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If you've been following the current rift in the Linux community between Linus Torvalds and his minions squaring off against Con Kolivas and the mainstream Linux fanatics, you probably know that it's getting quite heated.

This past week was marked by the release of the NVIDIA 100.14.19 display driver for Linux and Solaris, which was the first alternative OS driver release from this Santa Clara company in about three months. The public change-log is quite lengthy and finally delivered on fixing the GeForce 8 performance regression. In our GeForce 8800GTS Linux tests, the performance fix was very evident. However, now that we have had the time to run more extensive tests with the GeForce 8 series and this new driver, we have found not everything to be smooth sailing.

Computers in the European Union should be sold without a bundled operating system, according to this submission to the European Commission. It says that the bundling of Microsoft Windows with computers is not in the public interest, and prevents meaningful competition in the operating system market.

LXer Feature: 23-Sept-2007

Some of the big stories this week include: A non-profit that refurbishes computers with FOSS get hassled by the EPA, Microsoft wants in on the OLPC, SCO blames Linux for having to file for Chapter 11 and IBM joins up with OpenOffice.org and then releases its own free office suite. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

This document describes how to set up Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) on Debian Etch. For this tutorial I chose Ubuntu v7.04 as a backup-client. The resulting system provides a flexible backup system with many features. It will be able to back up multiple hosts via network to various devices. I chose the disk based backup for this howto.

Setup CUPS (Common UNIX Printing System) Server and Client in Debian

Sometimes I just gotta wonder about GNU/Linux and wi-fi...Maybe you can help.

Howto Set Flickr images as Ubuntu desktop wallpaper

Military tacticians often bewail the havoc that the "fog of war" (i.e., the inability to communicate effectively amid the chaos of the battlefield) wreaks on their carefully laid plans. About 10 days ago I tried to do a bit of fog cutting when I posed a few questions at Microsoft's Jason Matusow's blog .

We decide to take a fast ride on Mandriva 2008 RC2. We looked at the KDE version of this Linux distribution that was released on September 21 2007. Screenshots of KDE plus flash videos of both the KDE desktop as well as the GNOME.

Every Unix system offers several useful commands for finding files and searching them for strings. Together with programming techniques such as streams, pipes, redirections, and regular expressions they comprise very powerful tools ideal for administrative tasks.

JeOS is the latest buzz word in virtualization, however the concept itself is nothing new. Turns out that system administrators have been "hip" for awhile now, as juicing is something very similar to building a chroot environment!

Build an Eclipse plug-in that allows users to manipulate and navigate the content of an Eclipse Modeling Framework-based model.

Holonyx Inc. announced its Partner Program to provide Linux support and open source software support to Value Added Resellers and System Integrators. This program will allow Holonyx Partners to expand the technology solutions they offer to their customers by implementing fully supported open source solutions in their customer accounts.

The thinking seems to go something like this. Linux has to succeed broadly on the desktop as an alternative to Windows because:

* It’s a good way to support development of the OS and its attendant applications. People are more likely to invest in an existing success story than one that’s struggling.
* Linux is a technologically better system and it deserves to win.
* Someone has to stand up to bully-boy Microsoft

Remember Ubuntu Lite? The lighter-than-Xubuntu, more-graphical-than-Fluxbuntu variant of Ubuntu seemed about to get off the ground last year. Then it disappeared. In that time, Fluxbuntu has floundered, too. And while Xubuntu has never looked better and generally runs pretty well, I'd like to see Ubuntu play in the space occupied by Puppy, Damn Small Linux, DeLi and AntiX.

Matt LaPlante reported that there's currently 151,809 bytes of trailing white space in the Linux kernel, requiring a 15 megabyte patch to remove it all. Andi Kleen argued that the white space didn't much matter, "you don't actually save anything on disk on most file systems (essentially everything except reiserfs on current Linux) because all files are rounded to block size (normally 4K). Same in page cache. And in tar files bzip2/gzip is very good at compacting them."

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q2 2007, covering April, May and June 2007. Topics covered include the three scheduled developer meetings of the quarter (for Akonadi, ODF, and Oxygen) and reports from the Marketing Working Group, Human Computer Interaction Working Group, and System Administration Team. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.

Gartner declared open-source software the biggest disruptor the software industry has ever seen and postulated it will eventually result in cheaper software and new business models. Open-source products accounted for a 13 percent share of the $92.7 billion software market in 2006, but should account for 27 percent of the market in 2011 when revenue is expected to be $169.2 billion, according to Gartner research.

XMLTABLE is one of the most powerful functions in the SQL/XML standard and is available in DB2 9 for Linux, Unix, Windows, and z/OS. In part 1 of this two-part series you learned how to use XMLTABLE to retrieve XML data in relational format, how to deal with repeating or missing XML elements, and how to handle namespaces. Part 2 describes common XMLTABLE usage scenarios, such as shredding XML into relational tables, and producing hybrid XML-relational storage of your XML documents.