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In late December AMD had released open-source R600/700 3D code and a month later they released the 3D documentation that covers these Radeon HD 2000/3000/4000 series graphics cards. The initial code drop didn't do much good for end-users as they couldn't do much more than render a couple triangles, but over the past few months the open-source developers have been working on the proper Mesa support for the R600/700 graphics cards in a private code repository. Now this code may finally be pushed out to the general public in the near future.

Only four freshmen showed up at the University of Virginia in 2007 without a computer of their own, and the school has decided that it's no longer worth the expense of running campus computer labs. What's the point of running a university computer lab when all the students bring laptops anyway? That's a question that schools have been asking themselves as computer ownership rates among incoming freshmen routinely top 90 percent. Schools like the University of Virginia have concluded that the time has come to dismantle the community computer labs and put that money to more productive uses.

Gnome 2.26 didn't got a lot of attention when it got released. This blog post is reviewing some of the interesting changes in Gnome 2.26 and gives a opinion about them.

Bootloader Syslinux developer Peter Anvin, since 1992 kernel developer, gives an insight into his work.

Thanks to Ed Cherlin for your reference to the OLPC trials in Ethiopia and and the challenge of a rote-learning based culture per Eduvision's Ethiopia Implementation Report. This is a very useful report. As I read it I found myself thinking -I recognise what they are saying - it could have been written for Nigeria.

When it comes to putting Ubuntu Linux on mobile devices, Canonical has two flavors of their popular Linux distribution to suit the needs of vendors and end-users: Ubuntu Netbook Remix and Ubuntu MID. The former targets netbook computers (hence its name), particularly those with Intel Atom processors, and brings a unique interface atop GNOME. The Ubuntu MID edition is targeted for very small netbooks and mobile Internet devices. Particularly, Ubuntu MID aims to be on handheld devices and those with 4-7" touch-screens. Beyond having a different user interface, Ubuntu MID is spun with LPIA packages instead of the i386 package-set. LPIA is quite similar to i386, but targets the Low-Power Intel Architecture with different compile-time optimizations. With the low-power focus, will this distribution extend your battery life? Yes, our results today show that the power consumption can be cut down by greater than 10%.

Microsoft today sits comfortably atop the growing netbook market, with Windows garnering 90% of netbook sales in November, December and January, according to research firm The NPD Group. What about Linux? With just 10% netbook market share, the open-source operating system is a toothless tiger for now. But Linux-based netbooks may encroach on Microsoft's success in the near future. Two looming threats: Google may decide to run its operating system, Android, on netbooks and low-power processors from smartphone chip licenser ARM may take off in netbooks.

Here is my first of many ScreenShots of the 9.0.4 beta Jaunty Jackalope series of ubuntu Based Distros. Enjoy the screen shots below...

Device and hardware makers are discovering the flexibility of the Linux stack as the foundation of a platform for mobile applications that bring value to the wares they want to sell. Complications exist, but manufacturers are working through them to further drive the adoption of the Linux stack.

It's hard to write a bash script of much import without using a pipe or two. Named pipes, on the other hand, are much rarer.

Installing Ubuntu (or any other Linux) on a Macintosh is a slightly different process than installing Ubuntu on a more traditional PC. Various differences in the hardware, particularly the use of the EFI firmware system, mean that some extra effort is required to get your favourite distro up and running on your favourite hardware.

While the Catalyst driver for Windows was released a number of days ago, the Catalyst Linux driver was missing. It has, however, been released today. AMD's Linux engineers ended up delaying the Catalyst 9.3 release so they could spend additional time tuning this driver, since it will be the last release that supports the R300 through R500 series as the support is being dropped. The significant feature that was pushed back into the Catalyst 9.3 Linux driver is improved Composite support.

Everybody has a version of Windows that's their favorite. What version it is depends a lot on your age. Some of my older colleagues swore blind that Windows 95 was the pinnacle of computer science, at least when it was released. For most people, XP is their favorite Windows. Somehow Microsoft got everything just right with XP, but it's extremely hard to quantify exactly what. Ubuntu is like that. It's like a warm pub on a cold night -- inviting and welcoming to everybody. If you switch to Ubuntu you're still gonna have to learn stuff. That's just the way computers are. But Ubuntu also has that magical "Windows XP factor" -- it's as functional as you need it to be, yet is still accessible. It 'just works'.

XML provides a way to identify data items and subcomponents within any structured data set, but has its roots in documentation development and production. Robust, open standards for XML document markup and a rich set of freely available tools for XML document parsing and format conversion make it easy to install and configure a complete documentation development and formatting environment on any UNIX® or Linux® system.

The open source Java servlet container, Jetty, is now an incubation project at the Eclipse Foundation, following the move of the core components of Jetty 7 into the Eclipse repository. The move carries through on Greg Wilkin's proprosal to move Jetty under the Eclipse Project's umbrella. Jetty is to be part of the Eclipse Runtime top level project, but will also continue to be a Codehaus project, making it available under both the Apache 2 and Eclipse Public Licence (EPL).

Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT. Following a more limited open-access mandate at Harvard, the legendary school's faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort. Hal Abelson, who spearheaded the effort, said that these agreements went beyond providing a repository for papers, they changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers. "What's important here is that it's giving the university a formal role in how publications happen," Abelson said. "Some of the faculty said, 'You're calling this an open-access resolution but actually the way to think of it is as a collective bargaining agreement.'"

This tutorial shows how you can install Sun xVM VirtualBox 2 on a Debian Lenny desktop. VirtualBox is available as a package from the official Debian Lenny repository, but it's very old (version 1.6.6), therefore I explain how to install the current version (2.1.4 at the time of this writing). With VirtualBox you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux and Windows under a host operating system. There are two ways of installing VirtualBox: from precompiled binaries that are available for some distributions and come under the PUEL license, and from the sources that are released under the GPL. This article will show how to set up VirtualBox 2 (2.1.4 at the time of this writing) from the precompiled binaries.

Linux'ers who thought they had erased all traces of their latest Ponzi scheme, beware: MacForensicsLab's desktop forensic tool has moved to Linux. Designed to help law enforcement, E-Discovery, and IT professionals quickly extract suspect information, version 2.1 of MacLockPick now runs on Linux, says the company.

In Part 1 we learned about the not very well-known Adobe Flash cookies, how to find them on your Linux system, and how to use Adobe's Web-based Flash cookie manager. Today Carla Schroder is going to show us how to deal with Flash cookies using ordinary Linux commands, which unlike the Adobe manager are nice and fast and don't require an Internet connection. (This one's for you, Colonel!)

Sugar Labs has released a new version of the Sugar Learning Platform, a Linux-based software environment for education. The new version includes new programs and improvements to the environment's file journal system.