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Free and Open Source software can save you money. Whether you're running a business or are a computer user, FOSS software is high-quality software that can be quite inexpensive. Smart organizations know that, and they come to SCALE.

At FOSDEM 2009 in Keith Packard's talk on the rebuilt Linux desktop, he shared the progress made in composited 3D, monitor auto-plugging, 2D/3D/media shared objects, kernel mode-setting, and kernel-based 2D drawing. Allowing these problems to be addressed was the Graphics Execution Manager for kernel memory management. The Graphics Execution Manager was used instead of TTM (which we talked about several times before at Phoronix) and it allows for persistent objects, global name, and pageable contents.

Red Hat has announced that it has begun shipping the second rev and the first fully functional version of its Enterprise MRG real-time Linux. The Fedora Project, which is sponsored by Red Hat, has also put the alpha of its Fedora 11 development release in the field on time.

MEPIS Founder Warren Woodford wrote to let us know that the third release candidate for SimplyMEPIS 8.0 is now available for download. Woodford notes, "MEPIS 8.0 is in good shape, but I'd prefer to declare it final when Debian Lenny is released."

Birmingham has become the first English city to be completely remapped by its own citizens. Maps of the city are freely editable and available at OpenStreetMap (OSM). The OpenStreetMap project, run by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, is an open source project that is building free online maps, not based on any copyright or licensed map data. Birmingham is not the first city to be remapped in this way, but it is the first city in the United Kingdom. Birmingham joins the likes of Paris, Berlin, Canberra and Vienna.

I've discovered that NetBSD doesn't run so well on the Sparcstation 20 (50 MHz processor, 128 MB RAM). The install went fine, but the X configuration was less than optimal. Console messages continued to appear on the X screen, and I could tell that, among other things perhaps, the horizontal sync and/or vertical refresh might have been just a bit off. I imagine that if I take the xorg.conf information from OpenBSD and use it for NetBSD, all issues will be solved. But when NetBSD's 32-bit Sparc packages for Firefox and Seamonkey (precompiled packages, NOT ports) wouldn't install, and then the Geany package did install but ran so slowly as to be unusable, I decided to go in a different direction.

Text editors are wonderful, helpful tools for any computer user; they're not just for gurus and coders. They're essential for editing configuration files; you don't want to use a word processor because these insert all sorts of formatting codes that will mess up your files. They're great for quickly dashing off any kind of document that doesn't need all the bells and whistles of a word processor, and for coders and advanced users they contain a wealth of useful shortcuts and helpful features. Juliet Kemp introduces us to one of the better graphical text editors, Kate.

In Mystic Mine you guide a trolley through an old gold mine, switching rails at the right moment with a designated keystroke. It's the only normal thing about this new skill game from Koonsolo Games.

I wanted to view the Wikipedia article on OpenOffice recently, so I googled ‘openoffice’, correctly assuming that the link I was looking for would be near the top of the results. While doing this, I noticed that a Google query for OpenOffice also turns up a couple of paid sponsored links. But can you trust the links and associated downloads? Here are some thoughts.

Seeking to be known as more than the SUSE Linux company, Novell today shed more light on its evolving partner program — which blankets the company’s complete product portfolio. Here's the scoop.

Over the weekend the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM) took place in Brussels. In his keynote, Mozilla's Mark Surman hoped for Open Source's success and Debian key contributor Bdale Garbee supported its social contract. As an aside, Debian Lenny's target release date was reconfirmed.

The latest version of System Rescue version 1.1.5 is out today and it includes a few notable improvements over its predecessors. But yeaah this distro will still save your butt.

Subversion is a popular version control system: It keeps a record of changes over the lifetime of a file, allowing you to revert to an earlier version at will. It's particularly useful for code projects, but it can handle, and be useful for, pretty much any type of file (e.g., for tutorials!). Juliet Kemp shows us to how to use this useful version control system.

Boudewijn Rempt has summarised results of development for the next version of Krita, the painting and image editing application for KOffice. Krita 2.0 will contain a host of new features, some of which are unique in the free software world. Below Piotr introduces some of the new features which will be available in this release.

I recently reviewed Creating a Web Site: The Missing Manual and thought a review of this Head First book would be in order. While you might say that both of these books cater to beginners who don't have a history of creating and maintaining web site, you can also say that each book caters to its own special audience.

The Dojo Toolkit is an Open source JavaScript toolkit which can be used to develop stunning web pages. I liked it from the very beginning. It is very fast and provides lots of tools to work with DOM, Animations, AJAX etc. The base code is lightweight (~26 KB). jQuery, even lighter, also Open Source, is the write-less, do-more, cross-browser, CSS3 compliant JavaScript library. In this article we will experiment embedding jQuery in DOJO 123's Accordion widget and try to identify if there exists any cross-code interactions. The code is also tested for cross-browser suitability.

Simulating molecular motions provides researchers with information critical to designing vaccines and working on preventing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. But, until recently, researchers needed supercomputers or clusters to run molecular simulations. Now, reports ScienceDaily, a new open source application developed at Stanford University is making it possible to do complex simulations on desktop computers - faster than ever before.

If you've liked the things that the One Laptop Per Child project has brought to notebook design, but didn't fancy spending your hard-earned on a a design straight from the Fisher Price Research Laboratories, take heart: Nicholas Negroponte has announced that the hardware design is to be released under an open-source licence.

Why not have just one version of Linux that everyone can use and enjoy? Wouldn't that make things less confusing and encourage more people to adopt Linux? Not so fast, says Linus Torvalds. Multiple distros are "absolutely required," he was quoted as saying.

A little while ago, there was a rumour about Russia developing its own operating system, based on GNU/Linux. Now, some more details have emerged, following a meeting between Red Hat and the Russian communications ministry. The idea is to use the Russian Fedora project as a step towards the creation of the national operating system.