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While Linux desktop users have long been able to use Wi-Fi cards based on Atheros chip sets, they haven't been able to do so without using proprietary Atheros code. Now, the Software Freedom Law Center has given the green light to developers working on an open-source substitution for the closed-source code.

We bring the advice of experts straight from San Diego to your desktop. Red Hat Summit 2007 collected hundreds of Linux users all in one place–many of them experienced Red Hat Certified Engineers® (RHCE). And somewhere between all those smart people walking around–and our video crew shooting footage–the idea for some video tips was born.

Red Hat has released Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 beta this week, a minor upgrade that includes a laundry list of tweaks and improvements for virtualization, laptops and desktops, storage, networking, interoperability, serviceability, security and storage.

Linux Gazette...making Linux just a little more fun!

The commonwealth of Massachusetts has officially thrown its weight behind Microsoft's Office Open XML format along with the OASIS Open Document Format. In July, the commonwealth added Microsoft's format, also known as Ecma-376 or Open XML, to the list of approved standards in a draft of the Massachusetts ETRM (Enterprise Technical Reference Model), an architectural framework used to identify the standards, specifications and technologies that support Massachusetts' computing environment.

The KDE Community is happy to announce the immediate availability of the first Beta release for KDE 4.0. This release marks the beginning of the integration process which will bring the powerful new technologies included in the now frozen KDE 4 libraries to the applications.

Foreword: This article by Jean-Charles Verdie, CTO of software development firm Pleyo, introduces the Origyn Web Browser, a new open-source browser that targets consumer electronics (CE) devices such as mobile phones, PMPs (portable media players), and STBs (set-top boxes).

Did you know you can download SourceforgeEE for 15 users for free. You'll find it on Sourceforge.net and it comes in a VMWare appliance. That version will accommodate 50 users if you want to pay for more than 15 seats. From an enterprise point of view, the cost is quite reasonable.

Another O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) has come and gone. In many ways, OSCON is summer camp for geeks. A bunch of geeks from different parts of the world gather together each year in Portland, Ore., to learn, socialize, network, and get away from the workaday doldrums of our regular lives. Like summer vacation, it's over far too soon, but we pack a lot in just a short time.

The Black Hat USA 2007 Briefings got underway this morning at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Founder Jeff Moss opened the proceedings with a few brief remarks and statistics about the show. Officially, there are more than 4,000 attendees from more than 50 countries, Moss said, and that number would have been higher if Halvar Flake been admitted to the country instead of returned to Germany by immigration officials.

It was a blast. The 2007 SourceForge Community Choice Awards Party was held last Thursday evening in Portland, Ore., during OSCON. You should have been there, cheering along with everyone else when the winners were announced.

In part 1, you were shown how to set up hibernate and modify the configuration scripts to make it possible to suspend your desktop to RAM. In part 2, you'll step through how to implement your changes.

KnowledgeTree, the Cape Town based open source document management system, has taken off with a number of major customers, including the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre.

Need a simple yet effective way to back up your laptop or desktop machine to a network-attached storage device or a network hard disk running Samba? Using Samba's smbmount utility and the grsync backup tool, you can set up a backup system that is both reliable and straightforward in use. And since both programs are available as packages for most Linux distributions, you don't have to get your hands dirty compiling from source code and fiddling with settings.

An investigation by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) has determined that OpenHAL -- which facilitates Linux wireless connections for LAN cards using Atheros Communications technology -- does not incorporate any elements that might infringe on copyrights held by Atheros.

In my last installment of this series I introduced a variety of GUI-based tools that can help you discover more about your system to help identify potentially troublesome components. This week we'll look at some of the command-line utilities that do similar work. In fact, some of these utilities are the engines underneath the more attractive GUI tools, and there may be good reasons to employ the engines directly instead of relying upon their graphic incarnations.

Back in February I wrote about using xli to add a desktop background of your choice to a minimalist window manager. I chose to write about xli for two reasons. First, several window manager developers choose to use xli by default. For example, if you look at a .jwmrc file, the configuration file used by JWM, a lightweight window manager I am rather fond of, you will see that xli is used in the section. The second and perhaps more important reason I chose to write about xli is because it’s what I knew and used for years. One thing about Linux and UNIX: there are always different ways to do things. It turns out that many distros include something a bit newer and perhaps better than xli.

The second edition of the Air Mozilla video webcast will take place on Wednesday 1st August at 3:00pm Pacific Daylight Time (10:00pm UTC/GMT). Hosted by Asa Dotzler, the show will feature Bret Reckard, who works on recruitment for the Mozilla Corporation, JT Batson, who is currently working on the new Firefox support project, and Seth Bindernagel, who coordinates the community giving programme, which shares Mozilla's riches with valuable volunteers. The programme will end with a broadcast of Mitchell Baker's OSCON 2007 presentation.

GeeXBoX, a small media center Linux live CD distribution, can run from any small device, such as a USB disk or a wallet CD-R, and can play both disk-based media like DVDs and online media like Icecast streams. The project has been in development for several years and has just released version 1.1. I fed it every kind of media file I could lay my hands on -- Ogg, MP3, MP4, AVI, DVDs, VCDs, and their ripped versions -- and it played them all without a hiccup. But what makes GeeXBoX a fantastic distribution is its ease of use and malleability.

DataPilots are OpenOffice.org Calc's equivalent of what MS Excel and other spreadsheets call pivot tables. Under any name, they are a tool for extracting and summarizing the information contained in spreadsheet cells in a more convenient form. Using a DataPilot, you can immediately see relationships between different pieces of data that would be difficult -- if not impossible -- to find using formulas, and tedious to extract manually. In effect, a DataPilot gives you something of the power of using a database without actually switching out of a spreadsheet. Small wonder, then, that over half of spreadsheet users are said to use datapilots or pivot tables.