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As Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains, Canonical has always offered commercial support for Linux, though its services largely targeted the enterprise market. Today, Canonical is announcing its plan to extend commercial support services to Ubuntu desktop users: individuals and small- and mid-sized businesses desiring a dedicated helping hand with Ubuntu installation, data migration, and network configuration.

Canonical offers three levels of support -- starter, advanced, and professional (the comparison chart breaks down coverage nicely) -- for one- or three- year periods.

Today, Novell announced its SUSE Appliance Program, which encompasses Suse Studio Online, a customizable, lightweight version of Linux called SUSE Linux Enterprise JeOS (Just Enough Operating System), tie-ins with Amazon's cloud services, and full support for custom software. According to the company it is an end-to-end appliance solution that enables ISVs to rapidly build, update, configure and go to market with fully supported software and virtual appliances. In essence, developers can quickly use Novell's tools to build software appliances and even custom operating systems, and then use Amazon's cloud services and Novell's distribution channel to reach new users in new markets, with help available.?

Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Ingres and others have voiced support for the program, and Novell claims that more than 3,800 ISV applications are currently certified on the SUSE Linux Enterprise platform. Here are more of the details.?

There are very few reasons I'd sign on for YACC (not that YACC -- I'm talking about Yet Another Credit Card ). The Linux Foundation is making my unwavering resolve on this front feel a little less resolute today.

The Linux Foundation is rolling out its Tux-adorned Visa Platinum Card. Through a partnership with CardPartner, Inc. and UMB Bank, the Foundation will receive $50 for each activated card and a percentage from every purchase made with the card. All of the proceeds from these cards will be used to create community technical events, as well as provide travel grants to open source innovators. Because no one wants a Tux-carrying card holder to rack up huge amounts of credit card debt in order to support these services, these proceeds will be combined with the funds raised from membership dues, Linux.com advertising, and event revenues.

Hadoop and MapReduce are cheap and scalable for clustered queries, but they're slower than relational databases. Yale researchers have an improvement.

The Ubuntu Linux app store: fact or fiction? The emerging app store, which offers Ubuntu Linux and Debian applications, wasn?t built by Canonical.

Linux slips into Microsoft's warm, deadly embrace. How Microsoft will use the GPL to mount a serious backdoor assault on the core of the Linux platform.

Is Microsoft's GPL2 support really a big deal? It's recently released code is only for Linux Virtual Machines on Windows, not physical Linux servers and Linux desktops.

Red Hat is wrong to insist Microsoft disavow litigation. Did IBM, HP, Oracle, or even Red Hat ever declare that they will never, ever sue open source developers over patent infringements?

Palm's Linux secret makes the Pre. Palm Pre is no thriller as a smartphone, but the SDK reveals the most open mobile platform on the market.

In a move that marks a notable shift for Microsoft, the company has announced that it has released 20,000 lines of device driver code to the Linux community. The code includes three Linux device drivers, and has been submitted to the Linux kernel community for inclusion in the Linux tree. The drivers will be available to the Linux community and customers alike, and will enhance the performance of the Linux operating system when virtualized on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, company officials said in a statement.

Sam Ramji, Microsoft's open source czar, commented on the move in an interview posted on Microsoft's site. Today?s release would have been unheard of from Microsoft a few years ago, he said but it?s a prime example that customer demand is a powerful catalyst for change. It's a smart, long overdue play from the company.

Open source Lucene threatens Microsoft, Google enterprise search. Interest in Lucene and Solr is skyrocketing, as measured by job postings.

Why Apache is not the bottom of the open source incline. Why is the GPL still considered the bottom of the open source incline, and not, say, the Apache license?

Firefox 3.5's first vulnerability self-inflicted. The bug could be used to hijack a machine running the company's newest browser.

Embedded Linux achieves one-second boot time. MontaVista Software announced and showed a dashboard application going from cold boot to operational in one second flat.

Boxee will blow you away. In many ways, the Boxee media center platform is much better than the original XBMC 9.04 RC.

Is Oracle getting ready to kill OpenSolaris? What does a Linux company, which Oracle is, want to do with its newly purchased Sun operating system?

Google releases open source NX server. Amid the fanfare of the Chrome OS announcement, Google quietly released an open source NX server, dubbed Neatx, for remote desktop display.

HP releases $500 Linux netbook onto Aussie market. This week sees the Australian launch of the Mini 110, which HP is offering with both Ubuntu and Windows XP.

Free operating systems that aren't Linux. There are other free options such BSD, OpenSolaris, HaikuOS, ReactOS, and PureDarwin.

Chrome, Android have different jobs, Google says. Android has features unique to running mobile devices, and one doesn't replace the other, a Google mobile executive says.