Talk about a careful balancing act involving Ubuntu. Canonical appears to have financial relationships with both Google and Yahoo. Here’s how the relationships — involving Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) and Google Chrome OS — are shaping up. Plus, the potential financial implications for Canonical.

When we launched WorksWithU in 2008, I strongly believed Canonical needed to build strong server hardware partnerships with Dell, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. But as I heard more about Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) in 2009, I realized Ubuntu in 2010 may find a back door into the server market. Here’s why.

After placing its bets for years on Xen, Red Hat moved recently towards official support for KVM, the virtualization hypervisor built into the Linux kernel.  Here’s a look at what this change might mean for Ubuntu, which has promoted KVM from the beginning.

With an alpha version of Google’s Chrome web browser recently released, I’ve been using it on Ubuntu for a few days.   Below are some thoughts on the new browser and its ability to improve the Ubuntu experience.

I had to set up a Fedora 8 machine recently.  The installation process was simple enough, but configuring the system reminded me of several simple features that I take for granted when using Ubuntu, but which, when absent, make the user experience significantly more daunting.  Below are four of the features that provide an extra boost of user-friendliness to Ubuntu.

I’ve used Evolution, the default email client in Ubuntu, for a couple of years to manage numerous mail accounts.  In general, I think it’s a great application.  But as with everything in life, there’s always room for improvement.  Below, I consider the most chronically frustrating and poorly designed aspects of Evolution, and how they could be fixed.

Red Hat’s CEO, Jim Whitehurst, spoke out strongly recently against the possibility of Linux ever taking over the desktop computers of the world.  His comments may reflect Red Hat’s increasing distance from reality, but I don’t think they’re grounded in facts.  Here’s why.

Someone on the Ubuntu forums started an interesting thread today asking, “Can you manage to use only free software on your pc?“  It got me thinking about my dependency on proprietary software, and whether I’d ever really be able to get it out of my life entirely.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer brought up some interesting points last week when he displayed data showing that Linux, according to Microsoft’s research, enjoys higher desktop market share than Apple.  This observation not only contradicts claims that Linux use remains stagnant, but has the potential to redefine the tired “Mac vs. PC” discourse that has obscured Microsoft’s real challenge–open source–for a decade.

A representative of Red Hat told a reporter recently that the company, which abandoned desktop Linux years ago in order to devote its energies to the server market, “will indeed be pushing the Linux desktop again.”  Such a move would presumably present a challenge to Ubuntu, which has dominated the desktop scene for a long time.  Or would it?