Canonical announced that Mark Shuttleworth will be stepping down as CEO in March to be replaced by Canonical COO Jane Silber, reports eWEEK. Meanwhile, the Ubuntu project has released its first alpha of Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx"), which speeds boot-time while kissing the GIMP editor goodbye. Ubuntu sponsor Canonical announced the management transition in a call with press and analysts on December 17, writes Darryl Taft in our sister publication eWEEK. After surrendering his CEO title in March, Shuttleworth will continue to focus on specific projects within Canonical, including the company's move to support cloud computing, says the story.

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Microsoft Monday made an historic move by submitting device drivers to the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license. Microsoft has had a checkered past with both Linux and its open source GPL licensing structure, so the move was a jaw dropper. Here is a look at some of the milestones since Microsoft internal memos leaked in 1998 that attacked the open source Linux operating system as it began to pick up steam as an alternative to Windows.

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IBM has expanded its server lineup with a new mainframe system designed just for Linux that may be aimed, in particular, at higher-end x86 systems. The new system uses IBM's specialty Linux processor and runs either Novell SUSE or Red Hat systems. It does not use the mainframe operating system z/OS but includes mainframe management software as well as IBM's z/Virtual Machine system. Together, they constitute the company's latest "solutions edition," or what IBM says are lower-cost, integrated stacks for the mainframe.

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Linus Torvalds announced the release of a stable Linux 2.6.32 kernel. Major additions include kernel-based mode setting (KMS) and 3D graphics support on select Radeon cards, plus new kernel shared memory (KSM) technology for KVM virtualization, power-saving and performance improvements, and a faster "Devtmpfs" boot technology. Many of the recent Linux kernel releases have focused on filesystems, such as September's Linux 2.6.31, which was notable primarily for adding USB 3.0 support, but also offered a much more robust implementation of the Btrfs filesystem. Before that, Linux 2.6.30 added the NILFS2, EXOFS, and POHMELFS filesystems, and Linux 2.6.29 debuted the embedded-oriented Squashfs filesystem, as well as the first implementation of Btrfs.

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An operating systems war has begun. The possibility of a series of netbooks available for bargain-basement prices became realistic in the minds of computer buyers because of cloud computing and its lack of hefty hardware requirements. The war might prove not nearly as bitter as the war waged between avid Windows fans and die-hard Apple supporters, but considering the jabs between Google’s Chrome OS and Jolicloud — a new Ubuntu Linux-based cloud operating system for netbooks — the battle looks like it could get pretty heated.

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Linux developer Mandriva has updated its operating-system-on-a-stick with the release of Mandriva Flash 2010, which includes a bootable version of the software on a USB Flash drive. Available from mid-December, Mandriva Flash 2010 puts the latest version of Mandriva Linux onto an 8GB Flash drive, which has 6GB free for a user's own documents and files.

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Ok, the way things are going, this will likely be the last -rc. I wish we had more people looking at the regression list, but at some point I'm just going to have to say "ok, enough is enough". I'm also going to be away for the Thanksgiving week (which is next week, for all you who live outside the US, or for those of you who are otherwise oblivious about these things), so I didn't want to open the merge window any earlier either - thus one last -rc is pretty natural.

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Contrary to rumors, Google did not release a beta version of its much anticipated Chrome operating system today. And nothing is coming anytime soon: the final version is at least a year away, the mega giant web company said. But there was some significant news for the community today. Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.

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