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This week we received a note from Matthias Dahl, a Phoronix reader, who wanted to remind us about current problems plaguing the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series. Using any of the newer NVIDIA Linux drivers can cause graphics corruption followed by the system locking up. These problems are certainly known by NVIDIA and are experienced by many users as can be seen from this NvNews Forum thread. Below is what Matthias had to share about the situation.

Ubuntu Podcast Episode #20 covers the controversial notifications feature, Karmic Koala, New Mexico LoCo helps facility aimed at people with substance abuse problems, better integrated mail stack in Jaunty, lots of HP-related Ubuntu news, and much more.

Just three days ago we shared that Nouveau will become the default NVIDIA driver in Fedora 11 to replace the obfuscated xf86-video-nv mess. Now proposed for Fedora 11 is to also integrate the Nouveau kernel mode-setting driver.

In this HowTo I will describe how to prepare a Debian Lenny server for OpenVZ. With OpenVZ you can create multiple Virtual Private Servers (VPS) on the same hardware, similar to Xen and the Linux Vserver project. OpenVZ is the open-source branch of Virtuozzo, a commercial virtualization solution used by many providers that offer virtual servers. The OpenVZ kernel patch is licensed under the GPL license, and the user-level tools are under the QPL license.

Linux is a joke. Well, that may be a bit harsh, but Ubuntu certainly seems to be all the excuse founder Mark Shuttleworth needs to make one bad pun after another. After Bill Gates' performances with Jerry Seinfeld, one wonders if becoming a billionaire tech mogul alters brain chemistry. At any rate, Paul Rubens reports on the future of Karmic Koala and Canonical. (Hint: not as successes in show biz.)

I'm taking PCWorld's new LinuxLink Blog under my wing. Being a mentor comes with great responsibility.

Have a confusing and entertaining Saturday :)

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses. If you didn't get to attend the event, don't panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.

The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks. Because they are generally less expensive, open source products may become attractive to more corporate users as their budgets are cut, laying the groundwork for a growth spurt, according to the recent study by Eastern Management Group.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit that keeps Linus in keyboards, and most recently, has been looking to glam things up a bit — earlier this month provided a first glimpse into its plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, to be held April 8-10 in San Francisco.

IBM earned 4,186 U.S. patents in 2008, becoming the first company ever to earn more than 4,000 U.S. patents in a single year. IBM's 2008 patent total is nearly triple Hewlett-Packard's and exceeds the combined 2008 patents of Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Apple, EMC, Accenture and Google. Samsung had the second most patents, with 3,515 issued last year, according to IFI Patent Intelligence. This is the 16th consecutive year IBM has led in U.S. patents.

Novell officials cited declining fortunes across its business yesterday "due to the slowing economy" as it summarized its first-quarter results of 2009. CFO Dana Russell said net revenue for the quarter was $215 million, compared with net revenue of $231 million for the first quarter of 2008. Net income was $11 million, or 3 cents per share, compared with net income of $17 million, or 5 cents per share, for the same period the year before, Russell said in Novell's quarterly earnings report teleconference.

Recently we looked at networking your Linux receiver – and described how you can stream video from it to any PC on the same network. Now we'll take these networking aspirations further afield by going online. Although a few satellite receivers offer the Ethernet port that gives rise to such flexibility, only Linux-based receivers are capable of taking full advantage of such functionality.

The fifth alpha version of the upcoming Ubuntu 9.04 (codename Jaunty Jackalope) was uploaded a few minutes ago on the official mirrors. As usual, we've downloaded a copy of it in order to keep you up to date with the latest changes in the Ubuntu 9.04 development.

If you edit a lot of configuration files, and are confronted a lot with the configuration files edited by others, you probably spend a lot of time looking at the changes made to the file since the last time it was edited or installed. The standard command line utility diff does a reasonable job when it comes to finding small differences. It shows that it wasn't developed to create the best possible human readable output when you try reading long listings. diff output looks something like this:

Did you ever vote for an issue on the OpenOffice.org bug tracking system? Well, today could be your first time! In this article, I try to demonstrate why the rulers should be hidden by default in OpenOffice.org Writer. A UI detail, maybe. But aren't small changes for millions of people a big change? In any case, it could be a good occasion to visit the OOo bug tracking system, tell your opinion, and get involved!

Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community. It's a message that Cisco isn't boasting about yet, but was willing to discuss with InternetNews.com. Cisco is the world's largest networking vendor and a technology juggernaut that is seeing the value in using and contributing to open source.

According to an announcement on Mepis.org, Simply Mepis 8 was released on Sunday, February 24, 2009 to the delight of people from all over the world. It didn't take me long to download both 32-bit and 64-bit iso images, burn them and begin installing them on my HP 6449US laptop. Actually, I had been testing all the way from the earliest betas through version 8 gold, but wanted to do a clean install on both partitions.

For months we have seen S3 Graphics advertise a magical Linux driver in their press releases that promised to offer OpenGL 3.0 support and advanced video functionality. They had reported to us the driver would be released in December, but that deadline had passed and they continued to announce Linux support when launching the Chrome 540 GTX, but still there was nothing. However, S3 Graphics has now actually delivered such a driver! They have delivered a Chrome 500 series Linux driver that not only provides OpenGL 3.0 support but also H.264, VC-1, and MPEG-2 hardware decoding on the GPU. While it may appear to be good, this driver is still far from perfect.

Exciting news from the LinuxDNA project, which earlier this month successfully compiled a recent Linux kernel with the Intel C/C++ compiler (ICC). This is not just a compile without errors, this is — for the most part — a fully bootable, compatible Linux kernel that can boot into a full Linux system. The full system is based on Gentoo Linux, and utilizes kernel version 2.6.22.