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Mozilla Messaging announced on Tuesday the official release of Thunderbird 3, a major update of the popular open source mail client. The new version brings great improvements, including an impressive new search system and support for tabs in the user interface.

The Mozilla Foundation began forming the Mozilla Messaging subsidiary in 2007 with the aim of giving Thunderbird a chance to soar. The company brought in former ActiveState CTO David Ascher to direct the organization and set its technical agenda. After he took the reigns in early 2008, he began documenting his team’s vision for Thunderbird 3, an ambitious update that would modernize the mail client in much the same way that the Firefox 3 release renewed Mozilla’s browser. The roadmap included plans to adopt Gecko 1.9 so that Thunderbird could leverage important improvements that had been made to the underlying architecture of the Mozilla platform.

Nice catchphrase too.

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Using the terminal:

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/mimeinfo.cache

Search for: x-directory/gnome-default-handler=

and make sure the whole line reads

x-directory/gnome-default-handler=nautilus-folder-handler.desktop

instead of:

x-directory/gnome-default-handler=Thunar-folder-handler.desktop
x-directory/gnome-default-handler=pcmanfm-folder-handler.desktop;
x-directory/gnome-default-handler=kde4-dolphin.desktop

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Red Hat expanded its virtualization product portfolio this week with the launch of its Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform. The company touts it as an end-to-end solution which includes management tools and a bare-metal standalone hypervisor that can run both Windows and Linux guest operating systems.

Red Hat aimed to become a major player in the virtualization market last year when it acquired Qumranet, the company behind the Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM). Following the acquisition, Red Hat began transitioning its virtualization strategy towards KVM and away from Citrix’s Xen. KVM has strong backing from the upstream Linux kernel development community, making it a natural choice for Red Hat. The company has invested considerable resources to boost KVM’s capabilities and has built robust management tools around the technology. KVM was practically the centerpiece in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, which was officially released in September.

Google is providing the web development community with an intriguing glimpse under the hood at some of the fundamental building blocks of the company’s most popular web applications. The search giant has opened the source code of its comprehensive JavaScript library collection and is making it available to third-party developers for widespread adoption. Google also opened the source code of its own JavaScript compression tools.

The library, called Closure, includes an extraordinarily diverse assortment of capabilities with functionality ranging from JSON serialization to standard user interface widgets. All of the features are cross-browser compatible and can be readily adopted without marginalizing any users. The library consists primarily of helper functions and user interface widgets, many of which are recognizable from popular Google applications.

This is an ever growing list of terminal commands to keep handy

1. sudo apt-get install --fix-broken
2. sudo dpkg --configure -a
3. htop
4. dpkg --get-selections > installed-software (Back up list of installed Software)
5. dpkg --set-selections < installed-software (Restore previously installed software)
6. apt-get -u dselect-upgrade (Execute #5)
7. lshw > lshw.txt (See your system's hardware info)

Sun’s ZFS filesystem, which the company has referred to as “the last word in filesystems,” was widely expected to be adopted by Apple for use in Mac OS X. However, support never materialized, and the open source project to port the filesystem was unceremoniously shut down last Friday. The (un)stated reasons at heart seem to be licensing issues, though there are also technological reasons why Apple may want to create its own advanced filesystem.

The ZFS filesystem is perhaps one of the first truly “modern” filesystems based on the concept of “copy on write.” In the case of ZFS, this is done at the block level, so when any block on a disk is going to be modified, a fresh copy of all the data for that block is written to a new block on disk, and the older block can be retained for snapshot purposes. The filesystem is meant to address the needs of ever-growing storage, with features like data integrity, integrated device management, instant snapshots, and facilities to deal with increasing concurrency.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has received a major update today. The new version, Ubuntu 9.10, will introduce several significant new features and will deliver the latest version of the GNOME desktop environment and other applications.

This is the eleventh release of Ubuntu since the project’s inception five years ago. The distribution has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity in the Linux desktop ecosystem and has attracted a considerable audience. Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, touts the new release as its best yet and says that the latest improvements will take the Ubuntu user experience to the next level.