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Debian and SELinux developer Russell Coker did a nice comparison of Debian and Fedora. I’m often asked about that, even from companies, so if you need this to compare the different versions of Debian (from stable to unstable) with Fedora or RHEL or even CentOS, go ahead and read it.

While it's not as easy as apt-get update, apt-get upgrade in Debian/Ubuntu (or the Update Manager), there's something very sane about maintaining a Slackware box. For one thing, you know way more about what goes into it. One thing with Slackware -- it pays to read. Read the documentation, keep up with blogs and Web sites that write about Slack.

Built from the ground up to create identical output on both printer and screen—all in a cross-platform way—cairo is becoming a huge player in the Linux graphics space, as well as BSDs, Windows, and OSX platforms. Learn about cairo, a free software vector drawing library that can draw to multiple output formats.

This is our first look at Sabayon Linux 3.4f. This distro has an excellent KDE desktop and we have produced a small flash video to see Sabayon Linux 3.4f in action

In this blog post, i have a few minor updates along with one important message: I draw a parallel in an unexpected place to prove the point I'm raising concerning the promotion of Free and Open Source Software. We need numbers and we need to take action now. The time for debating the most effective methods is over. The overall message is simple: Just do something already.

Stefan Richter posted the IEEE1394 subsytem and FireWire subsystem TODO lists noting, "it seems also appropriate to disclose the current manpower behind FireWire driver development and maintenance. There are just two people who regularly work on the drivers: Kristian Høgsberg (author and maintainer of the new firewire subsystem, in the past also involved with the old ieee1394 subsystem) and me (co-maintainer of both the new and old subsystems). But we both have a lot of other projects going on at the moment."

Slackware provides security updates all the way back to version 8.1 along with 9.0, 9.1, 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, 11.0 and 12.0, so if there is a reason you're using an older version of Slack, it is still being supported by the distro's creator, Patrick Volkerding and his team. ... Slackware is still supporting version 8.1 a full five years after its release. That's the kind of commitment I like to see for a distribution. If you want to install it, you won't be left out in the cold if you want to stay with an older version that does what you want it to do.

When typewriters ruled the desktop, all paragraphs had a ragged right justification, with each line starting at the same position on the left, but with a variable right margin. Full justification -- lines whose left and right sides all ended in the same positions -- were the mark of professional typography, and beyond the means of the average user.

Tagua, a generic boardgame for KDE, is approaching version 1.0, and the developers decided it's time to get the word out on this exceptionally cool application by releasing a first Alpha.

Bharata Rao posted a query to the Linux Kernel mailing list looking for ideas on how to best handle filesystem namespace unification with Union Mount, "typically this is done by reading the directory entries of all the union'ed layers (starting from the top and working downwards) and merging the result by eliminating the duplicate entries. This is done by extending the getdents/readdir system calls to support the notion of union'ed directories."

One of the more humorous ad series today is the Geico "caveman" commercials, featuring a caveman complaining about the stereotype of something being "so easy a caveman could do it." Since we don't have to worry about offending cavemen (or cavewomen), companies can safely poke humor at that demographic group and not worry about alienating anyone. However, you might want to think twice about saying "it's so easy your mom can do it."

How easy is it to buy a Dell Ubuntu PC? Not as easy as you might imagine, and Dell is causing all the problems.

All week we have talked about the performance of the 8.41 display driver and the performance on various ATI graphics cards from the R300 series to the latest R600 graphics card. In some of these articles, we have briefly commented on the image quality, but in this article we will be looking exclusively at the image quality while gaming with the ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB under Linux.

What I wish to share is my excitement over the upcoming Ohio Linux Fest. I am not a Systems Administrator or a Programmer. I don't even work in the IT industry. I am excited about meeting some of the leaders of this community that I have become a member of. The guest list at this point is, to say the least, prestigious.

The new VirtualBox brings seamless virtualization to Linux. This puts Linux on par with the Mac - users can run their native desktop but still launch the odd Windows-only program when they need to. The VirtualBox manual doesn’t give much detail on the new feature, so here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of VirtualBox 1.5

You’ll all have seen and read by now about NetApp suing Sun for patent infringement. I’m not going to re-hash the arguments, but there are a couple of points of interest related to Sun’s patent strategy and open source. What occurs to me is that NetApp has gone out of its way to maintain that its patent claim is not an open source issue but an issue between two vendors about a technology that just happens to be open source. But ZFS is not an open source project.

So you have one of those sophisticated office printer models with adjustable guides that allow you to use any weird media size (with some sensible min/max value for width and height)? And you don't know how to tell CUPS to use that size when printing? (Ah... you don't have such a printer, and you are about to skip this article? Wait. The content may still be useful to you. See the last paragraph.)

A computer mouse is no longer a simple object as nowadays it may come in a variety of shapes and sizes, colors and tones, bigger and smaller and sporting exotic or more common features. Among the shapes that a computer mouse can take these days is the shape of a little happy penguin, looking especially for those Linux lovers out there. But, while this mouse is certainly cute and does not look half bad, I have to speak up my mind and say that it may be less than ergonomic or practical for that matter to the above average computer user.

IDF might have a tad more attention when it kicks off the week after next in San Francisco but Itanium loyalists will also get their moment in the sun soon when the Gelato ICE conference kicks off on 1 October in Singapore. This is a pretty specific show aimed at ISVs, SIs, developers and others that are working on big scale-up Linux-on-Itanium projects but two interesting things are likely to come out of the confab: a catch-up on the Itanium roadmap and developments in LinuxOnLinux, a project to support virtualisation on the chip.

[Huh? Is the "Itanic" still around? – Sander]

In a move which may raise eyebrows amongst the Linux developer community, Pieter Knook the CEO of the smartphone vendor, HTC has said that mobile Linux will face difficulties unless it gets support from a major long term partner - and named the company's own long term partnership with Microsoft as an example to follow.

[Here's some FUD to round off the week – Sander]