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Kernel mode-setting for Intel graphics hardware can already be found in the mainline Linux kernel and will be included by default in the release of Ubuntu 9.10 later this year. While Intel's kernel mode-setting support has been maturing in a steadfast manner, this support has not been moving along quite as fast for ATI and NVIDIA hardware. It is possible we will see ATI/AMD kernel mode-setting along with the necessary memory management support enter the Linux 2.6.31 kernel and potentially see this feature appear in Ubuntu 9.10 as an end-user option, but currently this support is still deemed under development. For those with ATI Radeon hardware looking to test out kernel mode-setting, there is now a Launchpad PPA and a LiveCD available for testing out these mode-setting capabilities atop Ubuntu.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — A young woman in a white cocktail dress sat in a chair with a purple shawl wrapped around her head. She wore high heels, bulky brown sunglasses and a surgical mask. Moments later, the shawl and mask were ripped off and she sprang into song. A model’s floral fingernails tapping a computer with Microsoft Multi-Touch software, one of many touch-screen devices shown. It was all part of a musical revue by Micro-Star International celebrating the release of a new laptop. The rather eccentric display hardly seemed out of place at last week’s Computex trade show — the annual computer industry gala held here in Taiwan’s capital city. This year’s show signified the computer industry’s move far beyond traditional desktop and laptop PCs into more exotic devices. If dancing girls and loud music at an exhibitor’s booth helped attract attention to these strange new computers — or explain them — all the better.

Back at the beginning of this year, we interviewed Paul Sherman, the project lead of Absolute Linux which is a derivative distribution of Slackware. Sherman has just released version 12.2.5 and this week we take an in-depth look into the distro. What does it have to offer? Read on to find out! In the news this past week, Fedora prepares for the grand launch of "Leonidas", openSUSE opens up its development model to allow more community contribution, and SliTaz publishes a roadmap to stable version 3.0. Sun Microsystems has released OpenSolaris 2009.06 and, as many have suspected, it will form the basis of the upcoming Solaris offering. Meanwhile Mandriva Linux, which also recently released a new version, is looking ahead by collecting ideas for the upcoming 2010 release. Finally, for users of the popular CentOS distribution, the community has published its first bi-weekly magazine, collecting interesting information from the world of the well-respected enterprise distribution. Happy reading!

After Christian Ehrlicher announced that he would step down from packaging and bug fixing for KDE on Windows, some articles were written which suggest that KDE on Windows is on hold now that the main developer has moved on. Even though KDE on Windows is only a small project and from the loss of one developer will be felt, we are far from dead. The Windows port has not been a one-man-project and many other people are still involved. KDE on Windows will continue to be developed and packages will continue to be made.

Percona’s XtraDB is a fork of InnoDB with a ton of extra options and enhancements. Here’s a look at what it can do for your busy database.

Recently I have being managing a box using a 3rd party application that allowed me to handle a windows box where I could use putty to get SSH access to a linux box. It had to be done this way because both my box and the linux box are nated, so they can't reach each other. Let me say it was a real PITA. The keyboard layouts were getting on my nerves. Some important keys didn't work sometimes... or at all (like ; or @ or ', etc). After a while I was encouraged enough to dig for a solution to get access to the SSH service of the linux box directly (or almost) instead of depending on this mess I was using.

Content creation used to be the stronghold of Apple and it's OSX operating system, but recently there have been signs that content producers are more and more attracted to Linux. What made me realize that creative software on Linux had made it with the content creation crowd is this poll on the DAZ Studio forums: more than 150 Daz Studio users would like to see a Linux version.

To what extent is Linux serving in mission critical environments today? There are still IT leaders that consider Linux a non-contender in such environments. Despite a steady stream of research verifying the use of Linux in the enterprise, there are lingering doubts as to the prevalence of Linux in mission critical environments.

Just finished watching “Revolution OS” again, after a year or more. I still can’t believe that with all the work the GNU Project put into the GNU operating system, that Linus Torvalds could come along, with a Kernel of all things, and take the credit away from the Free Software Foundation, and thus, also taking away the credit from the X.Org, Apache, etc. developers.

[Cue flamethrowers and asbestos undies... - Sander]

This guide explains how you can build customized Ubuntu (as well as Kubuntu/Xubuntu and Edubuntu) Live-CDs with the help of UCK (Ubuntu Customization Kit) on Ubuntu 9.04. UCK allows you to customize the language and the applications on the Live-CD.

If you are looking for a hosting provider for your new website, or want to upgrade your hosting services your going to get confronted with a lot of options. It may not be completely clear what the differences are. No doubt you probably want some kind of Linux hosting as there are only very specific circumstances where windows web hosting has benefits. In my humble opinion you would only want windows hosting if you have a web service or application which can only be run on windows(which would be a design flaw). Reasons why Linux is superior for web hosting include:

Everywhere you turn in computing circles nowadays you hear about Virtual computing, whether it is HyperV, Vmware, Xen, KVM or other solutions. In this guide we use Fedora 10 Linux and Qemu to run Windows XP sp3 inside a virtual machine, step by step with screenshots to show you how easy it is to run Windows inside of Linux.

Idiocy, hubris, chutzpah, arrogance? Regardless of what you call it, Microsoft's attempt to rename the Netbook last week put its arrogance on full display.

Ubuntu provides the very useful ability to upgrade from one release to another, but a flaw in the process makes the upgrade far more painful than it should be.

I guess that is what you might call a turn up for the books, as the US Department of Homeland Security announces the 16 members which have been sworn in to serve on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Especially when you consider that one of them, Jeff Moss, is best known for being the founder of the Black Hat and DEFCON hacker conferences and something of a hero to the hacker community.

A newer version of our older perl netbackup backup activity reporting script. Cleaned up a bit and updated to work with NetBackup 4.5 through 6.5

Bordeaux for OpenSolaris 1.8.0 was released with support for Microsoft Office 97, 2000, 2003, Visio 2003, Project 2003, Internet Explorer 6, Adobe Photoshop 6 and Adobe Photoshop 7. There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliablity of all the supported applications.