As noted here at the very beginning of this year, while Linux becomes more firmly entrenched in businesses, and as cloud computing advances in general, Linux will become a huge part of cloud infrastructure. While Microsoft hasn’t made a lot of direct statements on the topic, Mary Jo Foley, who usually has a good bead on the company’s projects, has been steadily writing about Microsoft’s intent to enable Linux on its Azure cloud platform. Now she’s uncovered additional signs that these are the Redmond giant’s plans, and the whole idea makes a lot of sense for Microsoft.

According to Foley in her original post:

“What does this mean? Customers who want to run Windows or Linux “durably” (i.e., without losing state) in VMs on Microsoft’s Azure platform-as-a-service platform will be able to do so…The new persistent VM support also will allow customers to run SQL Server or SharePoint Server in VMs, as well. And it will enable customers to more easily move existing apps to the Azure platform.”

Sure, everyone knows that Android is winning over developers at surprising rates and competing neck-and-neck with Apple’s iOS on smartphones, but it’s easy to forget that Android has become a powerful economic force, too. Because Android isn’t tied to just one hardware maker, we don’t get steady reports giving us the total amounts of money that Android is generating. However, Samsung’s latest earnings report provides a good glimpse of how dependent on Android-based smartphones the company has become. Its report also sheds light on why Google can hugely benefit as it moves into the smartphone business through its Motorola Mobility acquisition.

Samsung just reported net income of four trillion won, or $3.6 billion for the fourth quarter of 2011, and that’s up from 3.42 trillion won in the fourth quarter of 2010. As BusinessWeek reports:

“Samsung shipped more smartphones last year than Apple did iPhones, with the popularity of its Galaxy models helping the Korean company sell a record 300 million handsets. Samsung, whose parent group plans a record investment this year, is introducing more phones and tablet computers to cushion slumping profits at its liquid-crystal display business amid a global economic slowdown.”

The more I use AutoKey, the more I believe it to be an essential piece of software for the Linux desktop. If you happened to miss my last article about it, AutoKey is a system-wide service that allows you to easily set scripts to run when certain key combinations are pressed. AutoKey also lets you set text shortcuts for longer words or phrases. Since AutoKey uses Python for its scripting language, it is incredibly simple to setup a few productivity boosting shortcuts.

My newest AutoKey infatuation is my automatic DuckDuckGo search box. Similar to what you can do with Gnome-Do, this setup pops up a dialog box waiting for input when you hit a keyboard combo. To set it up, you will first need to install a few GNOME packages: sudo apt-get install libgnome2-0

The libgnome2–0 package includes the gnome-open command line utility. Using gnome-open we can pass a file or a web page along on the command line to be opened by the default browser on the desktop. Next, create a new script in AutoKey and add these lines: import os

GhostBSD 2.5 was released a few days ago and the headline on ghostbsd.com reads “Now with an Easy and Secure Graphic Installer.” GhostBSD is obviously a free BSD (and not coincidently, a FreeBSD derivative), but it aims to be a user-friendly free BSD and to improve the GNOME experience on FreeBSD.

GhostBSD has been in development for two years, but perhaps has been overshadowed by PC-BSD. PC-BSD has been in development for over six years and has commercial backing. GhostBSD is one of those small projects with few developers and an underdeveloped Website. Most of the tabs are yet to be filled out. There is no documentation or an About just yet, but maybe soon.

GhostBSD is available in i386 and 64-bit in GNOME or LXDE version for optical or USB media. It’s too early for any 2.5 reviews, but 2.0 got mixed results with a couple of reviewers thinking it needed more polish. John Combs, the GhostBSD team manager, said of 2.5, “Many bugs have been fixed and many parts of the system updated, tweaked and fine-tuned.” He also invites current and prospective users to visit the forums to share your thoughts.

Unfortunately, this is where my excursion ends this evening. I have booted GhostBSD in the past, but tonight I couldn’t get passed the login screen. No matter what I tried, it just wasn’t going to accept any input from my keyboard. Perhaps, you’ll have better luck. Please let me know in the comments.

How unbreakable is Microsoft’s lead in word processing? Microsoft Word, of course, is the world’s most widely used word processor and has been for many years. But Google has been winning some enterprises over with Google Docs, there are a number of viable open source word processors that offer compatibility with Word, and Word has never faced so much stiff competition. Now, IBM is bringing its Lotus-drive suite of productivity applications to the cloud with IBM Docs, and while its unlikely to shake Word’s hegemony right out of the gate, it is more evidence that powerful companies mean to compete with the Redmond giant in the cloud.

According to IBM:

“IBM Docs is a new office productivity suite for working on documents, spreadsheets and presentations — together — in the cloud. With IBM Docs there is no desktop software. You only need a browser and an account, and you are able to easily create professional looking documents and share them with others. IBM Docs is simple yet powerful – letting you get started quickly, but delivering the advanced features you need.”

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The popular design network Dribbble has grown substantially in just a few short years. Graphics designers and illustrators from all over the world have flocked onto the web seeking invites. But aside from the exclusivity their layout design has become a prominent factor of the entire branding.

I love the simplistic nature of their gallery-style photo boxes. It matches well with a community of designers excited to share their latest pixels with the world. In this tutorial I’ll go over techniques for constructing a similar design in HTML5 and CSS3. You can build a very similar page structure with just bare-bones essential CSS. Yet when we can utilize new browser-supported properties like box shadows the process becomes much more captivating.

Quick, how old is Google’s Chrome browser? You may be surprised to hear that the browser debuted as recently as December of 2008 (although a pre-release build was available a couple of months before that). Just a few short years later, Chrome is a formidable browser that is threatening to overtake Firefox’s market share. The core of Chrome, Chromium, is also open source, though, and a number of different offshoots of Chromium are available. InfoWorld is out with a good assessment of these alternative flavors, and we’ve covered a few here at OStatic, too.

SRware Iron is a Chromium-based browser that combines the inherent speed of its open source core with lockdown privacy. Privacy and ad blocking are its strong points. If you haven’t looked into it and private browsing matters to you, you should definitely check it out. You can get the browser for Windows, Mac OS or Linux here, and look into our coverage of it here.

Meanwhile definitely check out InfoWorld’s exploration of Chromium-based browsers, which include:

 CRPortable – which packages Chromium in PortableApps format, so that you can efficiently run the browser from a USB key.

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A few months ago at Vandelay Premier we recently released a set of highlighter brushes for Adobe Illustrator,and in this tutorial we’ll show how you can accomplish the same thing on your own. We’ll scan some lines made by a highlighter and that will give us a nice brush for using whenever highlighter or marker effects are needed.

What you will need to complete this tutorial:

Toorox 01.2012 GNOME was released on January 20. Toorox is a Gentoo-based binary distribution that installs additional software and updates from source. It ships with an easy and fast installer that results in a complete out-of-the-box system.

According to the changelog, Toorox 01.2012 ships with Linux 3.1.6-gentoo, GNOME 3.2.1, GCC 4.5.3, Xorg-Server 1.11.3, and Firefox 9.0.1. Some other applications include GIMP, Envince, Deluge, Liferea, Empathy, LibreOffice 3.4.3, Cinelerra, and Audacity. Also included are lots of tools and utilities, nice list of games, and two graphical package managers.

Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth is getting a lot of notice for a blog post he has up, that defends the Heads-Up Display (HUD) interface that the upcoming version 12.04 LTS version of Ubuntu will feature. Shuttleworth’s post characterizes the interface as a big new step for Ubuntu, and he offers a screenshot and a video illustrating it. Some users are guaranteed to balk at it, though, as it veers away from the menu-driven desktop computing interface that graphical operating systems have used for so many years.

According to Shuttleworth:

“It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as ‘beyond interface,’ it’s the ‘intenterface.’  This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity.”