and their underlying OS is exposed for all to see.

Longing to try the professional-grade video editor Lightworks on Linux? Well, you don’t have long to wait. 

The first public beta release of the linux build of Lightworks is scheduled for April 30th.

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

The latest build of Ubuntu 13.04 daily iso image can be downloaded from official Ubuntu cdimage server.

However, I found downloading from this server to be extremely slow. So, I tried some mirrors and now the daily image is downloading at full speed.

Arronax is a program to create and modify starters (technically: .desktop files) for applications and locations (URLs).Arronax can be used as a standalone application or as a plugin for Nautilus, the default file manager of the Gnome and Unity desktop environments.

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Google Drive for Linux is a contentious issue. It is now common knowledge that Google is an active user of Linux for its internal purposes.

Shuttleworth at work

Mark Shuttleworth has been named as one American magazine Forbes‘ ’12 Most Disruptive Names in business’

The list comprises of a dozen folk across industries as diverse as healthcare and credit who, the magazine say, are ‘dramatically shaking up their fields’.

GNOME 3.8, the latest version of the popular free desktop environment, has been released.

The fourth major update to the GNOME 3.x line, GNOME 3.8 brings many new features and functionality to its users, including enhanced applications and a focus on privacy.

GNOME 3.8 has been released today, the new version bringing many new features and enhancements, including a new application view and overhauled window layout for GNOME Shell, new setting panels for privacy, search and notifications and of course, many updates to the core GNOME apps like Web (Epiphany), Boxes, Documents and more.

Red Eclipse is a cross-platform, open source first-person shooter game that supports both single (against bots) and multi-player modes. The game runs on the Cube Engine 2 and it's very flexible, allowing players to extend the existing game modes (Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, etc.) with "mutators", changing how the game is played.

The latest iteration of the popular GNOME desktop, version 3.8, sees release today – but what are notable changes and improvements should you be looking out for?

Here’s a list of our 10 favourite changes – in no specific order – new to this release.

Leap Motion is a company developing advanced motion sensing technology for human–computer interaction.

Jolidrive, a dashboard for managing various online accounts including Dropbox and Google Drive, has added support for Ubuntu One.

When is Microsoft Office not Microsoft Office? When it’s actually a faithfully-crafted imitation, of course!

WPS Office, built by Chinese development group Kingsoft, claims to be the leading free office suite in China. And with such a familiar looking interface that’s not a difficult notion to swallow.

Three applications make up the suite:

Ubuntu Kylin, the newly-sired Chinese edition of Ubuntu, is already starting to mould its own identity.

The Norwegian military use Ubuntu – and that’s a fact.

In an article on Norway’s cyber defence effort over on Norwegian IT site digi.no, Ubuntu’s Unity desktop is clearly visible in one of the accompanying photos.

So much for people not using it!

Fingerprint readers, whether for legitimate security reasons or just as a nifty feature that lets you feel vaguely James Bond-ish, have checkered support under Linux. However there is always a solution.

Yeah that's right, Ubuntu 12.10 is now upgradable to latest Ubuntu 13.04 "Raring Ringtail" release. And Ubuntu 13.04 is pretty stable for a beta-quality OS, though I still won't/can't recommend it for production machines. I have been using it in my netbook from the early alpha releases and it has come together pretty nicely.

Have trouble with fullscreen gaming on Linux? Try FSGamer for Linux. FSGamer is an opensource utility that runs games in its own X server, which can improve the speed, reduce annoying interruptions, and make switching between fullscreen games and your desktop easy and reliable.