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"The GoblinX Project is proud to announce the second release of the next G:Mini. The G:Mini 3.0 rc01 (2.9.90) is released.

It has been a while since last mentioning the Creative X-Fi sound cards at Phoronix, but it's not because the Linux support is all nice and working now that Creative open-sourced their X-Fi driver, but rather things have stalled. The X-Fi sound cards still are a sore spot on Linux and there isn't "out of the box" support in major Linux distributions.

Novell shipped SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 on March 24. The really interesting part of the story involves two related projects — called Mono and Just enough Operating System (JeOS). Indeed, Mono and JeOS could give SUSE Linux 11 a lift with software developers, Microsoft .Net customers and partners. Here’s the scoop.

Good morning my fellow Admins, Engineers, Scripters, Programmers, etc..... YOU GET THE IDEA :). For the past week, I have been learning all about the CIM and WBEM API. Since I am working alot more then I have ever have with VMware. I am trying to automate as much as possible with out using Perl. Now please do not think I am hating on Perl, it is not that at all, it is just the fact that I love Python, thats all! That being said here is the 1st part in a 2 part series on Listing Virtual Machines using Pywbem in Python. I the 1st part I will show you how to list Virtual Machines and data related to those VMs. Example Below...

Security researchers have identified a sophisticated piece of malware that corrals consumer routers and DSL modems into a lethal botnet. The "psyb0t" worm is believed to be the first piece of malware to target home networking gear, according to researchers from DroneBL, which bills itself as a real-time monitor of abusable internet addresses. It has already infiltrated an estimated 100,000 hosts. It has been used to carry out DDoS, or distributed denial of service, attacks and is also believed to use deep-packet inspection to harvest user names and passwords.

The disclosure that Red Hat have applied for a patent on what might strike some as an obscure corner of the software ecosystem has caused others to re-evaluate how open and collaborative Red Hat actually are. As the AMQP 1.0 standard entered into its final phase, a 2007 Red Hat patent application, the company now refers to as a "defensive" patent, on an obvious extension of AMQP, was automatically disclosed and caused quite stir. What is AMQP, why is it important, what has Red Hat done to cause a ruckus within the AMQP community, and what does it mean to open source in general.

"Tux Fleets of USB Keys to Boldly Go Where No Windows Has Gone Before", by Hung Chao-Kuei, is an excellent read all full of good insights, like "Microsoft is afraid of Linux-bootable usb keys" and "We shouldn't really care about what MS thinks. We should just mind our own business and boldly go where no windows has gone before." Wise advice! It is an excellent article and an enjoyable read.

Commercial Linux distributor Novell today takes the wraps off SUSE Linux 11, its riff on Linux for servers and desktops that now sports a commercially supported extension for the Mono runtime environment and a variant that provides high availability clustering of servers. The Mono Extension to SUSE Linux is the first time that Novell has offered commercial support for the Mono runtime, which allows applications that are coded in C# and using the .NET Framework to run atop non-Windows platforms. Novell bought into the open source Mono project when it acquired Ximian, the company behind Mono as well as the Gnome graphical user interface, back in the summer of 2003. That's a long time for Novell to take to get Mono commercial, but better late than never.

The latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise, Novell Inc.'s commercial distribution of the open-source operating system, bears more fruit from Novell's controversial two-and-a-half-year-old interoperability alliance with Microsoft Corp. One version of SUSE Linux Enterprise 11, what Novell likes to call SLE 11, will allow companies to run applications built with Microsoft's .Net platform to work on Linux without recompiling them. That version, called Mono Extension, even runs on IBM's System z, enabling IBM'S mainframe computers to run .Net apps.

VLC (VideoLAN Client) is one of the most popular video players on Linux, together with players like SMPlayer or Kaffeine. It plays many audio and video formats (including Xvid, DivX, H.264, Theora, WMV, Real Video, Ogg, MP3, FLAC, APE, AC3, WAV) together with DVDs and DVD ISO images. The version which comes included in the Debian Lenny repositories is 0.8.6h, which uses the wxWidgets kit and it is kind of outdated now. The latest release of VLC is 0.9.8a, which is now built in Qt 4 and includes several improvements over the 0.8.x series.

With NetworkManager 0.7, which can be found in most modern Linux distributions already, there is "out of the box" support for many mobile broadband / cellular cards in this excellent network management utility. Most SM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HDSPA, HSUPA, and EVDO devices can then provide an Internet connection to a Linux host usually with the click of a menu item from the NetworkManager plug-in. However, not all mobile broadband devices play well with Linux right now.

Novell today is rolling out the newest edition of its flagship enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 11 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 11. The new releases are the first major updates since the SLES and SLED 10 releases in July of 2006. With SLES 11, Novell is also providing a baseline image so software vendors can easily build appliances. The concept is something know as a JeOS (Just enough Operating System) and has been trumpeted by Novell as the future of operating systems. "We designed SLES 11 to be ubiquitous, to run in physical, virtual and cloud models," Steinman said.

Oracle is not buying Red Hat The rumor mill has it that Oracle may be buying Red Hat. Don't believe it. All it took was one mention that Oracle might do well to own Red Hat, but that the timing wasn't right, by Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert for people to start talking up Oracle buying Red Hat. Folks, it's not going to happen. IBM will buy Sun. Oracle buying Red Hat? No. This isn't the first time that Egbert has dreamed up fantasies of Oracle buying Red Hat in the minds of silly investors. She was wrong then. She's wrong now. Why? The reasons why it didn't make sense in 2006 are still the reasons the move makes no sense today.

This article is a short overview of how to use apt-pinning on Debian and Debian-based distributions (like Ubuntu). Apt-Pinning allows you to use multiple releases (e.g. stable, testing, and unstable) on your system and to specify when to install a package from which release. That way you can run a system based mostly on the stable release, but also install some newer packages from testing or unstable (or third-party repositories).

This article is part of the first-person shooter games reviews I'm putting up. Until now I talked about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, ioQuake3, UT2004, Nexuiz and OpenArena. I will dedicate this edition entirely to Urban Terror, a great first-person shooter game which was initially developed as a Quake 3 mod and evolved into a powerful and fast standalone game.

Think open source and you might think many things, but I doubt very much that banking will be towards the top of the list or even on the radar for that matter. Yet the concept of a hacker bank to fund open source projects is exactly what has come out of discussions between a couple of open source hardware nuts, Justin Huynh and Matt Stack, who have now started the Open Source Hardware Central Bank.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating "women excelling in technology." There are plenty of women contributing to free software, but where are the well-known ones that code at a high level, rather than run foundations like Mozilla's Mitchell Baker or GNOME's Stormy Peters? And what can we do to nurture more of them?

Earlier this week, Psystar released yet another Mac clone -- choosing to ignore the copyright infringement lawsuit pending against it in federal court in San Francisco. InformationWeek's Antone Gonzalves points out that the move is a risky one given that Apple is asking the court to require the Florida-based startup to recall the clones it has sold. Never mind the compatibility problems that could crop up running OSX on non-Apple hardware.

Debian Lenny comes with Wine 1.0.1 included in the repositories, which is the stable release of Wine, but it is also a little outdated. Here are a few easy steps for compiling and installing the latest Wine release from source in Debian Lenny. This tutorial should work for the latest Wine release (at the time of writing, the last release is 1.1.17).

You may be running non-free programs on your computer every day without realizing it—through your web browser. In the free software community, the idea that non-free programs mistreat their users is familiar. Some of us refuse entirely to install proprietary software, and many others consider non-freedom a strike against the program. Many users are aware that this issue applies to the plug-ins that browsers offer to install, since they can be free or non-free.