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Ubuntu Linux 10.04 LTS is a major release of the operating system Mark Shuttleworth and his company Canonical first released in 2004. In this interview with Simon Dingle Shuttleworth discusses the significance of the latest version of Ubuntu Linux, competitor operating systems, the move to cloud services, open source advocacy and how it has changed in recent years, application distribution, social networking, smartphones and other topics.

Shuttleworth is a South African philanthropist and internet entrepreneur who started the company Thawte in 1995 and went on to sell it to Verisign at the turn of the century in a US$575 million deal. He then became the second ever self-funded civilian astronaut traveling to the international space station as a member of the Soyuz TM-34/TM-33 missions. Upon his return to earth Mark formed the Shuttleworth Foundation and Canonical.

Simon Dingle recently authored a chapter on Mark Shuttleworth for the book South Africa’s Greatest Entrepreneurs. The publication will be available in September 2010.

Use the audio player above to stream the interview or click here to download the mp3 file.

Telecommunications group Vodacom has launched its Linkbook into the SA market – a super-low price netbook that will go for R199 per month on a two-year contract, including a monthly bandwidth bundle of 300MB. (more…)

As an open source operating system Linux shows up all over the place. I’ve seen Linux-powered vending machines, ATMS, model cars and autopilot drones, never mind the slew of Linux-based mobile phones hitting the market in the form of Android and Maemo.

And now a new Australian company called Misa Digital has put Linux to work in a digital guitar it has developed. The instrument is powered by Gentoo Linux and uses a touchpad and buttons instead of strings. The result is pretty amazing, as you can see from the video below.

Misa isn’t shipping the guitar just yet, but pre-orders are available from the Misa Digital website. Rocking.

The first smartphone based on Google’s Android mobile operating system is being launched on September 23 2008, on the same day as the Apple iPhone media launch in South Africa. Available on the T-Mobile network internationally, the HTC Dream G1 should soon be available on local cellular networks.
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