Ubuntu and family had another of their bi-annual releases last week Thursday, the 26th of April. This latest release is version 12.04, codename Precise Pangolin, and is a Long Term Support release.

As usual, I upgraded when the first beta release came out, and so I have had a "sneak peek" at what's in this release of Kubuntu.

I just heard some great news today: the Kubuntu distribution has financial sponsorship from version 12.10! Blue Systems, a sponsor of a number of other KDE-based projects, has stepped forward and will be employing Jonathan Riddell from May, when he steps down from his position at Canonical.

Kubuntu will continue to be a community-driven project (as it has always been) and Riddell will continue to be employed full time to work on Kubuntu. With this momentum, Kubuntu will continue to be one of the world's leading distributions, and the distribution who can boast to being used for the biggest rollout of desktop Linux in the world.

Kubuntu also boasts the first tablet-focused distribution, with the Kubuntu Active flavour hopefully being release later this year.

With this new sponsorship, and independence from Canonical, the Kubuntu team hopes to give Kubuntu new wings, and take it to new heights with KDE and Linux.

This is a guest post by Raoul's brother Etienne, who is not only passionate about music, but also open source software.

Music is such an important part of a church service, even though we may sometimes wish that the tone-deaf person next to us didn't join in the singing! Therefore, it makes sense that the church's organist or musical director will need to write sheet music from time to time.

Enter MuseScore! MuseScore is a sheet music or score writer that is intuitive, easy to use, and runs natively on most platforms through its use of the Qt toolkit. Oh and, best of all, it is completely open-source and free of charge! It was started as a fork of the MuSE sequencer by Werner Schweer, who heads up the project with the help of Thomas Bonte, Nicolas Froment and others.

Adobe released the last version of their Flash client for Linux last week, version 11.2. While this new release contains a host of new features, it is also the end of the Flash on Linux era.

This is mixed news for Linux users, as they will now have to depend on the open source implementations of Flash Player if any new features of Flash are to be supported. It is great that Linux users will be able to use open source implementations, but sadly these implementations lag far behind the official client, and they don't even support all of the previous releases' features.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the new all-free-software tablet from KDE developer Aaron Seigo called the Spark. Unfortunately MakePlayLive, the company manufacturing the tablet, ran into some issues with the name being trademarked, and has had to choose a new name. After much deliberation, they decided to choose a name "... with a musical theme that celebrates some of the brightest lights in human history when it comes to making, playing and living interesting lives."

Thus, the Spark has been reborn the Vivaldi!

Linux and Open Source software is growing and gaining more and more recognition these days. Most folk who work in the technical sector have at least heard of open source software, even if they haven't used it. But with more and more visibility, open source projects get more and more FUD from detractors. One of the most commonly heard sayings with regard to OSS is, "well, you get what you paid for!" followed by, "If you want to use something that's free, how can you expect it to be anywhere near as good as one of the paid products?"

Quite honestly, that's the biggest bunch of baloney. In some cases, the software is not yet ready to be used, but because of the open source mantra of "release early, release often," most projects put releases out as soon as possible for others to look and and hopefully turn to helping the project. When dealing with mature applications, it is almost never the case. I've always maintained that open source code is better than proprietary code, though I've never been able to prove it. Now, at long last, a study has confirmed what I have always said: there are less bugs in open source applications than in closed source proprietary applications.

It seems that Adobe is getting less and less cozy with Linux, despite having built 64 bit support for Flash initially only on Linux. Adobe recently announced that they are no longer releasing Flash Player for Linux other than bundled with Google Chrome. Support for the current version of Flash Player, version 11.2, will continue for 5 years in the form of security updates.

This is yet another slap in the face for Linux users, with Adobe previously withdrawing the Linux version of Adobe AIR, which many open source developers latched onto when it was first unveiled.

In the first lesson we introduced Python, the CPython interactive interpreter, and wrote a very simple program. This lesson we'll look at choosing a good editor, rewriting our previous program into a script and Python's basic types.

The Linux world sure is buzzing at the moment! From the Raspberry Pi, to Ubuntu for Android, through to the Spark, things really do seem to be hotting up around the Linux platform.

Not to be outdone, another company has just opened pre-orders for their Linux product, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumbdrive and runs Linux. The Cotton Candy, from Norwegian company FXI Technologies, has a USB connector on one side to power it, and an HDMI connector on the other to plug into a display. The small device sports a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode HD video.

It also features Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, so that you can control the system using wireless peripherals like a keyboard and/or mouse, with a smartphone and a special app, or by leveraging a laptop's keyboard and touchpad.

Apparently the Cotton Candy can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0.