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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.

Today is Facebook Suicide Day. What I suspect is a very small group of Facebook users plan to delete their accounts along with all their personal information residing on the social networking service. The reason they’re doing this is due to Facebook’s shifting privacy policies and what seems to be a personal problem with the company’s young CEO Mark Zuckerberg. I won’t be deleting anything today except a few press releases in my inbox. But that doesn’t mean I approve of Facebook’s user privacy policies either. (more…)

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…)

The idea behind netbook computers was to provide affordable, good-enough hardware that would allow people to get online and productive without breaking the bank. What we got, instead, was a range of small laptops that in most cases are priced above their bigger siblings, ramped up by distributors and cell networks. IBM and Canonical (the company responsible for Ubuntu Linux) are changing that, however, along with manufacturer Simmtronics. These three companies have collaborated to create a netbook that breaks through the $200 (R1500) mark.

The Simmbook, which is currently available for pre-order, will go on sale in developing markets soon and is expected to cost as low as $190 (R1400) when it does. (more…)