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Late last month the open-source community was presented with Chrome 9 series DRM support as the first step in providing 3D acceleration for these VIA IGPs atop a free software stack. Today we have been greeted with more patches from VIA's Bruce Chang.

The patches submitted to the DRI-devel mailing list fix a system hang with multi X support, fix a system hang issue caused by 3D scaling+ACPI, and address a segmentation fault when playing video with AGP after resuming from the system suspend mode.

These VIA driver fixes will likely find their way into the Linux 2.6.29 kernel...

Today we're going to take a look at a part of Perl that a lot of folks shy away from; mostly because (from my experience) they feel it's too abstract a notion or too complicated to understand. But, if you know a guy who knows a guy, you already understand this concept ;-)

I've owned this book for quite awhile and discovered that I have never reviewed it. I determined to correct my oversight and to share my insights regarding Goldwasser and Letscher's book with you. Of course, the snake head on the cover is totally inaccurate, given that the Python language was actually named for Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and company (or Flying Circus, rather). I suppose the snake's head just looked more cool against a jet black background, though. Is the book itself just as cool? Let's find out.

Now that my work was done I decided to look for an FPS game that would run on my new EEE PC 900.

Novell Chief Marketing Officer John Dragoon responds to five key questions about the company’s SUSE Linux strategies, broader software efforts and partner initiatives. Here's the scoop.

DSS, Inc. the leading developer of enhancements to VistA, the VA’s award winning electronic health record, announced it will open source the code for its vxVista® an enhanced version of VistA designed for the commercial market. In this major development, DSS, Inc. has effectively removed the greatest obstacle to collaboration in the VistA community by providing their enhanced version of VistA under a commercially friendly open source license that can be used to unite the VistA community.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma panels now support "drag-and-drop unhide". More improvements for scripted Plasmoids. "Weather" Plasmoid moves into kdereview for eventual move to extragear for KDE 4.2. Lots of reworking the "HTML Validator" Konqueror plugin. Start of a "BomberMan"-like game using Kapman as a base. New game themes in Bomber and KTron. Further progress on the rewrite of Kolf. Start of an effort to refactor game modules in KGoldrunner. A KIPI plugin to export photos to Facebook from KDE photo applications and much, much more.

I'm toiling every spare minute to finish my latest book, "Building a Recording Studio With Audacity." There is a chapter for golden-eared audiophiles, who have been left behind in the rush to lo-fi MP3s and poorly-engineered CDs with no dynamic range to speak of, no balance, no nuances-- just shove all the levers to the top and call it good. So, as usual, to do it right we have to do it ourselves, and one interesting option is DVD-Audio. It supports higher audio resolutions than CD-Audio, and now there is a good GPL authoring application for creating DVD-Audio disks.

Using the OORunner class that we developed last week we'll now create a Python class for converting spreadsheets into CSV files. The converter supports any type of input spreadsheet that is supported by OpenOffice.

When I first installed OpenBSD 4.4 on my Toshiba 1101-S101 laptop (Celeron 1.3 GHz), I kept the stock 256 MB of RAM. Everything was running so well that I didn't hurry to add RAM. But since I do have spare PC133 SODIMMs, I could've bumped it up to 512 MB, 768 MB or 1 GB.

The friendly British Bobby has just been given the right to remotely hack into the computers of UK citizens without notifying the owners, or bothering with a search warrant, or even passing an act of parliament for that matter. A few months back the Brit police proved themselves not to be too worried about the small matter of search warrants when it comes to computers, data and privacy when City of London detectives closed the investigation into BT and Phorm.

International Linux advocates have flooded Cisco Systems with inquiries about a lucrative software development contest. Here's what's at stake for Cisco Systems, Linux ... and Microsoft.

PC BIOS giant Phoenix Technologies today launched a fast-booting Linux add-on for Windows PCs. This hands-on review finds "HyperSpace" works to redress slow boot times, WiFi connection hassles, and short battery lives typical of Windows PCs, but sacrifices a lot of flexibility in order to achieve these goals.

The newly-released book "How to be a Geek Goddess" is supposed to be a helpful, not-condescending computing howto for women. Tina Gasperson, who blatantly admits to being of the female persuasion herself, isn't sure it meets these goals, and suffers from severely mixed feelings. Read Tina's review to find out if this is a must-read or a must-fling-against-the-wall.

Ubuntu Eee is dead, long live Easy Peasy! This is a custom Linux distribution (Ubuntu 8.10 based), optimized for netbooks, especially the Eee PC series.

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with HAProxy, Wackamole, and Spread on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using Wackamole and Spread, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. HAProxy is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

Fifteen months ago we exclusively showed off SplashTop from DeviceVM, which was an instant-on Linux environment embedded into ASUS motherboards and since then it has worked its way into products from other OEMs. DeviceVM continues to work on further refining SplashTop by adding in virtualization support and other features, along with a promised developer SDK. Phoenix Technologies, the company producing the BIOSes for many of the motherboards on the market, is today introducing their SplashTop competitor. HyperSpace is the Phoenix Technologies product being unveiled this morning with several distinct differences from SplashTop.

Chris Mason, lead developer of the copy-on-write BtrFS filesystem, has appealed for its inclusion in the Linux kernel.

Think of the two most popular laptops trends, namely big screens and small screens. Now put them together and what do you get? Yep, the Lenovo ThinkPad W700ds with one big screen and one small screen. Is this genius or simply the maddest laptop ever?

Bloggers took a moment to contemplate the upcoming year and what it means for open source software and Linux in particular. There were some New Year's resolutions and a few holiday gifts still floating around in the week between Christmas and New Year's Day.