Database giant Oracle has agreed to purchase Sun Microsystems in a deal worth $7.4 billion, according to a story in eWEEK. Oracle wants Sun more for its hardware than its software, and may choose to jettison Sun's open source offerings, including MySQL, says eWEEK.

The Linux Foundation (LF) announced the results of its Technical Advisory Board (TAB) election. Six new members were elected to the ten-member TAB, originating from companies including Intel, Oracle, and Red Hat, says the LF.

A community site dedicated to offering previews of open source applications has now added Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to its catalog. Click2try now offers over 40 virtualized open source applications in its online catalog, with both free and paid subscription plans available, says the company.

Canonical (Ubuntu), Xandros, Linpus, and Red Flag announced they will deliver versions of their Linux distributions based on the open source Moblin v2 stack and application framework for Intel Atom-based netbooks. Novell, meanwhile, demonstrated its previously announced Moblin v2 version of SUSE Linux on Acer and

RealNetworks has extended the Moblin version of its RealPlayer streaming media player to support a variety of netbook-oriented processors and Linux distributions. RealPlayer for Mobile Devices will be offered with Ubuntu, as well as fast-boot "instant-on" distributions from Xandros, Phoenix Technologies, and DeviceVM (pictured), says Real.

Canonical demonstrated a prototype version of an execution environment for Ubuntu that lets it run Android apps, says an industry report. The environment acts like a simulator, and is based on the Xorg X Window environment, says the story.

Ubuntu Linux sponsor Canonical has launched a beta web-based "cloud" service that offers online storage and file synchronization for Ubuntu 9.04 users. The "invitation only" Ubuntu One is pretty bare bones right now, but it could be the start of something bigger, says an industry report.

Dell is readying a netbook for the K-12 educational market with a rubberized case and an optional touchscreen. Incorporating an Intel Atom N270 with 1GB RAM, the Latitude 2100 offers a 10.1-inch display, WiFi, gigabit Ethernet, up to 250GB storage, and Ubuntu Linux, says Dell.

Dell has announced a lower-cost version of its popular Mini 10 netbook, which runs Ubuntu Linux. The Dell Inspiron Mini 10v sells for $300, offering a 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270, 10-inch display, 120GB or 160GB hard drive, and a 1.3 megapixel webcam, the company says.

Softpedia: "The GNOME developers, through Lucas Rocha, have announced early this morning in a press release that the last maintenance release of the popular GNOME 2.26 desktop environment is now available for download."

Uncle Sam may soon get a little diplomatic help from the iPhone and BlackBerry. On June 30, an Egyptian company specializing in translation software released a tool designed to translate quickly between English and Arabic by way of a wireless device.

Cairo-based Sakhr Software introduced an application -- downloadable to Apple's iPhone and Research In Motion's BlackBerry -- that in seconds transmits an audio translation of a spoken phrase.

At the outset, Sakhr is pitching the software toward the U.S. intelligence community and the Defense Dept., which have lacked adequate Arabic language capabilities, particularly since the September 11 terrorist attacks. "What we are solving is a real-world problem," says Sakhr spokeswoman Tuyen Ho. "This product will help men and women in the armed forces and intelligence community bridge the communications gap. It will help keep them safer." The company declined to name customers but said it is talking with the Defense and Justice departments and various intelligence agencies.

Aiming at Businesses, Too

In recent months, U.S. government agencies have stepped up their reliance on cutting-edge tech tools for diplomatic means. The State Dept. in April arranged a delegation of executives from Google, AT&T, Twitter, and other tech startups to journey to Iraq to meet with government officials, business leaders, and students to discuss ways to use tech across that country.

The software Sakhr released June 30 is also designed for use by businesses. Its debut coincides with Sakhr's acquisition of software maker Dial Directions for an undisclosed amount. The two companies collaborated on the app for a year, with Sakhr developing the language software and Dial Directions designing the mobile architecture. Sakhr plans to release a version for consumers in August.

Sakhr designed its software so that users concerned about the security of their transmissions can host conversations on their own servers and monitor and mine...

T-Mobile USA's follow-up to the first "Google phone" will go on sale in early August, the carrier said Monday. The "T-Mobile myTouch 3G with Google" will be a touchscreen phone and will lack the physical keyboard of the T-Mobile G1, the first phone that used Google's Android software.

For developers,  Oracle's Fusion Middleware 11g rollout on Wednesday emphasizes  Java technologies, particularly the company's JDeveloper IDE,  along with concepts including declarative programming and ALM (application lifecycle management).

Google's Linux-based mobile operating system — Android — has become a popular choice for phonemakers worldwide. Now, if Firefox developers are getting what they think they are, we may finally see the combination of Google's power OS with Mozilla's groundbreaking browser

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Starry Hope: "As you can see, people are blogging about Ubuntu far more often than other distros. (We’d also like to note that a good amount of blog posts that contain the word “fedora” are about the hat and not the Linux distro)."

Webupd8: "Here is how to enable more than 2 speakers (channels) in Ubuntu - PulseAudio:"

Phoronix: "Being the benchmarking junkies that we are, we have set out to compare the file-system performance of EXT4, Btrfs, and NILFS2 under Ubuntu using the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. We also looked at how these file-systems compared to EXT3 and XFS."

Buntfu: "When taking a look at "CompizConfig Settings Manager" in Ubuntu it can be a little overwhelming when considering all the possible combinations available to us. Often when you set up a couple effects, it seems that you rarely ever see them, or they have to be self induced."

ComputerWorld: "When the 250-store California supermarket chain Save Mart Supermarket began making plans to roll out a time and attendance tracking application to manage its 20,000 workers, Oracle was not on its list of preferred databases, even though the company has some older versions running in-house."

DistroWatch: "Paul Sherman has announced the availability of the first release candidate for Absolute Linux 13.0, a lightweight modification of Slackware Linux for the desktop."