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In this edition of the Nouveau Companion, covered is the status of this open-source NVIDIA display driver and what went on at FOSDEM with the Nouveau project status and combining LLVM with Gallium3D. Recently the Nouveau developers have been successful in using EXA acceleration on newer GeForce 9 graphics cards, backlight controls working on more NVIDIA graphics cards, and a port of the Nouveau driver to FreeBSD. Work on kernel mode-setting and proper kernel memory management is also underway.

The U.S. Constitution makes a point of guarding against tyranny through a series of checks and balances. The software market, it turns out, is no different. Or, rather, it could turn out to be that way. Windows has stood alone for over a decade as the dominant operating system for personal computers, and had a growing lock on the server, too. But then Linux happened, and Apple's Mac OS X is increasingly spoiling the Windows party, too (though some recent data suggests that Microsoft's "I'm a PC" marketing may have actually paid off).

Despite ongoing wrangles in court with Apple computer, upstart OS X-based computer manufacturer Psystar has introduced a new desktop model. Psystar's the company that, back in April 2008, started selling its own computers with Mac OS X preinstalled. Apple sued in July 2008, arguing that the OS X end-user license forbids its installation by third parties. Psystar has argued that the company acquired its copies of OS X legally and that the license agreement is unenforceable.

In my last article on OpenStreetMap I looked at the recent mass imports of public data — everything from British oil wells to the entire road network for the United States. But for those interested in more than an alternative to Google Maps, the ability to extract or add data to the project is what really makes OpenStreetMap shine. Whether you want to get an SVG of a campus map or import a local government's database of every building in the city, Linux users will find plenty of tools that cater to their needs.

IBM's reported interest in buying Sun Microsystems Inc. has Java and open-source community members expressing both hopes and worries about the implications of such a deal for the tools, applications and open-source projects they use every day. IBM is willing to pay at least $6.5 billion for Sun, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday that cited anonymous sources. While analysts said a deal would make strategic sense for both companies -- such as by providing a stronger sales channel for Sun's software and a large installed base of Sun server customers for IBM -- some of the talk in the Java world's trenches is not so sunny.

Pushed into the Jaunty repository this morning for Ubuntu 9.04 was a new theme for USplash. This Canonical project for providing a splash screen at boot-up on Ubuntu is being replaced by Plymouth with Ubuntu 9.10 (the Karmic Koala release), but there is a new Ubuntu theme as one last hurrah. This new USplash theme has a fixed-size Ubuntu logo centered in the middle of the display and a new progress bar. From our feelings at least, this new theme looks more professional than its predecessor, but it's not exactly a complete overhaul. Below is a video of this newly-pushed theme.

SINGAPORE--Local institute of learning, Republic Polytechnic, has partnered IBM and Red Hat to groom IT professionals with expertise to meet rising adoption of open source software and mainframe virtualization. The institute has launched a new course that provides training on IBM's System z mainframe based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. At a media briefing Wednesday, Eden Liew, RP's deputy principal overseeing corporate services, said up to 150 students and 75 industry professionals are expected to be trained over the next three years.

Photographers in the Free world rejoice! On behalf of the Digikam developer team, Gilles Caullier has announced the first KDE 4 release of Digikam, the photo management application.

The first beta of Mozilla's Fennec mobile web browser has been released for Nokia's N810 Internet Tablets running OS2008 ("Maemo"). The beta is the twelfth development milestone and is intended to get feedback from users, testers and Web developers. The Fennec team also want to encourage add-on developers to port their existing add-ons and create new ones for the mobile browser.

Tux, the Linux penguin mascot, will be taking a break during the Linux 2.6.29 kernel cycle. Committed to the Linus's kernel tree last night is a new temporary logo known as Tuz. Tuz is a Tasmanian Devil, which is a species in danger of becoming extinct. The Tasmanian Devil is native to Australia and during this year's Linux.Conf.Au conference it was decided that Tuz will stand in for Tux for one kernel release in order to raise awareness for this creature. Tux will return with the release of the Linux 2.6.30 kernel.

The server market is shaping into a Linux vs. Windows battle as UNIX declines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is strong and growing. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), backed by Novell, should also be strong and growing, but it isn't as it continues the Novell tradition of continually getting whipped by Microsoft. Does SLES even have a reason to exist?

Gnome fans are today looking forward to the release of Gnome 2.26, the latest release of the popular desktop environment. New Gnome releases are always worthy of attention, particularly as they become the face of popular distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora in the following months, but as a long-time user of Gnome there does seem to be less to be excited about than ever before. Sure, there are changes to the Gnome Media Player and some new icons and a little bit more polish, but it’s not the stuff that will have users falling over themselves to download a copy.

Linux is losing ground on the netbook front, but there lies opportunity for it in smaller, dedicated Internet-enabled appliances, said an Ovum analyst. Laurent Lachal, open source research director at the U.K.-based analyst firm, said in a research note, Linux is not doing as well in terms of market share, compared to when it made its debut on the netbook market.

CompuLabs is a month from shipping what may be the smallest, most energy-efficient PC ever. The Fit-PC2 is based on an Atom processor up to 1.6GHz, and can be ordered with Ubuntu 8.04 pre-installed on a 160GB SATA drive or SSD.

Medscribbler electronic medical record (EMR) uses handwriting recognition on a Tablet PC for a HIPAA compliant computerized medical practice and document management solution. CEOMike writes: We are about to release in this coming quarter Medscribbler Open Source, initially on Sourceforge, which will have both code and compiled downloads Screen shots, videos and no obligation online demos are available

The current economic downturn is set to drive Linux adoption, according to a white paper by research organization IDC. In a survey of 330 organizations with 100 or more employees, IDC found that 53 percent were planning to increase adoption of Linux on servers, while 48 percent were planning to increase Linux on clients, as a direct result of the economic climate. The survey was conducted in February, and the white paper published on Monday.

The chief executive of HTC said his company, which was the first to launch an Android phone with the G1, will roll out at least three more this year. The HTC Magic is one; it's scheduled to be sold by Vodafone in Europe. What the others are isn't quite clear yet.

With all the talk about newspapers worldwide facing financial pressures, the time now is right for tools that can be used to move newspaper content online. One such tool is Campsite, a open source content management system for print publications which this week announced a major new release.

A week ago at Phoronix we published an interview with the developers of FFmpeg (well, just three of their active developers) where topics from OpenCL to their release cycle to multi-threading support were discussed. Diego Biurrun, Baptiste Coudurier, and Robert Swain also talked about their version 0.5 milestone.

An IDC surveyPDF of IT decision makers suggests that the economic crisis is promoting the use of Linux in companies. A total of 330 decision makers in Western Europe, America and Asia responded to the Novell commissioned survey, which shows that a good half of the firms questioned are already using Linux servers.