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Developers of the XDA Forum found a simple hack to gain access to root privileges on the Android platform of G1 mobile phones. The result is the potential of installing and using native Linux applications on the G1 and messing things up in the process.

Open source multimedia specialist Collabora is hiring developers to work on the nonlinear video editor PiTiVi. The Cambridge, UK-based company contributes heavily to the GStreamer media framework and other GStreamer-dependent projects, so PiTiVi is a natural fit -- and it fills a sorely needed niche on the Linux desktop. PiTiVi is a GTK+ video editor written primarily in Python and available under the LGPL. It uses GStreamer for audio and video processing, and the Gnonlin editing components. PiTiVi maintainer Edward Hervey is a Collabora employee, and the company employs another PiTiVi hacker part-time to focus on user interface improvements.

Microsoft announced a new program the other day called Microsoft BizSpark, where they give away a boat load of software and services to young startups and presumably lock them into Microsoft long-term. For a small start-up with little capital, this has to be a very attractive offer, but think be for you take the offer.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, November 5, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include a new president for the United States of America, your tax dollars at work avoiding the benefits of FOSS, an open source election at OpenSUSE, a new legal challenge to the RIAA's anti-piracy campaign, and more good Linux news on the netbook front.

Linux Magazine is broadcasting a live stream from the UKUUG Linux Conference in Manchester, UK (November 7 through 9). It's the yearly event of the UK's Unix & Open Systems User Group. The UKUUG Linux Conference will cover a variety of subjects, including kernel and desktop development, tools, applications, networking and security.

Last week we published Ubuntu 7.04 to 8.10 benchmarks from a Lenovo ThinkPad T60 and had found Ubuntu's performance degraded peculiarly over the past year and a half. We then published Fedora 7 to 10 benchmarks covering the same time-frame and from the same exact Intel notebook computer, but the newer releases of Fedora were only marginally slower in a few tests. In our performance exploration of Ubuntu we now have additional tests to publish this morning. This time around we're switching out the hardware we're testing on to Intel's newer Core 2 series and we're comparing the performance of the x86 and x86_64 editions of Ubuntu 8.10 against Apple's Mac OS X 10.5.5 operating system.

Sun and IBM launch project and repository of code to make OpenDocument Format application development easier.

Battle of the Browsers postings are nothing new, but usually are based upon the opinion of a single reviewer. However, if there were cash prizes to uncover bugs in Chrome, FireFox 3.1 and IE8 you might get a broader and more interesting view. Welcome to the Browser Bug Battle...

If you're looking to run a serious open source collaboration server, Yahoo's Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) should be on your short list. This Web 2.0 email and groupware server offers AJAX Web-based administrator and user interfaces, a variety of useful groupware features, and email import functionality. ZCS comes in five versions. The Open Source Edition, which is the one I tried, doesn't have all the features of the others, but it's purely open source.

This document describes how you can configure a Debian Etch system for IPv6 so that a) it can connect to other IPv6 hosts and b) other IPv6 hosts can connect to it. IPv6 should become more important in the future as recent estimates assume that there will be no more IPv4 addresses left by 2010 or 2011. Therefore it's time time to learn IPv6.

In an intriguing interview with kernel developer, Greg Kroah-Hartman, he says he has evidence that Linux now supports more devices than any other operating system. In the lengthy interview, he talks about why this is true now, and how hardware suppliers and open source developers can work together to bring more peripherals to life.

A new release of IBM's Lotus Symphony office suite brings the software to a wider audience with a beta for Mac OS X and a full version for Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Can Symphony take a significant share of the office suite market from OpenOffice and Microsoft, or is the company's attempt to compete merely an Irrelevant Business Move?

3 more things you should know as a Linux Administrator. Do you know them? Since my "5 Things Every Good Linux Administrator Knows" post the other day, I've received some indirect feedback from friends and readers alike, that admittedly, leaves a little egg on my face. I left out three very important things that every good Linux administrator should know. I appreciate the feedback and I'm glad that my readers and those close to me feel enabled to let me know when I'm in error or at least falling short of a full delivery.

Maybe that Linux system sluggishness is being caused by the CPU? It's worth a look :) Yesterday, we took a look at some useful commands to help identify memory bottlenecks in Linux. More specifically, we were looking at SUSE 9.x. We're going to use the same Linux version today (for our examples), although - again - much of this stuff translates fairly simply to other distro's.

Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf. I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

In times of YouTube and Co., a free video codec offers a good base for video enjoyment on the Internet -- independent from the interests of commercial providers. After a long development and some criticism, Ogg/Theora seems to be getting there. Yesterday saw the release of codec version 1.0, with Ogg in container format.

openSUSE 11.1 is moving ever closer to its December release date. The fourth beta release became available Monday, with some new bug fixes, updated versions of GNOME, Banshee and the kernel, and webcam support re-enabled. One of the changes long time openSUSE users will notice right away is the new YaST disk partitioner.

Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. It has ability to run add-on scripts written in any scripting language. This tutorial explains how to open a shell prompt or gnome-terminal at the current location while browsing directories and files via nautilus Linux / UNIX Gnome file manager.

Could Microsoft become the next Consolidated Edison? It could happen.

The openSUSE project has a new board, and the new board has big plans. The distribution's first board was appointed by Novell in November 2007, tasked with the unusual job of "bootstrapping" a community-elected board that could guide the project with a balance of Novell and non-Novell influence. Less than a year later, that community-elected board is now in place, and looking forward to its new role. Pascal Bleser was on the bootstrap board, and took part in laying the groundwork for the new, permanent board election process. "We first initiated the creation of Guiding Principles that were primarily driven by Cornelius Schumacher (who happens to also be on the current KDE e.V. board of directors) but discussed on our opensuse-project mailing list, growing with the input of community members.