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Last year we hosted our first annual Linux Graphics Survey as really the only study that's been done to get a better understanding what the Linux community is using in their computers to fulfill their graphics needs, what their key interests are, and where they are looking for improvements. We're hosting this survey once again so we ask that between now and December 15 you take a few minutes to vote in the 2008 Linux graphics survey.

Sometimes it's nice to know the company you keep ;) Today we're going to shoot out a quick one liner script that can come in handy from time to time. It doesn't fall under the "necessary" category (or, maybe not even the "useful" one ;), but it's nice to have for those times when you just don't feel like doing any extra typing or expending the effort required to separate the wheat from the chaff on a screen full of garbage output. That is, as I've always understood, one of the main reasons to script things out in the first place.

There are many options available for Linux distros, over 500. Most of you can make into a server. However, if you are looking for the professional level server that, in my opinion, leads all other distros in functioning as a server then you need to investigate CentOS. Here is a list of the reasons that CentOS is top on my list for a server.

It's a small wonder that the Linux operating system remains vibrant in multiple industries and is poised to make a dash for more consumers' desktops, considering how often misunderstandings get in the way of its advancement. For instance, Linux was not immediately recognized as a real OS in the way that consumers and business owners viewed the Apple computer or IBM PC in the early days of computing.

Gone are the heady days of early Ubuntu releases when everything seemed new and fresh. Now you have to look a little deeper than the desktop wallpaper to see the changes Ubuntu is making.

I admit it, before hearing his name in connection with OLPC's G1G1 campaign and looking it up on Wikipedia I had no idea who that Tom Brady fellow was. But I now understand he's some kind of soccer American football player or something. ;-)

I have just finished a new book about free software. Excerpt: Given the technology that's already available, we should have cars that drive us around, in absolute safety, while we lounge in the back and sip champagne. All we need is a video camera on the roof, plugged into a PC, right? We have all the necessary hardware, and have had it for years, but don't yet have robot-driven cars because we don't have the software. This book explains how we can build better software and all get our own high-tech chauffeur.

I must say Linux Mint seems to always impress me with every new release. In this release Linux Mint has brought to us a new software manager called MintInstall, which allows you to browse the Mint Software portal offline, see screenshots that are available per package, and much more. Linux Mint has also brought you MintNanny, which allows you to control what domains are blocked.

The FreeBSD jail mechanism is an implementation of operating system-level virtualization that allows administrators to partition a FreeBSD-based computer system into several independent mini-systems called jails. FreeBSD jails offer security, ease of delegation and os level virtualization. This article explains how to upgrade FreeBSD jails using 'make world'.

Failure to virt-install F10 PV DomU and repeated issue with CentOS 5.2 in stub domain after same port via http://gitco.de ( upgrading only hypervisor to keep virt-install alive at Dom0 ) brought me to idea just go through traditional “hg” cloning mercurial repository at http://bits.xensource.com and build local Xen with 2.6.18.8-xen kernel

One of the more bizarre accusations flung by Microsoft at GNU/Linux over the years is that it doesn't scale. This is part of a larger campaign to portray it as a kind of “toy” operating system – fine for low-end stuff, but nothing you'd want to run your enterprise on. Sadly, that narrative has been rather undermined by the independent Top500 supercomputing sites ranking. Five years ago, the GNU/Linux family ran 36.80% of the top 500 supercomputers; worse, Windows ran on precisely one supercomputer.

For Linux desktop users interested in a mid-range discrete graphics card there are more choices than ever before with NVIDIA continuing to release new stable Linux drivers as they have done for many years while AMD this year has been making evolutionary leaps compared to their earlier state. AMD is now providing same-day support with all new products, CrossFire on Linux, OverDrive, and many other recently introduced features. NVIDIA and AMD are nearly at a feature parity and even in the past two months they both released new video APIs for Linux (PureVideo / VDPAU and X-Video Bitstream Acceleration, respectively) and they are now battling it out on Linux over performance. We recently looked at AMD's new ATI Radeon HD 4830 mid-range graphics card, but in this article we are comparing it to the NVIDIA GeForce 9800GT, courtesy of Micro-Star International.

Probably biggest edUbuntu deployment in an educational system with around 100,000 workstations suffers from lack of relevant e-content, so the students--beneficiaries of Computer for Every Child Project--wander around the internet for stuff to read in class.

What gives you a firewall, load-balancing, QoS, 3G support, RADIUS, wireless access point, HTTP proxy, VPN, VLAN, PPPoE, captive portal, and a host of other useful security, authentication, and network applications, all in a hundred megabytes? Zeroshell, the built-from-scratch Linux network appliance.

In a report on enterprise open source usage released this week, Gartner research director Laurie Wurster stated in rather strong language that companies could face a big intellectual property issue because they are using the software without understanding the IP implications of the licensing language. But is she exaggerating the danger and is there less complexity with open source licenses than with proprietary ones?

C Cod is a front end to your C, C++, or Objective-C compiler that lets you treat C more like a scripting language. C Cod comes with C Server Pages, which provides support for CGI so you can write Web applications in C or C++ and have them automatically compiled on demand.

If you thought the RIAA had cornered the market on heavy-handed, misguided lawsuits, think again. TorrentFreak reports that the Societe civile des Producteurs de Phonogrammes en France (SPPF) plan on pursuing a lawsuit against three US-based companies that develop P2P applications. Vuze, Limewire, and Shareaza are the applications targeted in the lawsuit. There is a fourth company named that's not a developer, or a P2P site -- it's a repository.

FTP is a very insecure protocol because all passwords and all data are transferred in clear text. By using TLS, the whole communication can be encrypted, thus making FTP much more secure. This article explains how to set up ProFTPd with TLS on an Ubuntu 8.10 server.

It might be time to invest in a better umbrella, as over the last few days it seems as though pigs might be taking flight. It's not so much that Adobe is releasing a 64-bit Linux alpha version of Flash, it's that Adobe is releasing the Flash alpha for Linux before it releases versions for any other operating system.

The Dell IdeaStorm site was an inspired move by the company, providing a way for the market to tell a major supplier what to do, rather than the reverse, which has been the default for the whole Industrial Age. When the site first went up, it sustained what we might call an Insistence on Service Attack by Linux and open-source geeks. Since then, however, the pressure hasn't let up. At the time of this writing (on September 10, 2008 for the print magazine), the same kind of demand is there.