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Last fall, the openSUSE Project achieved an important milestone: the first-ever openSUSE Board election. Two new members joined the two victorious incumbents and the Novell-appointed chairman to form the project's first elected board. Now the composition is changing once again, as one of the board's original members takes a step back.

To those running ATI Radeon graphics cards on Linux, this week has been very important with several key announcements having been made. The TTM memory manager is getting ready for inclusion into the Linux kernel, which finally will allow the open-source ATI driver (and soon the Nouveau driver too for NVIDIA hardware) to have kernel-based GPU memory management. With the memory management work set in the ATI driver via a mix of TTM and GEM, the ATI kernel mode-setting is also getting ready to be released as a staging driver within the Linux 2.6.31 kernel. The announcements this week have not been only about the GPU and Linux kernel, but the Radeon driver rewrite has also been merged to master. As we discussed in yesterday's news post, this Radeon Mesa re-write brings several key improvements immediately and there are still more features to come.

While analysts suggest the number of Microsoft Office users has dropped 15 percent in the last several years, most companies still use it. With so many low-cost and free alternatives, it makes little sense, and in most cases it's just throwing good money after bad.

Your editor is widely known for his invariably correct and infallible predictions. So, certainly, he would never have said something like this: Mistakes may have been made in Xen's history, but it is a project which remains alive, and which has clear reasons to exist. Your editor predicts that the Dom0 code will find little opposition at the opening of the 2.6.30 merge window." OK, anybody needing any further evidence of your editor's ability to foresee the future need only look at his investment portfolio...or, shall we say, the smoldering remains thereof. Needless to say, Xen Dom0 support did not get through the 2.6.30 merge window, and it's not looking very good for 2.6.31 either.

Modern mobile phones and PDAs have increasingly sophisticated data/internet connectivity. The globe-trotting Juliet Kemp gives us some good tips on how they can liberate us from the server room, and allow us to roam freely.

It's not just the new design and updated software that brings a sparkle to the eleventh version of Fedora (Leonidas), there are also a whole raft of technical enhancements. Fedora once again finds itself in the vanguard – expect to see many of these changes coming to other Linux distributions in the near future.

Dynamic checkbox creation I also created a box which contained checkboxes for a few of the options of the ls command. As I want to add more commands to the tool it would take me a lot of time to create all the checkboxes and a lot of copy pasting code. I don't think that's a good idea, so I've been thinking of some way of dynamically creating vertical boxes containing the checkboxes for all options per command. That way I can just create a VBOX by passing a command and it's options to a subroutine.

The Ubuntu team this morning released a second alpha of the upcoming Karmic Koala operating system, also known as Ubuntu 9.10. While it is still early days for Karmic, this release does give some insight into plans for the final release, scheduled for October this year.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope based server as a spamfilter in Gateway mode. In the end, you will have a SpamSnake Gateway which will relay clean emails to your MTA. You will also be able to view your incoming queue, train your SpamSnake and carry out a few more advanced operations via MailWatch.

Remember back in the day when your computer wasn't obsolete or irreparably damaged by the time you got it home? ;)

Microsoft plans to remove Internet Explorer from the versions of Windows 7 that it ships in Europe, CNET News has learned.

Taking it further, Mono on the whole also enables easier migration - for both developers and users - from legacy CLR frameworks such as Microsoft.NET. Students who learn Visual Studio.NET at University can take their skills and directly apply them to creating or improving Free Software on their shiny new Ubuntu installations, without the need to learn a new language. Businesses with investment in .NET-based applications can look at replacing their servers or desktops with Free Software. Whilst providing .NET compatibility has always been a secondary goal, it is an extremely popular one, which has prompted a lot of input and development work from assorted people into the Mono codebase.

In the last six months, Microsoft and Novell have signed more than 100 new customers for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) as part of their 2006 collaboration agreement. According to Microsoft, this is double the sign-on rate for the first two years of the agreement with Novell.

I’m a big fan of Free Culture and free open source web services too, licensed under the AGPL. I wrote about the creation of Libre.fm a little while back, and I think we could really use more of these truly “free” web services. So when I heard about a new AGPL social network for film fans, I was very happy. The site is called Filmaster and I was lucky enough to have a chat with Borys Musielak (the site’s creator) about how it all came to fruition.

As Canonical polishes Ubuntu to potentially support Google Android and Moblin v2, I’m both impressed and concerned. On the one hand, Canonical continues to change with the times — and in some cases, stay ahead of the times. On the other hand, Canonical runs the risk of repeating some major software mistakes IBM made in the 1990s. Here’s why.

Linux and open-source companies have made much about how the recession is creating opportunity at the expense of proprietary and licensed-based software as IT budgets are cut. For proprietary and license-charged, read Microsoft and Oracle.

Reader Mark Scott submitted this interesting variation on Linux OEM netbooks: this one is bundled with Symantec's Norton 360. No, it doesn't run on Linux.

Fedora 11 was released earlier this week so we have set out to see how its desktop performance compares to that of Ubuntu 9.04, which was released back in April. Using the Phoronix Test Suite we compared these two leading Linux distributions in tasks like code compilation, Apache web server performance, audio/video encoding, multi-processing, ray-tracing, computational biology, various disk tasks, graphics manipulation, encryption, chess AI, image conversion, database, and other tests.

Linux kernel 2.6.30 has been released with hundreds of changes from the previous version, including a new architecture for suspend and resume that Linus Torvalds says switches the kernel to a "new world order." "Hopefully now done with the suspend/resume irq re-architecting, and have switched to a new world order," Torvalds announced to the Linux kernel mailing list. "Although I suspect lots of details will still change, of course." "I'm sure we've missed something, and I know we have some regressions pending. At the same time on the whole it looks pretty good. We've fixed a few regressions in the last few days, and there's always 2.6.30.x."

The GNOME Foundation and KDE e.V. are excited to announce the keynotes for the first ever co-located Akademy and GUADEC, over 100 talks as well as BOFs, keynote sessions, lightning talks and many opportunities to meet other developers and begin collaborating between projects.