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In The Beginning:

It was 1991, and the ruthless agonies of the cold war were gradually coming to an end. There was an air of peace and tranquility that prevailed in the horizon. In the field of computing, a great future seemed to be in the offing, as powerful hardware pushed the limits of the computers beyond what anyone expected.

But still, something was missing.

And it was the none other than the Operating Systems, where a great void seemed to have appeared.

Like most people who do tech work of some sort or another for a living I love my toys. I’d love to have the latest and greatest gee whiz system and if I won the lottery I probably always would. Today’s best full-featured distros all have native 64-bit versions. One of my favorites, Vector Linux was a little late to the table but I’m pleased to report that the current release, Vector Linux 5.9 Standard, has a 64-bit version in beta right now. Good news.

Sick and tired of hearing various "Bill Gates is Satan" jokes, the Prince of Darkness today issued an edict demanding an end to such friviolities. "How dare you compare Bill Gates to me!" Satan snarled during a fake press conference from the Fire & Brimstone Briefing Room broadcast live on CSPAN. "Yes, we all know Windows is an evil piece of cr@p -- and I applaud Bill Gates for his efforts -- but he doesn't even come close to the sheer vileness that I possess!"

Having thrown around a few initial impressions about the OLPC XOs, I thought I would take a more in-depth look at the user interface and some of the activities kids can engage in. And I have a couple of comments about their durability and adjustable screens.

ECMA, the international IT standards association, recently published its responses to comments of the ISO National Bodies in response to Microsoft's Office Open XML application for ISO standardization (the actual 2,293-page response is closed to the public). The ECMA proposals will be discussed at a Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva after which the National Bodies may reconsider their original vote. Microsoft's responses make clear that within one year, it will have four different OOXML specifications to implement and interoperate with, and each of those specs will be closed. Under no circumstances should such a flawed specification become an international standard.

gLabels is a nifty little GNOME application used to make business cards and labels. I used to do it in OpenOffice, but that was starting to become kind of a pain. To make it nice and easy, gLabels will work with a whole bunch of different labels and paper you can pick up from your local office supply store.

Back in June of 2005 with the ATI Linux 8.14.13 driver release was a new installer to more easily facilitate the installation of this binary graphics driver using a graphical interface for a generic setup or generating distribution-specific packages (at that time Red Hat was the only officially supported distribution). With time, this installer has evolved by gaining new features and more distributions are being supported through their --buildpkg command for generating custom driver packages. These packaging scripts are now even hosted in the open for more community interaction. With two new driver options that will be formally introduced next month in Ubuntu's packaging scripts for the Catalyst 8.02 Linux driver, the installation process of the ATI fglrx driver on Ubuntu will become several steps easier.

This quick and painless tutorial will show how to forward your GNOME session from your Linux box to another computer, via SSH and X11 Forwarding. I have found out along the way that X11 forwarding seems quicker then a traditional VNC connection and has better integration. Better security and (what seems like) quicker response times are just one of the benefits of using SSH.

Today we will go through how to easily add a new (or old) hard drive to our server. We will specifically be using a Slackware box that serves up apache and a few others, but the principals remain essentially the same for another linux box such as Ubuntu. So we have run low on diskspace on our webserver since the addition of Gallery2 and need to add another hard drive to our setup. Our first drive was a 20GB drive that we will leave as the root (/) drive and will add a second 250GB ATA drive (western digital) to the mix.

Ingo Molnar posted amerge request for the latest git scheduler tree summarizing,"it contains various enhancements to the scheduler - find the full shortlog is below. 96 commits from 19 authors - scheduler developers have been busy again. :-/" He added,"the scheduling behavior of the kernel to normal users should not change over v2.6.24, but there are a good number of new features and enhancements under the hood." Ingo went on to list a number of these new features, including:"Various instrumentation and debugging enhancements from Arjan van de Ven; Peter Zijlstra's RT time limit and RT throttling code for the RT scheduling class; Paul E. McKenney's preemptible RCU code; refcount based CPU-hotplug rework by Gautham R Shenoy; there's serious interest in running RT tasks on enterprise-class hardware, so Steven Rostedt and Gregory Haskins wrote a large number of enhancements to the RT scheduling class and load-balancer; Peter Zijlstra's high-resolution scheduler tick code; [...] and a good number of other, smaller enhancements."read more

The GPL v3 growth for this week is consistent with our average growth rate. As of January 25th, the GPL v3 count is at 1579 GPL v3 projects, up 44 projects over the past week. The LGPL v3 list is growing slowly but steadily and is currently at 150 LGPL v3 projects, as compared to last weeks number of 148 LGPL v3 projects. Lastly, the GPL v2 or later count is at 6440 projects. The GPL v3 conversion is still averaging around 50 projects per week, with the last two weeks bringing in 56 and 44 projects.

The first beta, codenamed 'Ophrys', for Mandriva Linux 2008.1 is now available. Major new features in this pre-release include: new XML-based package meta-information system; out-of-the-box support for the multimedia keys present on many modern keyboards; Perl has been updated to 5.10; reverted to teTeX as the default TeX system; latest NVIDIA (169.09) and ATI (8.45.2) proprietary drivers; KDE 4.0.0 final available in the Cooker. The Coding Studio has screenshots.

The summary of points is this: He has a lot of issues with Ubuntu regarding integrity. He says they are similar to Fedora but make too many compromises...they “propagate the viewpoint that Open Source both violates intellectual property rights and is nothing more than a community of piracy.”

[The article does not cite anything resembling a real source--TC]

Classifying people is dangerous. The best and the worst have tried and failed. Classifying people has been one of the core evils in human history. It has been used as an excuse to murder, deport, mutilate, enslave, exile and torture people throughout time. It's what I've been calling "labeling" all the time.

biosdecode is a command line utility to parses the BIOS memory and prints information about all structures (or entry points) it knows of. The DMI table doesn’t only describe what the system is currently made of, it also can report the possible evolutions such as the fastest supported CPU or the maximal amount of memory supported. In this tip you will learn about decoding BIOS data (dumping a computer’s DMI ) and getting all information about computer hardware without rebooting the server.

The Eee PC has captured a lot of attention for destroying its competition, but it does not meet the needs of an everyday computer. This is why Linux needs a good alternative to the regular laptops.

Take a good look at the Official IBM home for information about the Green mainframe transformation, and how you can use the mainframe to save data center energy and cost.

One of the main reasons people move from Windows to Linux is the promise of greater security from malware on the Internet. Everyone knows you need to add extra security to try to keep a Windows desktop safe, but what do you have to do to accomplish the same thing on Linux? To answer that question, we asked a number of well-known Linux kernel hackers and a security expert for their thoughts on the matter.

Over the past few days several of you have suggested that I take a look at the new KDE 4 for Windows. Well, yesterday I downloaded the installer and took a look - and I’m pretty impressed by what I’ve seen so far. KDE stands for K Desktop Environment and this is free software that provides an easy to use and application rich desktop environment. KDE’s origins are rooted in Linux but the latest release brings with it support for both Windows and Mac.

And so it begins. One challenge Dell has had over time is getting the right lists of hardware included in the right Linux packages. Today's example - monitors. Dell, over the years, has by my count sold 197 different monitor types, and releases several more each month. We'd like to see those monitors appear in the drop-down list of your favorite Linux monitor configuration tools.