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For a long time now Microsoft has insisted that potential partners recognise its patent portfolio before signing interoperability agreements. But now Microsoft has stepped out of that box and signed an interoperability agreement with Red Hat that excludes any mention of patents. The agreement is aimed at improving interoperability between the two companies’ virtualisation products. The companies will join each other’s certification and validation programmes as well as provide technical support for mutual customers, as part of the agreement.

I decided earlier this week I needed to rip a DVD and looked around at the available options on Linux. I’m not overly experienced at doing this sort of thing, in the past I’ve always got the job done with applications like dvd:rip but not had a very satisfying experience. I’d heard a while back that the popular program Handrake had now released a Linux version with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) and it seemed a good idea to try it out. I have some Mac using friends who really like it and often tell me how good it is for ripping discs. There’s been a command line version of Handbrake on Linux for quite some time I believe but I never used it, I can handle myself pretty well in a terminal but it just didn’t appeal. Handbrake is licensed under the GPL and as such is completely free and open source software, with all these facts and endorsements ringing in my ears I figured I should take it for a spin, no pun intended.

With about a month having passed since the release of Phoronix Test Suite 1.6 "Tydal", the first alpha development release to its successor is now available. Phoronix Test Suite 1.8 "Selbu" will focus on a number of underlying improvements and further polishing from where Tydal was left off. There will also be quite a bit of preparatory work for Phoronix Test Suite 2.0. Selbu is expected for release in the second quarter of 2009.

Defend the Earth from alien invaders in this action-packed, story-driven space shooter!

When we were in college, my wife (then, girlfriend) had the best answering machine greeting message, ever. When people called her, the answering machine would answer, “Hello?” and wait. Invariably, the caller would start talking as though they had actually reached a live person. They'd be talking about last weeks assignments, or a party next week. Then the other shoe would drop.

When announcing Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Mark Shuttleworth had hoped to make this next Ubuntu Linux release perform better and to boot "blindingly quick", in particular with Ubuntu beginning to appear on more mobile devices. Well, with Alpha 4 have been released earlier this month, are Canonical developers and the community in the right direction with making Ubuntu 9.04 boot quickly? We have boot-time benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 9.04 work along with Linux desktop benchmarks comparing it to its predecessor, Ubuntu 8.10.

Without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest story of the past week was the release of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 'Lenny'. After nearly two years of continuous development and a controversial vote or two, we finally get the chance to take a quick look at the finished product - the new live media as well as the 'netinst' network installation CD. In other news, Ubuntu announces that Jaunty will ship with Linux kernel 2.6.28, Wiley publishes OpenSolaris Bible and makes three sample chapters available for free download, openSUSE's Zypper gains Bash-completion improvements, Red Hat publishes a 'State of the Union' address, the Woof project releases version 0.0.0 with support for Arch Linux, and Cuba develops their own Gentoo-based variant distribution called Nova. Also in this issue are links to two interviews - the first with Steve MacIntyre, the head of the Debian project, and the second with Scott Ritchie, an Ubuntu community developer.

When it comes to open-source communities, individuals are much better citizens than institutions. The enlightened self-interest that causes individuals to send back bug fixes, contribute ideas for new features and write documentation is much harder to find in institutions. This week, the JargonSpy analyzes why such a gap exists and what can be done about it.

Moonshine is both a Firefox browser plug-in and a desktop player. The plug-in can be downloaded and installed just like any other Firefox extension. The desktop player, which plays WMV/WMA content on your PC through Firefox, has to be built from source code.

If the VCS configuration model isn't confusing enough for you, there's still hope! Today we're going to take a look at creating new "types" for use with Veritas Cluster Server (VCS). In a broad sense of the term, almost everything you'll ever define in your main.cf (the main configuration file for VCS) is based on a specific "type," which is actually described in the only standard include file in that configuration file: types.cf - Note that both main.cf and types.cf are located in /etc/VRTSvcs/conf/config.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, January 2009 (Issue 28) is available to download. You can find it at the PCLinuxOS Magazine website. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list .

In this article, we have covered single-table searches with query by example criteria and additional criteria specification, selecting displayed values, and ordering results. We also took a look at wildcard searches and full database search

In what came as a surprise to many Linux observers, Red Hat announced on the morning of February 16th that it has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft to enable increased interoperability for the companies' virtualization platforms.

Everybody needs diagrams. Most users need to create one more often than they think: that flowchart for a presentation, that sketch of the bird feeder to build this weekend, or a time line. Getting more technical, there are always circuits and blueprints and the like. Stop wasting time with an office app, the GIMP, or a paint program: use Dia, an easy yet powerful made-for-diagrams editor.

Recently Eigen 2.0 was released. You might already have heard about Eigen, it is a small but very high performance maths library which has its roots in KDE. Below, the two core developers are interviewed about it.

Xandros is porting its desktop Linux distribution -- noted for use in the pioneering Asus EEE netbook -- to two ARM-based platforms for netbooks and other mobile devices. The ports are part of a larger push to support ARM-based devices, including 3G-enabled MID-like devices and even smartphones, says Xandros. The two Xandros ports are to the Qualcomm Snapdragon and netbook-focused Freescale i.MX515. The ports will include "a variety" of user applications, and will support both keyboard and touchscreen input, says Xandros. Applications are said to include a browser, push-based email, PIM, instant messaging, a photo viewer, a media player, and a Microsoft Office-compatible office suite.

World of Goo was released for GNU/Linux 2 days ago and within the first day it managed to outsell the previous best selling day via the developer's website by 40%!

Virtualization on the server is being hyped until we're sick of hearing about it. But virtualization on the desktop is very useful for a lot of different uses: development, making screenshots for howtos, testing, having access to applications without rebooting, and many more. Matt Hartley compares VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels, and several other virtualization candidates, and their fitness for the desktop user.

When GroundWork Open Source launched its 5.3 product release earlier this month, the network management software maker was shocked to discover Ubuntu as the platform of choice for nearly one-third of initial customer deployments. Here's the scoop from WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Tracey Pilone's recent blog at O'Reilly.com, The Intersection of Algebra and Technology got me thinking about one of my "soapbox" issues; the use of computing in education. One of the biggest proponents of computers in schools is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has provided millions of dollars in technology to education, from Elementary schools to Universities over the years. But is this all a good idea?