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Lenovo's core PC and laptop businesses are under attack. And the company hasn't said much about its long-term server strategy -- especially as it relates to Linux. That has to change fast.

In 1999, Rockstar Games and Rockstar North (then known as DMA Design) furthered the groundbreaking gameplay concepts established just two years prior in the original Grand Theft Auto - with the release of GTA2.

The KDE Project is happy to set the first beta of KDE 4.1, codenamed Caramel, free today. KDE 4.1 is intended to meet the needs of a broad range of users and we therefore respectfully request you to get testing Beta 1. Beta 1 is not ready for production use but is in wide use by KDE developers and is suitable for testing by Linux enthusiasts and KDE fans.

These days, business and free software co-exist with little friction. Although you still find some members of the free software community who automatically view business with suspicion, for the most part the community considers the multibillion dollar open source industry as a validation of its beliefs. Business and free software are so closely intertwined that kernel developers Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton are employed by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit consortium of corporations. But in recent months, this cooperation is showing signs of becoming strained.

While the RadeonHD developers have been busy working on Radeon HD 3200 / 780 Series support and other features for this open-source ATI R500/600+ driver, the DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) support has been lagging behind. Earlier this month Matthias Hopf was successful in getting DRM working on an RS690 GPU and he has published RadeonHD DRM code into his personal development tree, but no code has yet to reach master. Meanwhile, as the xf86-video-ati driver is using AtomBIOS, they are able to spend more time working on the 3D features and other areas and less time "banging on registers" or even waiting on register documentation to arrive. David Airlie has been working on the R500 3D support along with Alex Deucher and Corbin Simpson.

Google is this week expected to release the long-awaited update to its Web Toolkit (GWT) adding support for Java 5 Standard Edition language features to speed development and performance of JavaScript. The search giant has also outlined plans for successive versions of its web toolkit. Version 1.6 is scheduled for the third quarter, under a planned quarterly cycle for "minor" updates, with a version 2.0 featuring bigger changes further out.

AirRivals is a free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) with the characteristics of both Third-person shooters and flight simulators, developed by MasangSoft and owned by Yedang. In AirRivals, players pilot their own individual starfighters (called "Gears") throughout a number of maps, including terrestrial, lunar, and space maps. It has typical MMORPG elements such as leveling, currency, and a skills system. Ace Online is a largely Player vs. Player (PvP)-oriented game, with character leveling and item acquisition achieved through combat against Non-Player Characters (NPCs) and the completion of missions. As a player gains levels, more and more maps become accessible.

Microsoft expects to lose margin as "cloud" competitors start to eat away at its core businesses. Kudos to Microsoft for calling out the obvious. But Microsoft still has a lot to learn if it thinks it can charge more under its own cloud model because "the customer will pay Microsoft a larger fee, since Microsoft also runs and maintains all the hardware,"

This document describes how to set up PHPlist on Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu and Debian. This howto should also work for other distributions with little modifications. Taken from the phplist page: "phplist is an open-source newsletter manager. phplist is free to download, install and use, and is easy to integrate with any website. phplist is downloaded more than 10 000 times per month and is listed in the top open source projects for vitality score on Freshmeat."

A look at yet another quick and simple Perl command line execution statement that you can use to save yourself lots of time...

I can hardly believe that I'm composing an entry in Movable Type Open Source 4.1 using Damn Small Linux. Now that version 4.3 of the low-spec Linux distribution has added Firefox 2 to its software mix, I can use the browser -- here named Bon Echo for reasons that escape me -- for many more things than I could the Firefox 1.06 browser included in previous incarnations of DSL.

Many hex editors try to copy an entire file into memory before they let you edit it, which explicitly limits the size of the files you can view or edit. lfhex is designed to allow you to edit binary files larger than can fit into your computer's memory. While you might normally not be working with binary files that are larger than your memory, it's good to know that your hex editor can scale to such large files when that situation arises. lfhex can load huge files quickly and does not require large amounts of memory to do so. For example, the documentation mentions that loading a 2GB file requires less than 2MB of RAM.

I've blogged a bit recently on how hard it is to install Movable Type and have it actually work on your own server. After getting and configuring Apache and MySQL (or PostgreSQL or SQlite), making sure you get the static files in the right place and the CGI/Perl files in the other right place, then making sure everything has the proper permissions ... I found it to be way beyond my capabilities. To be fair, I haven't yet tried to install WordPress, but I recently found out something very interesting: There are WordPress packages available in many of the major Linux and BSD distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu and even OpenBSD. Luckily, the same thing is now happening for Movable Type. So if you're using the Debian GNU/Linux distribution -- and I strongly suggest you do -- you can now install Movable Type as a Debian package.

Why would anyone try to introduce an operating system into the existing glut unless it pays off in spades? What can a new entrant give us that the multitude of Linux distributions, the Mac OSX and old, hoary Windows hasn't?

The AMD 780 Series Chipsets have been available for nearly four months now, and supporting the Radeon HD 3200 graphics since day one has been AMD's proprietary Catalyst driver. On the open-source side, there has been the Radeon HD 3200 / 780G support quite quickly through the xf86-video-ati driver due to its use of AtomBIOS, but the support within the RadeonHD driver hadn't arrived until earlier today. Thanks to 22 code commits made to the mainline xf86-video-radeonhd git tree, it's now possible to use this newest AMD integrated graphics processor with this Novell-spawned driver.

In this video interview Open Source Initiative co-founder Bruce Perens talks to German Linux-Magazin Online. He discusses Open Source licensing and the characteristics of individual licenses such as GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, Apache and Affero GPL. Besides that he reveals an interesting feature he develops for his Blog technocrat.net and why Debian releases have such funny names. Although this is a German website the video interview is in English.

Recently, I wrote a review of the note-taking application Tomboy. Though I find Tomboy exceptionally useful, I had a minor issue with the inability to create new notebooks from within a note. Within hours of the review appearing on Linux.com, Boyd Timothy, one of the app's developers mentioned in the article's comments that my idea had merit and said he would add the feature to an upcoming build. True to his word, he did. This is a shining example of one of the most valued yet sometimes overlooked features of open source software: it really is for the people, by the people.

It is fair to say that distributed source code management systems are taking over the world. There are plenty of centralized systems still in use, but it is a rare project which would choose to adopt a centralized SCM in 2008. Developers have gotten too used to the idea that they can carry the entire history of their project on their laptop, make their changes, and merge with others at their leisure. But, while any developer can now commit changes to a project while strapped into a seat in a tin can flying over the Pacific Ocean, that developer generally cannot simultaneously work with the project's bug database. Committing changes and making bug tracker changes are activities which often go together, but bug tracking systems remain strongly in the centralized mode.

The Asus Eee PC in subnotebook format has been the hit portable computer of the year, with the recent 900 series upgrade only brightening the Asus star. Now word comes that an Eee desktop – with the same Linux OS – will be launched at Computex and on sale later this year.

A year’s research on Novell and the openSUSE project is now published as a master’s thesis at the University of Oslo. “Managing Firm-Sponsored Open Source Communities” details the collaboration between Novell and the openSUSE community. Community members and employees in Novell have participated in the study. The study deals with the tension between openness and control often found in projects that mesh corporate entities with the open source community. On the one hand, Novell wants to enable participation and contributions from external contributors, but cannot turn over full control to the community because it produces its enterprise product from openSUSE.