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Since our previous peek at the state of wireless networking in Linux, which is moving forward in an excellent fashion, the new unified Linux wireless stack (mac80211) has been accepted into the mainline 2.6.22 kernel. This is the new common base for all Linux wireless drivers. There are no drivers yet that use mac80211, but inclusion in the kernel is a huge step forward. Linux developers are hard at work porting old drivers and writing new ones, and this should attract participation from additional developers who now have a nice unified wireless networking stack to build on, instead of the previous mish-mash.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 102 for the week of August 20th. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue102

If you use the Opera browser on multiple machines, you'll inevitably run into the problem of keeping your bookmarks in sync. While you can store your bookmarks using services like del.icio.us, you might want to opt for oSync -- a synchronization utility that has a couple of clever features besides the ability to keep bookmarks and notes in sync.

After several months of development, the SS2L OpenDev publishes a first version of the free project Kochizz. This graphic tool aims at facilitating the configuration of the Apache Web servers.

So, you have an irritatingly loud CPU fan which is making you consider whether or not launching your laptop through the nearest window is a good idea. Well, before you do that, why not give CPU frequency scaling a go.

Explaining what freedom in computing is about, is also talk about the FSF and/or the GNU project; they’re nothing less than the flagship of the free software movement and they’ve made huge steps toward freedom in computing, but they have missed a key point: If the average computer user is not on our side, we’ll get nowhere.

A distributed computing project named "Artificial Intelligence - Reverse engineering the brain" has been launched on Linux. The goal is to use the power of distributed computing to build a large scale artificial intelligence system.

It has long since been my own personal experience that Linux documentation is largely ignored by Linux beginners in exchange for the interactivity of Linux forums. The reasons why will be further explored in this piece; however, today I have located a solid exception to the rule.

Perhaps Creative Commons' LiveContent 1.0 CD would work better if more clearly defined. Its Web page enthuses that the project is"an umbrella idea which aims to connect and expand Creative Commons and open source communities," adding that it"works to identify creators and content providers working to share their creations more easily" and"works to support developers and others who build build better technology to distribute these works." In other words, LiveContent is a sampler of free content and free software, but this purpose seems lost in a cloud of rhetoric, even to project members. The CD suffers from lackluster presentation, a mediocre assortment of samplers, and a lack of explanation.

Linux's global uptake and acceptance into the mainstream marked a milestone when the Linux Professional Institute (LPI) announced that their exam totals have topped the 150 000 mark and that their rollout is gaining momentum.<br /> <br />

I have been a fan of PC-BSD for sometime now; however, it was after discovering this page that had me disturbed. Using PC-BSD's awesome packaging methods, the webmaster of this site has apparently packaged some applications that might cause some licensing concerns.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: "Pencils down" marks the end of the Summer of Code for 2007. Python highlighting support, with work on a new, handwritten lexer in KDevelop. A data engine and associated Plasma applet for KGet. Start of the Plasma-based Wikipedia and Service Info applets for Amarok 2. Wikipedia integration, and other improvements in the Step physics simulation package. A console added to KAlgebra. New graphical themes for KGoldRunner. XMP metadata support in Digikam. More progress in the unobtrusive search dialog for Kate. Usability work across many applications. No mixer functionality in Phonon for KDE 4.0. The start of development on KChart 2.

OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt highlighted a recent commit to the NetBSD source tree saying, "if anyone had any doubt that our insistence on freedom was important, just read this." The referenced commit message describes an effort to work around issues with a binary blob included with NetBSD, something strongly avoided by the OpenBSD project.

What's the real reason for closed, proprietary code? Embarrassment. Sure, we are drowned in tides of twaddle about precious IP, Trade Sekkrits, Sooper Original Algorithms that must not be exposed to eyes of mere mortals, and all manner of silly excuses. But that's all a smokescreen to cover up the real reason: to hide code of such poor quality that even PHBs know to be embarrassed. Exhibit A: Windows itself. Which proves it takes more than throwing billions of dollars and thousands of programmers at a software project to build something that is actually good.

Time after time we warned that with the arrival of Windows Vista comes an novel lock-in strategy. This strategy of lock-in stretches well beyond file formats. It also creates lethal and viral (as in “transferable”) integration of the server side and the desktop side. As mentioned many times before, all of this is happening quietly. It’s happening quietly for a reason. You never yell when approaching a rabbit.

Over the next week I will be starting on a new Ubuntu community project. The plan is to create a Social Network for Ubuntu users, giving users free blog space and email addresses on the ubuntu-users.org domain. Think of Facebook for Ubuntu Users by Ubuntu Users but as a non profit entity as opposed to a big business venture.

We don't review many disk controllers or hard drives at Phoronix but we decided to take a quick look at the Promise Technology SATA300 TX4 PCI controller card, which promises to be a cost-effective 4-port Serial ATA 2.0 controller. Two of the features include Native Command Queuing and Tagged Command Queuing support, but how does its performance compare to solutions integrated on the motherboard? In this review of the Promise SATA300 TX4 we tested it with Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn using an nForce 430 chipset.

I recently discovered APTonCD, a utility that makes it easy to store Ubuntu packages on a CD or DVD so that they can be installed again later without having to download the packages again. You can download the packages you want once and then install them all on as many computers as you want. It's also a pretty useful way to get packages onto computers with slow or unreliable Internet connections.

openSUSE 10.3 has reached its Beta 2 stage of development cycle. It was released on the 23rd of August 2007, 2 weeks after the release of the Beta 1 iso images. According to the openSUSE 10.3 release roadmap, the stable/distribution release of openSUSE 10.3 is scheduled for 4th of October 2007. The openSUSE 10.3 Beta 2 is offered in a 1-CD GNOME, a 1-CD KDE, and a 1-DVD iso images, covering the i386, x86_64, and PPC architectures.

Yochai Benkler describes Open Source as a methodology of commons based peer production. This means work made collaboratively and shared publicly by a community of equals. For Eric Raymond the virtue of Open Source is its efficiency. Open Source can create better products faster than the old closed source model. The name Open Source was deliberately chosen for its meaninglessness and ideological vacuity. This was intended to make the results of a very strong ideology more palatable to large corporations by disguising its origins. That ideology is Free Software.