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Tux is no mere drone -- he likes having fun every now and then. When it comes to gaming, open source tools and applications have a lot to offer developers, but that's not where it stops. Open source games themselves can be had for little or no cost, and a lot of them offer just as much baddy-blasting entertainment as proprietary titles.

I am pleased to announce the availability of LSB 4.0 Release Candidate 1. This version of LSB 4.0 has been put in the normal release directories, but IS ONLY A RELEASE CANDIDATE! In particular, certification is not yet open for LSB 4.0. We are continuing to use the previously-announced beta page for accessing information on LSB 4.0 prereleases.

GroundWork Open Source and Roaring Penguin Software Inc. are preparing a technology alliance to jointly serve VARs and managed service providers starting in January 2009, MSPmentor has learned. From my perspective, the anticipated deal will further legitimize open source in the managed services market. And it could accelerate GroundWork Open Source’s push into the IT channel. On the flip side, Roaring Penguin gains a growing partner that has been disrupting the corporate IT management market previously dominated by Hewlett-Packard OpenView, among others.

Video acceleration APIs for Linux has been a hot topic recently with NVIDIA having introduced VDPAU last month (the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) that brings PureVideo-like features to Linux with great results while it's already finding its way into MPlayer, FFmpeg, MythTV, Xine, and VLC. AMD has been working hard on XvBA (X-Video Bitstream Acceleration), but that has yet to be officially introduced. In the open-source realm there has been talk of extending XvMC to support video formats besides MPEG-2, but that hasn't yet amounted to anything. Today though another video API is now on scene with VA-API finally being implemented in MPlayer and FFmpeg.

Seasons greetings to one and all :)

You know, we were hoping for a Nokia knock-off to poke fun at this morning, but what we got instead was a comprehensive five page review of a vaguely N810-ish, Linux-based handheld called the MID-2008. The 4.3-inch, 800 x 480 touchscreen phone / media player features a 628MHz processor, 128MB RAM and supports a 16GB expansion card, WiFi and Bluetooth.

This post is more of an expansion, than a follow-up, to our May 2008 post on using who to find out what and when on Linux and Unix (picking only the options that appeared in most distro's version of "who"). It's also a bit more restrictive than our previous post, as we're restricting the discussion to newer Solaris' (8/9/10) implementation of the classic command.

I’ve been using Jungle Disk to do offsite backups of my data. Jungle Disk uses Amazon’s cheap online storage service, Amazon S3, to host backups. (15 cents a gig!) I don’t like Jungle Disk because it’s not open source and because the app is a little clunky, at least on Linux. I recently found that s3cmd could do an rsync-like sync of a directory. That’s cool, but it doesn’t do encrypted backups like Jungle Disk did. In this post, I’ll demonstrate how to make an encrypted backup of locally unencrypted data using EncFS, Amazon S3, and s3cmd.

Twhirl is a popular desktop twitter client based on the Adobe AIR platform. Adobe Labs have recently released an alpha version of the AIR platform for Linux. Linux users is now able to install the Twhirl easily.

Arduino is an inexpensive, easy-to-use electronics platform. The entire platform, both the hardware and the software, is completely open source, and the language is loosely based on C/C++. Arduino was built for makers, tinkerers, and artists who want to take the plunge into creating interactive physical objects. This three-part series starts with basic Arduino hardware and uses it to create an interactive laser game called "'Duino tag," where players can play tag using devices built nearly from scratch.

This morning I went to find the name of a piece of software through Add/Remove programs, only to find that there was only one category (”All”) and there were no applications listed at all. It took me less than 10 minutes to find and implement the solution, but I shouldn’t have to deal with this stuff. Worse, I find that these sorts of little problems are almost common. They don’t take long to fix, but they happen way too often. Not every day by any means, but still often enough to be annoying.

Electronics manufacturer Round Solutions presents the AarLogic C10/3, a breadboard which contains a complete Linux PC on a surface of just 104mm x 63mm. A Quad-band GPRS module and SiRF3 GPS module are also on board, as well as interfaces for USB, RS232 and Ethernet components. An SD-card reader enables the trouble-free expansion of the 4 Mb of RAM which comes as standard.

Intel has announced that the OpenSolaris variant of Unix is now better supported on its Atom processors. The Atom support is being positioned to bring the joys of x64 computing to netbooks and other low-power computing devices, and it offers some of the best performance/watt in processing these days. Sun Microsystems, which largely steers the OpenSolaris effort and will use the distro as the basis of the next generation of Solaris, wants to be among the greenest of IT vendors. It also wants to find a new niche for Solaris, as Linux has done superbly on netbooks this year.

Ext4 is the evolution of the most used Linux filesystem, Ext3. In many ways, Ext4 is a deeper improvement over Ext3 than Ext3 was over Ext2. Ext3 was mostly about adding journaling to Ext2, but Ext4 modifies important data structures of the filesystem such as the ones destined to store the file data. The result is a filesystem with an improved design, better performance, reliability and features .

[I found the link to this article on LWN in the thread talking about the new 2.6.28 kernel that Linus just released. Interesting stuff, 48bit addressing and a maximum filesystem size of 1 EB. 1 Exabyte? Wow! - Scott]

What’s the biggest secret to Red Hat’s success in a down economy? Plenty of pundits think it’s Linux and JBoss open source middleware. But The VAR Guy has another theory: One of Red Hat’s smartest moves is promoting a particularly influential magazine article about the company. No joke. Here's the scoop.

The Ext4 file system leaves its main development phase and will soon be ripe for productive use. Major renovation work on the code for memory and disk management promises GPU speed increases and better scalability. Hundreds of new and revised drivers improve hardware compatibility significantly.

Lanner Electronics has announced a space-saving, "half-rack" network appliance that runs Linux on a Core2Duo or Celeron M chip. Targeting network security and acceleration applications, the FW-7872 has five Ethernet ports, a serial port, two internal SATA ports, and two external SATA connectors, the company says.

Ah 2008, I hardly knew ye. Actually I knew ye quite well because there were certainly some personal Linux milestone moments. Profound? Hardly. Important? Personally, sure. Will they matter to you? Maybe not, but they might, just might, make you ponder your own 2008 Linux moments, compare them, and make you realize how important Linux has become to you. Enough with the intro. Let’s get on with the moments!

In the beginning, free software was an activity conducted on the margins - using spare time on a university's computers, or the result of lonely bedroom hacking. One of the key moments in the evolution of free software was when hackers began to get jobs - often quite remunerative jobs - with one of the new open source companies that sprang up in the late 1990s. For more or less the first time, coders could make a good salary doing what they loved, and businesses could be successful paying them to write code that would be given away.

Usually, when I write articles for Linux Journal, they are of a patently technical nature. This article is going to be quite a bit different. As we head into the Holiday Season and the start of a new year, I've begun to think about what I want to do in the next year, and what I wish I had done with this year. I've come up with a list of three things that I intend to do in the next year. I'm sharing them here in hopes that my list, and the reasoning behind it, will inspire you to make a similar list, and to accomplish great things in 2009. So here we go.