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The first update to PHP 5.3 is now available providing 5 security fixes in addition a long list of bug fixes to the popular open source dynamic language. PHP 5.3 was released at the end of June, so the 5.3.1 point update has been in the works for five months at this point.

Intel's Linux graphics driver stack is often at the forefront of X.Org / Mesa innovations, from Intel being the first driver having in-kernel video memory management to being the first driver with mainline kernel mode-setting support to even being the driver that often first receives support for new OpenGL extensions in Mesa. The Intel Linux driver stack can be attributed with many firsts, but continually pushing this driver while putting out quarterly timed releases has led to some pains. Earlier this year in fact the driver stack was rather buggy -- especially in Ubuntu 9.04 -- that impaired many users with stability issues, performance problems, and other headaches. Most of the regressions from overhauling the Linux driver stack have been resolved, but where is the driver stack at now? The Intel stack in Ubuntu 9.10 is performing rather well, but where it's more important is its status within Fedora as more of the bleeding-edge graphics packages are pulled into this release that often don't make it into other distributions until months later when they roll out their next releases. To see where the Intel Linux graphics are at in Fedora 12, we ran the same set of benchmarks in the Fedora 10, 11, and 12 releases with an Intel G43 IGP.

With the purchase of SUSE by Novell many feared that the brand would be subsumed into the corporate borg and contaminated with proprietary add-ons. But openSUSE goes its own way, and the result is a sleek, reliable distribution with all the bells and whistles. Paul Ferrill takes it for a spin and reports.

Chip designer ARM is excited about the prospect of Google Chrome OS, according to the company's EVP of Marketing Ian Drew. Speaking to TechRadar after being name-checked by Google at the unveiling of Chrome OS, Drew admitted that he couldn't predict whether the revolutionary principles behind the new operating system would be successful, but that he wouldn't bet against a company with such a good track record.

If you’re running Linux, there’s a good chance your distro of choice uses Grub as the default bootloader. Grub has served well for many years, but it’s beginning to show its age. As with all software, it doesn’t take long before the latest-and-greatest becomes old-and-haggard. Features have been piling up in Grub without much thought going into revamping the core program. Eventually, this lead to a messy patchwork that no one really wanted to maintain. At this point, Grub2 was born. It’s a complete rewrite from the ground up using a completely redesigned structure. This new Grub gives us powerful features like conditional statements (if/then, etc), intelligent upgrades, and some greatly improved graphics.

Back in July, your editor stumbled across Google's Courgette announcement and promptly added it to the LWN topic slush pile. He then promptly let it sit for three months or so. The news that this software is now the subject of a patent suit brought Courgette back to the foreground; here we'll look at what Courgette is for, how it works, and how it relates to the patent being asserted.

Korean electronics giant Samsung is helping the Linux-David Enlightenment with development ressources. It's possible that the lightweight and robust window manager might be the basis for Samsung's upcoming Bada mobile phone platform.

...First, I must compliment the openSUSE developers. I've had great correspondence from Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier and Will Thompson, a developer in the KDE team in Nuremberg, which were truly first rate. These are Linux professionals who clearly are much more interested in solving problems and putting out a quality product than anything else. I'll be filing bug reports by tomorrow to try and help them resolve the issues that I found. While I'm very positive about the openSUSE team I must say that I am a lot less sanguine about some in their community. Some fans (or really fanatics) came out in force ready to attack the reviewer...

Oooh, spooky! Microsoft has once again denied rumours that it built a backdoor into Windows 7.

The list of top 500 supercomputer for the month of November 2009 is available, in the list appears

In this article we develop and implement the basic parts of a web application like login registration, user authorization, navigation, internationalization (18n), and polling in conjunction with Trinidad, Facelets, and Seam and deploy using Seam-gen.

Left 4 Dead 2 was one of the most anticipated games of 2009. Even before its full release the good people over at Codeweavers where hard at work making sure their CXGames software would be ready to allow Linux and Mac gamers everywhere to fully enjoy this latest edition to Valve's source games. Less than twenty four hours after L4D2 hit shelves CXGames 8.1 was released.

Ubuntu’s commercial sponsor Canonical revealed late yesterday that it has been working with Google on its Chrome OS platform since before Mountain View announced its game-changing plans in July this year. The firm’s OEM veep Chris Kenyon said in a blog post on Thursday that “Canonical is contributing engineering to Google under contract”. His comments came following Google’s announcement that it would open source the Chrome OS.

Although counterintuitive, laptops without screens could be more useful to some people than laptops with screens. I explain why in this blog posting.

Google, as expected, has taken its Chrome OS effort and offered it up as an open source project called Chromium OS. As you may recall Chrome OS will target netbooks and other thin mobile devices — core markets that Canonical is pursuing with Ubuntu. Should Canonical be worried?

Google unveiled its Debian Linux- and Chrome browser based "Chrome OS" today and announced the open-sourcing of the project. Due to ship on netbooks in late 2010, the lightweight, cloud-oriented Chrome OS offers seven-second boot-ups, works only with flash storage, and borrows from projects including Moblin. No beta release of Chrome OS was made available at the announcement this morning at Google's Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, and no timetable for a beta was announced, but the final version should appear by the end of 2010. The distribution will not run on just any system, but can only be used with netbooks that adhere to Google's x86 and ARM-based reference designs, and offer Chrome OS pre-installed, said Google.

LinuxCertified,Inc. a leading provider of Linux training, will offer weekend Linux system administration bootcamp on December 12th - 13th, 2009 in South Bay (CA). This workshop is designed for busy information technology professionals and is designed to cover the most important Linux administration areas. In addition to carefully designed lecture material delivered by experienced Linux professionals, there is a heavy emphasis on hands-on learning. The training starts two weeks before the actual class, with access to an online e-learning tutorial, where students complete few challenging pre-class activities.

Progopedia is a free (GNU Free Documentation License) web-based encyclopedia of programming languages. The project aims to create an exhaustive list of existing programming languages (including language implementations and versions), to provide structured information about them and to present solutions to a set of standard programming tasks in these languages. The ultimate goal of the project is to be a reliable and useful encyclopedic reference for scholars of different levels and as well for professional seeking information about specific language version differences and features.

Google unveiled its Chrome operating system to the open-source community today and said it has designed the netbook OS to be faster, simpler and more secure than those offered by rivals.

The OMG!Ubuntu blog reports on the decision, however preliminary, at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas to remove the GIMP image editor from the 10.04 Lucid LTS release of the wildly popular Linux distribution. Those assembled seem to think that GIMP is not used enough and is not consumery enough. And that the F-Spot photo manager can do basic photo editing and is much better for the average user. Oh, do I have bones — plural — to pick over this one.