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Rumors are swirling that Dell’s U.S. Web site has stopped selling Ubuntu-based desktop Linux PCs. What are the potential implications for Canonical and the desktop Linux movement? Here's the scoop.

"A lot of people say calling Debian, Fedora, or Slackware, GNU/Linux opposed to calling it Linux, makes it harder to explain to people. An example, Bob could tell Sarah “You should use Fedora. It will work with your hardware, it’s fast, and it’s free” and Sarah might ask “What’s Fedora?” and Bob would tell her “It’s Linux.” and Sarah will understand. Wrong."

Microsoft was in violation of the GPL (General Public License) on the Hyper-V code it released to open source this week. After Redmond covered itself in glory by opening up the code, it now looks like it may have acted simply to head off any potentially embarrassing legal dispute over violation of the GPL. The rest was theater.

Many a vigorous debate has been fought over any possible legal threats that might be inherent in Mono. Now that Microsoft has extended its Community Promise to cover select parts of the C# programming language, which is what Mono is built on, it is being hailed as evidence that Mono is safe. Bruce Byfield tries to answer the question, is it really?

The real-time web is shaping up to be the next online revolution, and as we saw during our RealTime CrunchUp earlier this month, it’s already begun. But there are still some things that are holding us back — for one, many services still aren’t actually real time, they’re just something close to it. That may work well enough for sites like Facebook, but as we begin to see more innovation on this front, there’s likely going to be much more demand for technology that is truly real time. Groovy Corp, a database software marker partially owned by Intel, thinks it has the answer: a relational data management system called the SQL Switch, which it says will make true real-time both affordable and feasible.

Now that everybody has jumped on the Netbook bandwagon, a new mobile device parade is pulling into town. Led by Qualcomm, so-called Smartbooks are slated to debut in late 2009. Expected to be slightly larger than the iPhone, Smartbooks are mobile Internet devices (MIDs) that run Linux, Google Android and Windows.

LiVES is a video editing and VJ tool for Linux and BSD systems and today it celebrates its version 1.0 birthday. LiVES provides realtime video performance and non-linear editing for all classes of video editors and VJs (VJ is the Video equivalent of a DJ).

The management interface of the current stable version of DD-WRT, the free router firmware, suffers a vulnerability that lets attackers run programs with root rights on the router. The vulnerability, described at milw0rm and in the DD-WRT forum, is caused by inadequate handling of meta-characters in the query string in DD-WRT's httpd web server. The server will then run programs even when no session is running.

Known for manufacturing storage solutions in the enterprise, desktop, mobile computing, consumer and retail markets. It was only a matter of time before Seagate introduced their very own Network Attached Storage (NAS) product, the Seagate BlackArmor NAS. No, BlackArmor isn't some epic World of Warcraft item to lust over. This is serious business, just as backing up your data should be. Read the full Seagate BlackArmor NAS 420 Review.

After writing my article on The Linux RAM Disk for Linux+ Magazine and also after writing a very generic Linux RAM disk block device module, I decided to play around with the concept of RAM disks on OpenSolaris 2009.06. I must admit that this was actually a very great learning experience. One that I wish to share with the reader. Note that this post will be separated into two section: (2) tmpfs and (3) ramdiskadm.

I am a Linux geek. There I said it. Actually, I am kind of proud of being a Linux geek. I slogged through the bad old days to get here. It seems like every day something new shows up that makes me glad that I chose Linux as my tool of choice.

Yesterday NVIDIA released their first 190.xx Linux beta driver for their GeForce and Quadro graphics cards. The NVIDIA 190.16 Beta driver brought a number of VDPAU fixes, PowerMizer control features, a number of new official and unofficial OpenGL extensions receiving GLX protocol support, and there were a number of other fixes and enhancements too. However, now that we have had a chance to analyze this driver, there is more in store than what the change-log shares regarding this driver. There is in fact support for the unreleased OpenGL 3.2 specification.

Free software may be becoming more attractive to businesses, but even though using the software is free, chances are they'll still need to hire some technical assistance from time to time. Open source tech support experts sometimes need a few different skills than their proprietary counterparts, but their salaries are often quite similar -- if not better.

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of KDE 4.3 RC3, a release candidate of the 3rd iteration over the KDE 4 desktop, applications and development platform.

If you’re using SSH and you have your ports wide open to the world, your best bet would be to install fail2ban. If you’re curious though as of whom is trying to get in by bruteforcing your SSH passwords, you might get a clear view with the following command: grep “POSSIBLE BREAK-IN ATTEMPT” /var/log/auth.log This will verbose a list detailing each break-in attempt that has been made, with the exact date, hour, minute and second of it. It will also display the point of origin of these attempts, in a fashion similar to this one:

Opponents of SQL had their hands strengthened when Google's SQL-free technique, "Map/Reduce", showed it could search databases measured in petabytes. They look on relational databases as antiquated, a technique that can't cope with today's quantities of data or meet the requirements of full-text searching. Rather than relations, they rely on key-value pairs.

A lobbying group has been launched by more than 70 companies, academic institutions, and communities, to promote open source software as a "transparent and cost-effective option" for U.S. government agencies. "Open Source for America" counts AMD, Canonical, Google, Novell, Oracle, and Red Hat among its members.

S2 Games may not be as well known as id Software or Epic Games, but what distinguishes them from most of the other game companies is that they actually support Linux. With S2 Games' Savage 2, for example they provide a Linux-native game client. S2 Games is hard at work on another title, Heroes of Newerth, and that too will be supported on Linux. In fact, it's already running on Linux and Linux gamers will likely find a native client binary around the time of the game's release on Windows (read: it won't be released months or years later, like what we frequently find with Linux ported titles). Sound pretty great, but too impatient to wait for the game's release? Well, come play it with us right now! And for free!

More than 70 organizations and individuals have joined to form a "unified voice" encouraging the U.S. government to support and participate in open source software.

Back in 2003, Scott McNealy, then CEO of Sun Microsystems, dismissed GNU/Linux as a "great environment for the hobbyist" but not for the enterprise. The relative success of Linux on Sun's chosen ground, and the subsequent decline in the fortunes of Sun have proved McNealy's assessment to be wrong, but Linux undeniably has its roots and inspiration among hackers and hobbyists.