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This document describes how to enable and configure Compiz Fusion on a Mandriva One 2008.1 Spring GNOME desktop with an NVIDIA graphics card.

A report by the Standish Group indicates that adoption of ‘open source’ has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year. That’s not a huge amount of money compared to what has been lost though the misselling of mortgages, but it is still a lot. The report identifies the value of these ‘open source’ products to be about 6% of the world market for software. Unfortunately, the Standish Group doesn’t believe in openly sharing its research, instead selling it for $1,000… Read the full story at Freesoftware Magazine

There are time when I want to let my geekiness out and I want the world to know about it. I decided to share with you my favorite collection of Linux t-shirts that you also might like. Please share you ideas for healthy geeking in the comments.

[I thought that with all the talk about Linux T-Shirts that this was an appropriate article to post. - Scott]

People in most markets Lenovo serves, including Singapore, China and the UK, will be offered the company's new IdeaPad netbooks with either Microsoft Windows XP or a Linux OS, but users in Australia won't have that option. Australian and US computer buyers will only be offered Windows XP on Lenovo's IdeaPad S10, according to Lenovo.

My father was one of those old school guys when it came to adopting computer technology. He managed to build and run a successful company, and retire in 1998, without ever actually having a computer in his office. It was just never an absolute necessity for him to do his job. During the early years of the Internet, it took him a while to get his mind around the business model. Back in the go-go dot-com days, he would look at the IPOs and say to me, “Am I missing something, or are these guys selling one dollar bills for 80 cents? How is that a sustainable business?”

It painted a picture of Open Source software as being a minefield of grumpy litigious geeks who want to cash in with fat lawsuits, and no clear guidance for how to stay out of trouble. Oddly, this all seemed to come from a most unlikely source, the director of the Gnome Foundation, Stormy Peters. Even unlikelier, it was from her talk at LinuxWorld, which hardly seems a good venue for spreading misinformation of any kind, let alone old moldy misinformation...As usually happens with stories like these, reader comments were a mixture of "Die evil FUD-sucking scum!!" and "Er, it seems rather unlikely that Ms. Peters said these things."

This is a simple howto on changing your log on screen. This will also work with other distros. This is a very easy way to add more eye candy to your Linux system. I do everything under Gnome GUI so let's get started. Please read the agreement at the bottom. First off you will need to get some new login screens. I go to http://www.gnome-look.org to get mine. Just look to the left side under content and click on GDM Themes. Pick one out or pick a few out, that's totally up to you. Next we need to open the Login Window Preferences screen so we can add our new theme or themes. Click on System->Administration->Login Window:

Both StarOffice 9 and OpenOffice.org 3 will offer an office suite of tools compatible with Microsoft Office. Both are based on the same code base, and both will be native on the Mac, no longer requiring X11. Sun's Louis Suarez-Potts explained the key differences to TMO and what the customer should know before selecting one or the other.

At the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group spoke about the potential for enterprise adoption of Ubuntu and the impact that community-driven Linux distributions will have on the market. Companies are increasingly choosing free community-driven Linux distributions instead of commercial offerings with conventional support options. Several factors are driving this trend, particularly dissatisfaction with the cost of support services from the major distributors. Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell, according to Lyman.

IBM has reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software, which includes Lotus Notes, Sametime and Symphony, to preload on Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell's Suse Linux. The repackaging makes the middleware easier and cheaper to install on Linux PCs and free desktops from Microsoft software, IBM said.

Over the years I have made my share of cluster mistakes. Each problem presented an opportunity to learn something new, become a little smarter, get some scar tissue as it were. I had just such an opportunity this week as I as teaching Intermediate Beowulf: An Introduction to Benchmarking and Tuning as part of the ARC HPC Training at Georgetown University. I’ll get back to my teaching experience in minute, but first I wanted to talk about HPC education.

The network file system (NFS) protocol is getting its biggest overhaul in more than a decade, and the results could be profound for end users (see The Future of NFS Arrives). Version 4.1 of NFS, developed by a team of veterans from various storage interests, promises to unlock new performance and security capabilities, particularly for enterprise data centers. NFS was originally designed to solve the problem of remote access to home directories and supporting diskless workstations and servers over local area networks. With the advent of cheaper high-performance computing in the form of Linux compute clusters, multi-core processors and blades, the demands for higher performance file access have risen sharply. It's no wonder that a protocol designed for 1984 speeds would be unable to cope.

I have some screenshots from an old Caldera OpenLinux Lite CD that a member still had in his possession to show you. They disprove certain allegations SCO has made regarding Linux, I think, in the IBM litigation. For example, SCO claimed that it never released anything under the GPL. And it tried to allege that some headers and other features were their property and that Linux infringes them. I will show you differently.

A classic of Linux/Unix humor and a funny fake ad for anxiety medication ...together at last ;)

Building and using Linux-based PCs is a rewarding and fullfilling pastime for open source enthusiasts, but spreading the gospel to the masses can be even more satisfying. And if the masses include schoolchildren from low-income homes , cash-strapped non-profit groups and far-away developing nations where technology isn't something easily affordable, then it can be even more soul-satisfying.

When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity. When ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski declared that “Microsoft’s sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft “gets it” regarding the ASF” I had a fit of the giggles—and then, like many others, I started to ponder on the reasons why and what it actually meant.

Many college graduates are finding it difficult to enter the information technology world with little or no work experience. There is no such thing as an entry-level position anymore, and more and more graduates are finding themselves in a catch-22 situation because of this. Searching the numerous jobseeker Web sites, such as dice.com, will return thousands of positions available in the IT field. But when you look closely, most positions, such as an entry-level software engineer, have a minimum requirement of at least one year's work experience in a related field. The search field criterion doesn't even offer a selection for graduates with less than one year's experience.

A startup called Unison Technologies has released a commercial "unified communications" groupware suite based on Ubuntu Server, and announced a beta release of a Ubuntu desktop client. The Unison suite combines e-mail, instant messaging, a PBX, contacts, and calendaring, says the company.

Intel's latest performance desktop chipset is now the X48 Express, but there still is life left in the X38 Express, which was released late last year. The Intel X38 and X48 Chipsets share many of the same features including support for the latest dual-core and quad-core Intel processors, DDR3 system memory support, and 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 interfaces with there being very few differences to the end-user between these chipsets. In addition, benchmarks we have delivered from different motherboards have shown the X48 has little to no performance improvements over the older Bearlake chipset. ASUS's X38 motherboards are still very much in the market place and today we happen to be looking at one of their workstation motherboards based around the X38.

Another look at the renewed ASUS-Microsoft relationship (and Intel); CompTIA returns to haunt