"Unity 2D developer and Canonical OEM team lead, Bill Filler, created a lot of buzz around the 2D Unity option last week when he published a post entitled Unity 2D. Filler's original post was unavailable for several days and subsequent is now available again to the public and the screenshots included are from that post. The removal of the Filler's blog post prompted Linux Pro Magazine Online (LPMO) to contact David Barth, Engineering Manager for Desktop Experience (DX) Team, at Canonical, to find out the more about the future of the 2D Unity option in the Natty release."

De kogel is door de kerk. After years of focussing entirely on Gtk+ and GNOME, Ubuntu will finally start evaluating Qt applications for inclusion in the defaukt Ubuntu installation. Mark Shuttleworth announced the policy change on his blog today.

Okay so it took them two years, but hey, good things come to those who wait. The Xfce team has finally released version 4.8 of their Gtk+-based desktop environment. This release contains a lot of work under the hood, as well as a number of new features.

"Martha Lane Fox is promising GBP 98 computers to tempt the last remaining digital refuseniks in UK to get online. The machines, refurbed by Remploy, will come complete with telephone support, monitor, mouse and Linux software."

"Even if you don't believe all the hype about HTML5, sooner or later, you'll need to start encoding some video to WebM format. Maybe for internal experimentation, for a pay-per-view or subscription project (where H.264 may incur royalties), because you've decided to jump into HTML5 video with both feet, or because Google announced yesterday that it's going to stop supporting H.264 in Chrome. Whatever the reason, you'll be sitting at your desk or poolside one day, and you'll be thinking 'I've got to encode some video to WebM format'. If and when that day comes, set a bookmark in your memory banks for this article, because it's all about encoding to WebM. I'll start by looking at how WebM compares to H.264 in terms of quality, just to set expectations, and then briefly review the quality and performance of several free and for-fee encoding tools."

Steve Jobs has just announced he's taking medical leave from the company. Tim Cook will take over his role in Jobs' absence. "At my request, the board of directors has granted me a medical leave of absence so I can focus on my health. I will continue as CEO and be involved in major strategic decisions for the company," Jobs writes, "I have asked Tim Cook to be responsible for all of Apple's day to day operations. I have great confidence that Tim and the rest of the executive management team will do a terrific job executing the exciting plans we have in place for 2011." We wish all the best to Jobs and his family.

Ken Smith officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RC2 on the freebsd-stable mailing list. This is the second iteration of Release Candidates which will soon lead to 8.2-RELEASE. An updated release schedule may be found on the FreeBSD wiki.

"This set of tutorials aims to take you through programming a simple UNIX-clone operating system for the x86 architecture. The tutorial uses C as the language of choice, with liberally mixed in bits of assembler. The aim is to talk you through the design and implementation decisions in making an operating system. The OS we make is monolithic in design (drivers are loaded through kernel-mode modules as opposed to user-mode programs), as this is simpler."

A mini-tempest has been raging across the web with anger at Mozilla for removing the RSS icon from the Firefox 4 toolbar by default (and moving it to the bookmarks menu). This has been going on for a couple of weeks now, and I had avoided writing about it on OSNews since the recent furore is often cited to have begun around a personal blog post I wrote, but now things have come to an impasse: "No matter how loudly you shout, what you see in the beta with regard to the feed auto-discovery button is what will ship in Firefox 4". When Mozilla can say they are open to input, but refuse to change in the face of near universal disagreement, we all lose, not just me.

As an answer to someone asking whether Unity will require a working OpenGL stack to operate in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal", Mark Shuttleworth announced that Canonical would offer an optional, QT-based, "2D" implementation of Unity. Here is a video, too.

I didn't plan on this, but there's really nothing I can do. Unless you want me to write about the upcoming ten billionth download from the iOS App Store, you'll have to settle for this. On the Chromium blog, Google has clarified its decision to drop H.264 support from the Chrome web browser, and in it, Google basically repeats the things that those concerned about the future of video on the web have been saying for a long time now: H.264 on the web kills innovation.

"Steve Chang, the Chairman of Trend Micro, has kicked up a controversy by claiming that open source software is inherently less secure. When talking about the security of smartphones, Chang claimed that the iPhone is more secure than Android because being an open-source platform, attackers know more about the underlying architecture."

A new wrinkle in the update and fragmentation story emerged today. AndroidSpin is quoting an unnamed T-Mobile employee as saying that the carrier is being told not to release the Android 2.2 update (Froyo) to customers that own the Samsung Vibrant. The reason: to increase sales of the new Vibrant 4G.

And the fallout from Google's decision to drop H.264 support from its Chrome web browser continues to fall. Opera's Haavard - speaking on his own behalf - slammed the article which appeared on Ars Technica earlier today, while Micrsoft's Tim Sneath likened Google's move to the president of the United States banning English in favour of Esperanto. Also within, a rant (there's no other word for it) about the disrespect displayed by H.264 proponents towards the very open source community that saved and invigorated the web.