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Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?" About midway through the survey, there have been what Cherry calls "extraordinary numbers. With over 10,000 respondents in so far, the survey has been taken by 6,206 English speakers; 3,684 Russian speakers; 1,198 French speakers; but only 118 Spanish and 51 Japanese speakers. The curious thing about the English language users is that 63 percent of the English responses have come from Europe, with only 22.9 percent from North America."

The company I work for is HUGE and has more business segments than I will ever know. Being a company this big means there is, more often than not, has its fare share of of bureaucracy and red tape. Sometimes the easiest things in life become major accomplishments. So, I figured I was in for a headache trying to use Ubuntu - especially when the official company Linux distribution is Redhat. So it was a big (and welcome) surprise to find not one but two groups within the company putting together distributions of the IBM desktop products for Ubuntu.

[The company in question is of course IBM - Sander]

ToorCon 9, a hacker's convention, kicked off with registration and a reception Friday evening in the San Diego Convention Center. Keynotes and the talks were held Saturday and Sunday. This was my first time at ToorCon, and I learned why it is so highly regarded among the hacker community. It's good. There were probably a few feds in the crowd, but for the most part attendees were hackers or hacker wannabes. ToorCon occupied only a small fraction of the enormous convention center; the whole thing was conducted in three meeting rooms on the upper level.

Tackling a Linux problem takes skill, but also a lot of flexibility. A. Lizard takes the lessons shown earlier in this three-part series and demonstrates how to solve a real-life problem with his methodology.

Today it's now time where the fglrx driver reaches yet another milestone. Not only does today's release address many of the outstanding bugs for the earlier GPU generations while also introducing a few new features, but it also delivers AIGLX support! Yes, you read that right. You can finally run your ATI graphics card with the fglrx driver and run Compiz, Beryl, or Compiz Fusion without using XGL! This is coming 13 months after NVIDIA had introduced its AIGLX support, but now just days after the release of Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon it's here for ATI hardware. Granted, if you were using an older ATI GPU with the open-source Radeon driver, you could have been benefiting from AIGLX already.

There are many concurrent ongoing dangers in the world of Free Software. Among them, you will find software patents, hidden restrictions in obnoxious licenses and trademark lawsuits which seem to be absolutely unavoidable unless one has deep pockets filled with money for defense. Recently, expensive interoperability clauses have been added to the mix. Formerly, protection against such issues was achieved by adding condemnations to existing licenses.

Steve Ballmer believes that Microsoft is the only company with "the wherewithal" to dominate the world of mobile computing. Appearing at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment, a massive mobile tradeshow underway in downtown San Francisco, the Microsoft supremo told show goers that the company has the upper-hand on the likes of Apple and Blackberry-maker Research in Motion because its Windows Mobile platform is so darn versatile. Windows Mobile plays nicely with both enterprise and entertainment applications, he explained, and it's open to third party developers.

["the wherewithal" huh, Why do I not believe him? - Scott]

Source Mage GNU/Linux news for the week of October 15th, 2007.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Fortune-teller and Keyboard Layout applets for Plasma, KNewsTicker resurrected for KDE 4.0 as a Plasmoid. Rewrite of canvas tag support in KHTML. Various new language syntax highlighting in Kate. Internal database storage work in Digikam. More playlist handling work, and support for Magnatune "streaming membership" in Amarok 2. OpenDocument loading of charts in KChart for KOffice 2. Various graphics fixes and a user handbook for the Bovo game. Kolourpaint is now fully ported to Qt4. Continued work on the Eigen 2 library. Further porting away from KDEPrint to the printing facilities provided by Qt4.

Fedora 8 test releases have a surprise for all users interested in graphics: a release candidate for the new GIMP 2.4, meaning the final version will get the stable GIMP 2.41. This is exciting news, as the previous major release, GIMP 2.2, is several years old, and a lot of new features were added in the meantime.

Leading Linux Kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman is looking for devices not supported by Linux. He would like to add support for more hardware in upcoming Linux releases. He needs help from the Linux community in identifying devices that lack support.

Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny. By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions.

When I read reports on the Linux gaming industry, I can't help but wonder where the Linux gamers are at? Can we find them on the Nintendo Wii or perhaps the Playstation 3 (PS3)? After all, I have heard that PS3 actually works rather well with Yellow Dog Linux.

The first, and possibly the biggest advantage is ubiquity. It's the same Internet all over the world, so you don't have to worry about competing and incompatible networks. Anywhere you find an Internet connection is a potential Wi-Fi phone link. No hassles with SIMS or R-UIMs or roaming charges, or leaving behind a trail of perfectly good but useless phones behind because of vendor incompatibilities.

Still seeking OASIS approval, The Open Document Foundation (ODF) has quietly ended all work on its da Vinci project after failing to secure approval from the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS).

This document describes how to set up an Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) desktop. The result is a fast, secure and extendable system that provides all you need for daily work and entertainment. About 23.000 packages are available in the repositories.

Hackers twist ad network into Trojan network. Hackers have rooted into a server owned by internet advertising network24/7 Real Media and used it to serve malware-laced banner ads that tried to circumvent security mechanisms on end users' machines, Symantec researchers said. The malware exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Real Player that was patched on Friday.

Ubuntu Server is a popular Linux server distribution which has been gaining some good ground over the past few years, but is still behind its main commercial rivals: Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. However, one of the new, experimental (but stable) features in Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition is set to change the course of all server Operating Systems in the near future, and that feature is Tasks.

When it comes to managing processes, many people use old reliable commands such as ps, top, kill, and nice. These commands are handy, useful, and found in every Linux distribution. However, sometimes a GUI process manager can be useful, especially when you're trying to teach new Linux system administrators who aren't used to shell interfaces. Qps Visual Process Manager is a GUI ps substitute that lets you sort, manipulate, and manage processes.

Adding to its list of Linux partners, Microsoft has extended its collaboration agreement with Asian Linux vendor Turbolinux. Promising collaboration efforts and controversial intellectual property assurances for Turbolinux users, the deal could be seen as the latest attempt by Microsoft to extend its reach into the rich prize that is the Asian market.