Ubuntu development team has released a beta version for Ubuntu 10.10, the up-coming version of ‘Ubuntu’, a famous free Linux operating system. Ubuntu 10.10 is codenamed as “Maverick Meerkat”, this beta release came after 3 Alpha releases and it is now available for download in both desktop and Netbook editions.

Nokia officially announced it’s next generation Symbian smartphone Nokia “N8″.The N8 happens to be the first smart phone to run the new Symbian ^3 OS and the first 12 megapixel camera phone with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and a large sensor.

Also Nokia N8 is the first device to support HD Video recording, which offers to make HD-quality videos and edit them with a built-in editing suite. The phone supports Dolby Digital Plus surround sound and users can use it by plugging into their home theater system.

Ubuntu 10.4 LTS code named as “Lucid Lynx”, the 12th release of th marvelous Linux operating system from Canonical will available on 29th April 2010. A week back Ubuntu Shipit service started to offer free shipping of Ubuntu 10.4 LTS CDs, but due to high demand it stopped the service.Now the Shipit service is back and it  started accepting pre-orders for Ubuntu desktop and server editions.

Fedora 13, also known as “Goddard,” (beta) has been released and is available for download, this Beta milestone encourages users, developers, and administrators of all types to download and try out the release, also the Linux community reports that Beta is reasonably stable.

Google has confirmed that it’s future operating system Chrome OS will have an integrated media player that will offer  basic codec support , so that users can directly play audio or video files from Gmail or from USB drives or other media devices.

In an interview with Ars Technica, Matthew Papakipos, the lead engineering director for the Chrome OS project, shared that Chrome OS will have a complete media player that approximates the functionality of Windows Media Player.

TrueCrypt 6.3 has been released on OCT 22 and the most important feature of this version is, it adds full support for Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. If you are in Windows 7 and looking for a program to protect your important data, then you must consider TrueCrypt a Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux

What is TrueCrypt ?
TrueCrypt is an easy, convenient, highly reliable way for Windows and Linux users to encrypt their data on-the-fly.Its operation is pretty basic, it can encrypt an entire existing hard disk partition, or it can create a “TrueCrypt Container” folder within a partition, where that file gets treated as a second, virtual partition.

The next stable (Ubuntu) version Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic koala is going to be released on 29th October 2009.You can pre-order the CDs of either desktop edition or the server edition right now from Ubuntu’s ShipIt service, FREE of charge.

To request a free CD you need to register an account at Launchpad, the platform that develops Ubuntu or you can register an account by clicking Ubuntu ShipIt link.

Just after 2 months from the release of VLC 1.0.1,the VLC developers released third version of the Goldeneye branch of VLC: 1.0.2.

VLC 1.0.2 is now available with an important security update and also brings 64-bit support to Mac OS X.This version also adds support to create play lists in ZPL and WPL formats, and play videos from Vimeo. In addition to all codecs , x264 have been improved and upgraded, and also adds support to Windows 7 jump list.

Today  at IDF09 in San Francisco, Intel showcased Moblin  2.1 user interface.This open source Mobile operating system runs on an Atom-based device and this OS is expected to be ready by mid-2010.

Moblin is  open source project focused on the development of Linux for Intel-based devices. It incorporates Intel’s Mobile Internet Device (MID) architecture as well as various other consumer electronic devices, such as mobile handsets.

PNotes or Portable Notes is a open source software helps  you  to organize your tasks and never forget those important things  by allowing  you to add various sticky notes, in various designs and formats, to your desktop.

PNotes is  very small which occupies only 750 KB space on your hard drive.The interface is very simple and intuitive, this program stays in the context menu and you can configure everything by right clicking on the icon.

The Symbian Foundation on Wednesday released its first package of open source software under the Eclipse Public License (EPL),this move has been considered as the first step towards open sourcing the entire Symbian mobile OS.

The Symbian Foundation is an organization set up in 2008 by Symbian mobile manufactures like Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG and AT&T.

Cam studio is an open source Software that provides all the basic functions for a Screencast i.e recording all screen and audio activity on our Desktop or Screen.

Camstudio Software is very ease to use and very light (1.3 MB)  that you can carry it on a USB drive.New in version 2 is the ability to save your captured session to the .swf file format, meaning that your video can be streamed via HTTP using the Flash player.

CamStudio can also help in adding high-quality, anti-aliased screen captions to your recordings in seconds.The Video Annotation feature even helps in personalising your videos by including a webcam movie of yourself “picture-in-picture” over your desktop.

It comes with its own Lossless Codec that produces crystal clear results with a much smaller filesize compared with other more popular codecs, like Microsoft Video 1.

I recommend you  to watch this helpful CamStudio tutorial on YouTube.

Best of all,CamStudio 100% free. No need to license it for commercial products, no registration, nothing.  It is licensed under the GPL license.

Link: http://camstudio.org/