This partnership makes a lot of sense. As the Linux market keeps on consolidating around Red Hat and Novell, especially now that Microsoft seemingly backs the later, second-tier Linux distribution providers have no choice but to pool their resources. We expect not only more of such partnerships in the future but also mergers that go beyond technology to business level. Other Ubuntu-based distributions include Mint, Pioneer Linux and SimplyMEPIS.

Canonical and Linspire yesterday announced a deal that will see Linspire building its Linspire and Freespire Linux distributions on Ubuntu and Ubuntu users gaining access to Linspire’s click and run software repository.

In terms of the deal, Linspire will switch from Debian to Ubuntu as the base for their Linspire and Freespire desktop operating systems.

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced today a new partnership with commercial Linux distributor Linspire. The partnership will primarily entail technical collaboration. Linspire’s commercial distribution—which is currently based on Debian—will become an Ubuntu derivative, and Canonical will integrate Linspire’s Click-n-Run (CNR) software distribution system into Ubuntu.

Linux distributors Linspire Inc and Canonical Ltd have announced a partnership through which Canonical’s Ubuntu will become the platform for Linspire operating systems while Linspire will port its CNR service to Ubuntu.

Canonical Ltd., the sponsor of Ubuntu, and Linspire Inc., the developer of Linspire and Freespire, on February 8 announced a technology partnership to integrate with each other’s Linux distributions. Linspire/Freespire will be based on Ubuntu, rather than Debian, and Ubuntu will integrate with Linspire’s CNR package installer/updater.

The distribution of choice when it comes to a first go these days is Ubuntu - even though the recommendations come from users of various distributions.

It’s easy to see why Ubuntu is the chosen one (pun intended) - one only has to pop in a CD on any fairly modern PC and see the results. A graphical desktop is available for use fairly soon and anyone who wishes to take the next step and install the distribution has a very easy setup to follow. Of course, there are plenty of other distributions which are equally usable - Ubuntu just happens to be the one which is best-known.

October saw the release of Edgy Eft, the latest version of the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. The previous version, Dapper Drake, was released in June and, unlike its predecessor, Edgy doesn’t have the ‘LTS’ (long-term support) label added to it.

The name was originally chosen partly because Edgy (also known as version 6.10) would include many cutting-edge features, and perhaps not provide the more solid base that Dapper offered. However, due to Dapper’s late release, Edgy hasn’t had quite the impact it could have.

Ubuntu’s catalog surpasses those of all other Linux distributions we’ve tested, and its software management tools outclass not only Linux rivals’ but also Microsoft Windows’ and Apple OS X’s.

The Ubuntu developers are in the process of deciding whether to enable binary-only drivers by default in their installation process, under certain limited circumstances. This decision process has prompted the latest wave in a conversation that’s nearly as old as Linux itself.

Ultimately the question boils down to “What action is most likely to get us what we want?” Both the pro-binarists and the anti-binarists want more open source drivers, and both want more Linux users.

A substantial grant from Google has enabled notebook computers running Linux and a variety of open source software to be rolled out at rural schools in Fiji.

The machines use Edubuntu, an education-tweaked version of Ubuntu, along with common packages such as OpenOffice and The Gimp and specialist education software.