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I was thinking of ignoring the Black Friday sales this year as it's annoying to have to get up really early, stand in line freezing for hours, fight my way into the store along with a few hundred other people, get 1/10th of what I wanted, then spend another hour in the check-out line. But then I spent Wednesday night stuck at my office because a large snowstorm had blocked all the roads and they weren't be plowed out until the following afternoon. So to pass the time I started checking out the leaked BF advertisements to see what was available and I decided to try my luck at the Staples store in Alpena.

A good how-to on getting dx9c working under wine. For linux gamers we know that this is a major headache for us. Now we can snag some of those games that we have relegated to the *sigh* windows only stack and fire them up with little to no problems. ~Az

It seems like Novell’s role in GNOME is not healthy to GNOME’s existence (let alone the success of ODF), to say the very least. Only yesterday, we delved deeper into the connections between Microsoft and Novell, which desperately needs Microsoft’s money. It is worth stressing that Novell should be approached very cautiously by the Free software world.

Last week NVIDIA introduced the 169.04 Beta Linux driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. What we had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

The GNOME Foundation has issued a statement in response to recent accusations that it has been supporting the acceptance of Microsoft's Office Open XML format (OOXML) as an ECMA standard at the expense of the Open Document Format (ODF), the open standard used by OpenOffice.org, KOffice and other free software office applications. However, whether the statement's attempt at logical rebuttal will do anything to reduce the emotions or altruism behind the criticisms is anybody's guess.

Sometimes getting a grasp on what Open Source is and how it can be leveraged is difficult. There are many facets of Open Source, however, the two most interesting points of Open Source are: Direct cost savings from Open Source software. Slight difference in support models. In part one of the series, a generalized look at the costs and savings of Open Source. Story.

People are a funny lot. One person’s trash is another person’s treasure. And one person’s primary means of instructing a computer is met with disdain by another. There’s a perennial battle between mousers and keyboard jockeys, and “what’s in” appears to go in cycles.

Strategic Test has announced the World’s smallest Freescale i.MX27 processor-based System on Module (SOM). Called the TX27, it measures just 67.6 x 26 x 4.2 mm (2.6” x 1” x 0.16”) and contains an 400 MHz i.MX27 processor coupled with 64 MB mobile DDR-SDRAM (expandable to 128 MByte), 128 MB NAND Flash memory, a wide operating temperature range of –20 degree C to +85 degree C and a 200 pin SODIMM connector.

Many people have suggested that I submit some of my many aerial photos to Google Earth. I'd love to do that, but after looking at the instructions for adding photos, especially the "acceptance policy", I have to wonder if it's worth the effort, or even the Right Thing To Do. First, I have to upload photos into Paroramio, which was bought by Google earlier this year.. Since I've already uploaded 17,310 photos into my Flickr account, I'm not in the mood to do that again, least of all into a silo'd service — which Panoramio appears to be, while Flickr is not... at least not as much as Panoramio.

The Society of Imaging Informatics in Medicine recently released a special edition of the Journal of Digital Imaging focused on open source. While they are published in Springer, all the articles on major open source packages in imaging informatics are open access. SIIM saw it fitting that open source articles shouldn't be locked into a proprietary publisher.

We are now on the home stretch of the road to KDE 4.0, but KDE still needs extensive user testing to make sure everything arrives in the best possible shape for the release. There is a pressing need for users to be able to get hold of very up-to-date builds of KDE, especially if they want to participate in Krush days and pick up last-minute regressions, confirm proposed fixes, and avoid re-reporting recently fixed bugs, preferably without having to wait for their chosen distro to provide packages. KDE4Daily VM aims to provide such a service.

This is a detailed description about setting up an Ubuntu based server (Ubuntu 7.10) to act as file- and printserver for Windows(tm) workstations in small workgroups. This howto uses the tdb backend for SAMBA to store passwords and account information. This is suitable for workgroups for up to 250 users and is easier to set up than an LDAP backend.

Although some companies and government agencies have embraced open source, the level of adoption in Singapore is still low by most counts, industry observers say. According to Red Hat, open source adoption has grown over the years in Singapore--but not at a rate where it can or should be.

Use of the Linux operating system on desktop machines is continuing to grow with small and medium business showing the most enthusiasm for the open source software.

Skype recently released Skype 2.0 beta for Linux, which includes the ability to make video calls, a feature the Windows and Mac versions have had for some time. I tried the beta on two systems running Ubuntu 7.10 -- my desktop PC with a USB webcam and a MacBook Pro with its onboard iSight webcam -- with mixed results. Probably the hardest part of using Skype or any other VoIP application as a video phone is finding a webcam that is supported on Linux. As I noted in my review of the Ekiga videophone earlier this year, the Creative Labs Ultra NX works flawlessly.

The chapter on installing Blender was somewhat descriptive. It told me where the archive files were stored on the CD, but no actual installation instructions. I looked in vain for further hints and tips but none were to be found. As an old Debian hand now running Ubuntu on the desktop, I opened a terminal and a quick sudo apt-cache search blender later, I found that I could get the software directly installed from the apt system (yafray was also recommended and I installed it as well). No muss, no fuss. (Note to author: please include this fact in the 2nd edition. Thanks). The process for installing on Windows and MAC is different but you Windows and MAC users will have to discover it from the book since I'm only evaluating the text from a Linux point of view.

There are many dots to connect and many past discussions to combine, so this post will contain many pointers and hints, essentially leaving interpretation to the reader. Whatever you make of this, it seems safe to conclude that we find patterns here.

While the mobile Linux community has reacted positively to Google's Android, the new platform has also given it some cause for concern. The arrival of a giant player area with very clear ideas of role it wants mobile Linux to fill was bound to ruffle a few feathers and, despite public proclamations of "welcome" and "support", the Linux establishment is showing a few cracks.

I followed the story from the very first announcement of the SCO lawsuits against GNU/Linux users(who also happen to be their customers). After reading the latest sound bite from this companies CEO that ruined itself with a flawed (understatement) business model. I realized that this story parallels another one so perfectly it is almost frightening. It can truly be said that if you ever doubted that history repeats itself doubt no more...

In this Thanksgiving Day issue of the Nouveau Companion, the Nouveau team goes over what's left to do for a 2D stable driver release, the current work being done on the driver, and an assortment of Gallium3D and RandR 1.2 work. The stable 2D Nouveau driver wasn't announced in this issue, but it's coming soon.