Following the withdrawal of Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth from the day to day running of the company, and his replacement by Jane Silber, Matt Asay has now moved into the free post of chief operating officer.

Canonical has released the fourth and last maintenance update for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron).

Among the changes to Ubuntu 10.04 is that Google will lose its place to Yahoo as the Firefox standard search engine. Canonical attributes it to financial reasons.

The team at Ubuntu is trying to get users views as to which programs should be included in future versions of Ubuntu. The survey will be online until the end of January.

VIA Technologies out of Taiwan is building around its Nano processor the M'SERV S2100 minicomputer for system integrators and OEMs with three USB ports designed for the small office/home office (SOHO) and small to medium enterprise (SME) market.