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Back in May we shared that NVIDIA was readying its OpenCL Linux driver and had submitted their OpenCL 1.0 NVIDIA drivers to the Khronos Group for certification. As of this morning, NVIDIA has now released its OpenCL driver for Linux (and Windows), but it's only available if you are a registered NVIDIA developer...

Small screen? Crummy touchpad? Not a problem for Conkeror. Conkeror is a Web browser with an Emacs-style look, feel and configuration. It uses Firefox's HTML rendering engine and works with most Firefox extensions, but it provides a keyboard-driven interface and makes excellent use of screen space. It's a fitting Web browser for Netbooks with their imprecise touchpads and small screens. Conkeror uses the same free software license as Firefox.

Time for another distro review, and this time I thought I’d look at the latest version of a distribution I’ve enjoyed a lot in the past. Linux Mint 7, AKA Gloria. I’m tempted to make references to Van Morrison here, but I’ll restrain myself. The last version I reviewed was actually Linux Mint 5, so I’ve missed a release. At the time I said it was the best Linux distribution I’d seen for new users, better even than the hallowed Ubuntu (upon which it is based). Would I still feel the same?

As Greg Maxwell nicely pointed out it appears Theora can compete with other formats used to distribute video content online. He compared output generated by YouTube's encoding mechanism with output generated by the new Theora enconder (as of writing libtheora 1.1alpha2 is the latest release). The result in a nutshell: Theora delivers similar performance to whatever encoder setup is currently used at YouTube - this means online streaming services can use open media technology without paying a significant price in bitrate or quality compared to current setups.

Today, I'm announcing my new Linux company, HookLineNSinker, Inc. (HLNS) which will produce a new commercial Linux distribution: Pricey Linux. HLNS products include Pricey Linux Enterprise, Pricey Linux Small Business Server and The Pricey Linux Desktop. There are also Pricey Linux Support options for those of you who need 24x7 support for your Pricey Systems. And to comply with Linux licensing, we'll also offer a free, community edition of our Pricey Linux known as BaitNSwitch Linux.

A community site dedicated to offering previews of open source applications has now added Ubuntu Linux 8.04 to its catalog. Click2try now offers over 40 virtualized open source applications in its online catalog, with both free and paid subscription plans available, says the company. The newly offered virtualized Ubuntu distribution is complete with all standard bundled applications, including OpenOffice, GIMP, Firefox, and Rhythmbox, says Click2try. Like the other software hosted by Click2try, it is served up via VMware virtual machines (VMs) that are said to be securely stored within a hardened network infrastructure at the company's data center in Houston, Texas.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is serious software. But xTuple, an open source ERP specialist, is injecting some humor into the conversation while building a channel partner program. Here’s the scoop from The VAR Guy.

My interest here isn't in what Microsoft and the EU agree to as an appropriate remedy for Microsoft's market dominance in web browsers or past legal transgressions. My interest is in ensuring an increase in the global competition in operating system platforms. In short, unbundle IE in Europe? Why stop there? Why not unbundle the whole of Windows from all OEM PCs shipped in Europe?

The W3C, custodians of web standards, have launched an appeal for prior art to contest an Apple patent that appears to cover any kind of automated updating procedure, including the Widget standard on which the group is working. The patent, filed in 1995 and awarded in 1998, and which Apple revealed to the W3C in March, covers an application contacting a central server to see if a new version is available, and downloading the replacement if it is.

Google Mail, Calendar and Docs could be vulnerable. That's the argument an open letter to Google's CEO Eric Schmidt makes, thereby asking him to adopt the HTTPS standard for data transfers for these applications.

Amazon has announced the release of the source code for all their Kindle products. The basic underpinnings are Linux kernel 2.6.22that includes E-ink drivers, Kindle-specific hardware drivers, and probably some other Kindle-specific hardware patches. There are no specific licenses mentioned on the page but it should be safe to assume all of the code is released under the GPL since all of the modified packages are also GPL and Amazon isn’t releasing these as binary modules/blobs.

Canonical, the commercial organization behind the Ubuntu variant of the Debian distribution of Linux, said today that it has certified its Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition to run on all 17 configurations of Hewlett-Packard's sixth-generation of ProLiant servers. As El Reg was crabbing about earlier this week, HP does not officially and fully support Ubuntu, as it does commercial Linux distributions from Red Hat and Novell. With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating systems from those two respective vendors, HP has signed OEM deals that allow it to sell and front-end installation and technical support on behalf of those Linux disties, and the parties divvy up the money so they each get a cut of the action.

Last week a pull request went in to bring support in the Linux 2.6.31 kernel for Radeon kernel mode-setting and TTM memory management. This initial work was proposed to enter the Linux kernel as a staging driver and then be setup as a proper Linux kernel driver in the next release, Linux 2.6.32.

Linus Torvalds has criticized some of this Radeon kernel mode-setting work since there are some known bugs at this time (though at least it wasn't called untested crap), but nevertheless he went ahead and pulled in this new code prior to Linux 2.6.31-rc1.

Cheers! There is now Intel and ATI Radeon kernel mode-setting support within the Linux kernel...

Jordan is hoping to enlist computer technology and the Internet to fight an unemployment rate that probably hovers around 30 percent, thanks in part to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees the country has taken in. CNET News met recently with His Excellency Eng. Bassem Al Rousan, minister of information and communications technology of Jordan, in his offices in Amman, to talk about outsourcing, DVD piracy, Internet taxes, open source, and other topics.

If you haven’t heard yet, Google have released a developer preview of their new social networking and collaboration tool - Wave. What impact might this have on free software users and developers?

This is a brief description of the steps required to set up a basic web server (on Ubuntu 9.04) with the Zend Framework installed.

Sun Microsystems has announced the first beta release of VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1. The major additions to VirtualBox 3.0 so far is guest SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) support for up to 32 virtual CPUs, Windows guests now support Direct3D 8/9 applications and games, and there is now OpenGL 2.0 support for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests.

Guest SMP support has been a feature that's long been lacking from VirtualBox to provide better multi-core support, but it's finally arrived! To use the guest SMP support in VirtualBox, a processor with VT-x or AMD-V is required...

CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that transform Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announced the release of CrossOver Mac 8.0 and CrossOver Linux 8.0, both available for purchase immediately. Both versions of CrossOver 8.0 will include support for Internet Explorer 7, Quicken 2009 and performance upgrades for Microsoft Office 2007, particularly Outlook.

If you're not sick of the SCO litigation by now, you've obviously not been following it very closely. As we've reported before, the SCO v. Novell lawsuit has concluded, and now sits before the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals. SCO's business is in bankruptcy, and as of our last report, awaits a decision on the U.S. Trustee's motion to convert from a Chapter 11 reorganization to a Chapter 7 liquidation. But as anyone who's been paying attention knows, nothing involving SCO ever goes as planned — we warn you, this is a long one, you may want to pack a lunch. read more

Here we bring you ScreenShots of the Fedora 11 Installation process, as well with some of the apps that Fedora brings. Now I personally have not been a Fedora/RedHat fan for the Desktop environment since RedHat 7.3. After going through the install process and playing around for about 15 minutes, the only thing that I found impressive was how fast Fedora 11 booted. I know I will get flamed for the previous comment but this is my personal opinion.