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In the last few weeks and months, there have been some very interesting articles and discussions on iTWire about Linux, Windows and Mac OS and their relative merits. Here's my take on why I think that Linux will ultimately succeed, though don't be afraid the timeline is still pretty long!

Over the course of the past few months we have been saying that the NVIDIA 180 Linux driver to be released in the fourth quarter of 2008 would hold in store a few interesting features. Well, today that closed-source driver has been released in beta form. This driver adds a new VDPAU API, which provides PureVideo-like features on Linux, adds in CUDA 2.1 support, new workstation performance optimizations, X Render improvements, and other improvements.

m0n0wall is a popular, specialized implementation of FreeBSD + ipfilter designed for routers and firewalls. This Tip introduces us to its friendly natural-language ipfilter rules syntax, which has all the power and flexibility of iptables, but is much easier to understand.

Hi All, Here's my third tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series: "You want to enable logging via syslog or syslog-ng for your directory server"..

Ever wonder how people are creating all these cool Linux Appliances that you hear about? Now, you can know too--and create your own.

Mantis is that rare bug-tracking program for small projects that is neither too bloated nor too featureless. It's an excellent choice for developers who need a bug tracker that the average computer user can use. Its clean interface and numerous features make bug tracking fast and easy.

An Estonian embedded design house has developed a data-collection barcode scanner and PDA with an OLED display. Billed as the first OLED-equipped mobile terminal device, Artec's Triskan TS8 Professional Mobile Terminal runs embedded Linux on an ARM processor, and includes Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS, with optional WiFi.

Before attempting to convert Friend to Linux, there are some major tweaks you need to do. If you already done these tweaks and living by them then good for you, if not then doing this is a MUST: First of all you need to have a Friend first to convert before attempting to convert. And in order to have a Friend you need to have a Life right? Let me try to make it simpler for you my fellow geek: Now you have a package named whatever-3.42.tar.gz, what will you do? Untar it, then configure, make, make install right? But you will need a compiler first right? Now think of Life as your compiler, all of us have Life, but we need to recompile Life first using the -lessgeek and -moreoutgoing flags in order to create Life suitable for Friend.

A title like that is bound to get your attention, now that I have it, I would like to say something to all of the Linux enthusiasts out there. Now I ask you, how many times have you talked to a Windows user about Linux this year? Was there any result from your enthusiastic pitch: i.e. did anyone install Linux? Often we don't know. The problem is, without giving someone a tangible item to remember your conversation and or to take action with, we may have wasted time and energy.

Sun Microsystems Inc. plans to cut up to 6,000 jobs, or 18 percent of its global work force, as sales of its high-end computer servers have collapsed. The drastic move announced Friday highlights Sun's desperation to cut costs and survive as an independent company. Sun's shares have fallen so steeply they've crossed an ominous threshold, driving the company's market value below its cash on hand. That means investors believe the company itself is essentially worthless.

dmidecode is a tool for dumping a computer's DMI (some say SMBIOS) table contents in a human-readable format. This table contains a description of the system's hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information such as serial numbers and BIOS revision. Thanks to this table, you can retrieve this information without having to probe for the actual hardware.

Linux users have a myriad of calculators and unit conversion tools at their disposal. To set itself apart, Frink aims to track units for you and give you a way to quickly perform little conversions and real-world calculations without burdening you with needless details.

What is it about Novell? It's almost as if the company is determined to make itself unpopular with Linux users. The latest big announcement from Novell is that it has a new programme in place to lure Red Hat and Cent OS users across to its Suse Linux Enterprise Server. The company says it is planning on offering a three year subscription to its own Linux product for customers who make the switch.

Earlier this week we had published ATI benchmarks of the open-source Mesa stack and X.Org in the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 7.04. While the open-source graphics drivers have matured a lot over the past eighteen months and many new features have been added, the ATI performance with an R430 GPU really hadn't improved in the newer releases. To see if the open-source Intel situation is any different, we have carried out similar tests with an Intel 945G Chipset across the past four Ubuntu releases.

Black Duck Software, which services managed and secure implementations of open source software, just had a phenomenal third quarter, with quarterly bookings for its services up 62 percent. There were some other strong metrics for the company as well. This company has a shrewd approach toward the growing open source arena, participating in growth as many disparate kinds of projects are adopted, and the need for open source auditing rises. Here's what they've done right, and why more success may lie ahead.

Some quick steps to resolve a few basic issues with VCS faults. For the end of the week, we're going to continue with the theme of sparse-but-hopefully useful information. Quick little "crib sheets" (preceding by paragraphs and paragraphs of stilted ramblings by the lunatic who pens this blog's content ;) For this Friday, we're going to come back around and take a look at Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) troubleshooting.

I was talking with a pal of mine yesterday out back in his workshop. He was making a beautiful piece of furniture and I was going on about the world which, of course, eventually led to a discussion of computer operating systems, open source, that kind of thing.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, November 13, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. In today's news, I cover gift notebooks for children, competition for Linux servers from Redmond, a war that pits Linux against Linux (friend against friend), a bizarro-like world, and proof that Google is always interesting. Oh, and I forgot to turn on the studio lights.

So here we are. Home prices and incomes are falling, foreclosures are rising, layoffs are multiplying, and wealth is evaporating. Everyone is looking for signs of stability, but each new day brings new despair and uncertainty. Amidst the reckoning, it's hard to imagine the future, but regardless, it will arrive soon enough.

Earlier this week we had published ATI benchmarks of the open-source Mesa stack and X.Org in the Ubuntu releases going back to Ubuntu 7.04. While the open-source graphics drivers have matured a lot over the past eighteen months and many new features have been added, the ATI performance with an R430 GPU really hadn't improved in the newer releases. To see if the open-source Intel situation is any different, we have carried out similar tests with an Intel 945G Chipset across the past four Ubuntu releases.