Ubuntu's head designer, Ivanka Majic, is leaving for an extended motorcycle trip through America, and whether she will return to Canonical remains unclear.

Free/​Open Source isn’t just about software, it’s also about hardware. Open hardware projects are proliferating, and just like open source software, you can get started inexpensively. Here are three projects that are fun, useful, and suitable for beginners to embedded programming, robotics, and building electronic devices.

In a blog post on May 16, Miguel de Icaza announced Xamarin, a new Mono-based product company.

After six years of Qt 4, Nokia wants to modernize its toolkit for 2012 with the Qt 5 release.

The Budapest Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS-O) kicked off on Monday, May 9, at the Corinthia Hotel. "Accessibility is one of our core values as a project," Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said in his keynote address, as he acknowledged the Unity documentation team contributions to the 11.04 release. After briefly looking back at the "Natty Narwhal" Ubuntu release, Shuttleworth set his sights on the upcoming release, saying, "Our goal, our mission is 200-million Ubuntu users in four years."

The Ubuntu Developer Summit for the Oneiric Ocelot (Ubuntu 11.10) development cycle (UDS-O) will take place on May 9-13, 2011 at the Corinthia Grand Hotel Royal, Budapest Hungary.

Red Hat announces its 2012 Summit will be held at the Hynes Convention Centre in Boston Massachusetts on June 26-29.

O'Reilly announces early registration for OSCON, OSCON Data, and OSCON Java is now open. OSCON Data and OSCON Java are scheduled for July 25-27, while OSCON runs the entire week of July 25-29, 2011, at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland.