Dropbox is probably the most popular online file storage and synchronization tool among Linux users. And as we have seen earlier, it is rather easy to install Dropbox in Ubuntu. But as a Linux user, what really are the alternatives to Dropbox for online file storage? Lets find out.

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Red Hat declared war on VMware’s Cloud Foundry today, announcing that 65 new companies have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance backing KVM in a month’s time. In May, Red Hat, SUSE, BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM and Intel, announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance. As of today, 65 new members have joined, including Dell. Scott Crenshaw, who leads Red Hat’s cloud effort, denounced what he called VMware’s proprietary cloud platform.

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The face of the Linux desktop is drastically evolving. While the Linux communities struggle to bring more business and home users to the Linux desktop, existing users face choices about adopting redesigned desktop shells or finding suitable replacements. The fallout might well be the start of a Great New Linux Schism.

The Linux desktop has always been rife with choices. The big two in the ongoing contest for desktop environment users is GNOME and KDE. Both recently underwent massive redesigns. GNOME 2 morphed into version 3.0 with a radically different look and feel. KDE 4 is also graphically much different from the KDE 3 lineage. KDE 4′s Plasma Desktop Shell brings considerable new eye candy and performance hikes.

But the XFCE desktop environment is a popular alternative. Plus, LXDE and more bare-bones systems such as FVWM and IceWM add to the growing options list confronting Linux users.

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For all its flaws, Flash (or on of its incarnations like AIR or Flex) is still one of the few ways to create fully fledged desktop style applications that can be run in a web browser, mobile device, or as a traditional desktop application. By simply changing the target device when compiling, your code base can be used by almost any modern personal computing device without any significant changes.The exception however, as announced by Adobe recently, is the Linux desktop.

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Unity Grab Handles are a fun and aesthetically beautiful way to resize windows in new Ubuntu Unity. Even though they are not enabled by default in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, you can easily turn Unity Grab Handles on by following a few easy steps.

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Researchers at the PlanetLab global research network have developed a potential replacement for the widely used Unix sudo tool, called Vsys.

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Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through PHP-FPM) and MySQL support.

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The Git versioning system allows you to manage large-scale distributed code development projects with thousands of parallel branches. Its powerful checkout, merge, push, and pull capabilities help you work with code branches and clones. Sometimes you, as a contributor, might like to polish a branch you’ve checked out and reduce the number of commits you made before merging it with the master branch. One of Git’s nicer features is that it lets you rewrite history.

Rewriting history is not about changing the end result, but about making things cleaner and clearer. For instance, you can remove commits from the times when you added and later removed debug outputs, or merge the fixes you made to a feature with the commit that added the actual feature. The overall goal is to simplify history for the person who merges your branch into the master branch.

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The Desktop Summit 2011 is a joint conference organized by the GNOME and KDE communities in Berlin, Germany from the 6th August 2011 to the 12th August 2011.

The organizing team is now inviting applications to hold workshop and Birds of a Feather (BoF) sessions at the Desktop Summit. Read on for more details and how to make a proposal.

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It’s been a while since we’ve heard any major news about India’s ambitious $35 tablet, but a new report suggests that it’s finally inching toward reality. According to the Times of India, the controversial project is approaching the finish line with 100,000 units expected to ship this summer, starting this month. The government is expected to deliver 10,000 tablets to IIT Rajasthan in late June, while another 90,000 units will be rolled out over the next four months.

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