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Battered by competition and slowing demand, Sun Microsystems swung to a big loss in its fiscal first quarter, dragging the server and software maker's results below Wall Street's forecast. Sun also plans to write down the value of its business, a sign of the company's deteriorating competitive position and vulnerability to the economic meltdown.

Last month we had looked at the ATI Radeon HD 4670 under Linux. This graphics card had worked just fine with the Catalyst Linux Suite, but when using either of the two open-source ATI drivers there were problems with the DVI connectors. While using an analog VGA connector works if you are just after mode-setting support, the R600/700 GPUs still lack 2D, 3D, and video acceleration using any non-Catalyst driver. Sapphire Technology though has sent out an ATI Radeon HD 4550 512MB GPU to see whether this sub-$50 USD graphics card plays nicely with the xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd drivers.

The Xbox Media Center (XBMC) is a media center application for Linux, Mac, and Windows that allows you to manage/watch/listen to/view your videos, music, and pictures. It has a nice interface, can be controlled from the desktop or a remote control or via its built-in web interface, and it can be extended by custom scripts. This guide shows how you can install XBMC on a Fedora 9 desktop (i386).

As more and more consumers download smartphone applications, it's become increasingly vital for developers, phone makers and wireless carriers to have a deeper understanding of how customers interact with them. That's where a company like Flurry comes in. The San Francisco-based startup has developed software that gives demographic information about mobile application consumers.

It is good practice to use a different password for each Web site you need to log in to. Good passwords tend to be long and contain a wide selection of characters. That can make remembering all your passwords difficult. But you can make things easier on yourself by storing passwords for various Web sites in an encrypted file on your computer. I'll take a look at a four programs that give you easy access to your passwords when you need them and protect the password file itself against compromise.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote that a mobile edition of Firefox was expected within weeks. Well, now there is an alpha version of Fennec. We decided to give the little fox a spin to see what exactly the Firefox team had been up to over the past few months.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) in the mobile space face increasing pressure to build business models around open source, but need to weigh risks in adopting a suitable strategy, says analyst firm Ovum.

International Data Corporation (IDC) has analyzed PC sales figures for EMEA in the third quarter of 2008 and discovered that netbooks are responsible for more than half the nearly 30% sales growth. Linux is to ride along on the wave, which is to remain at its current level.

This weekend the xf86-video-intel 2.4.98 driver was released with hopes of releasing the Intel 2.5.0 driver on Monday. This driver is arriving a bit late compared to its original target of last month, but it's now available. This open-source Intel X.Org driver update features GEM integration (on supported systems), kernel mode-setting (on supported systems), improved EXA 2D performance, and quite a number of bug-fixes.

Engine Yard, a software developer of cloud deployment and open source tools for Ruby on Rails applications, last week released an open source framework for building fast, high-performance Ruby applications. Called"Merb," the programming tool is similar to Ruby on Rails. Merb is an MVC framework.

We gave Solaris zfs the treatment. Now it's time to go after those zones ;) A while ago (back in May, 2008, I believe), we took a look at working with storage pools using ZFS on Solaris 10. As we know, ZFS stands for the Zettabyte File System and not the Zone File System (which some folks think it does. Not criticizing. It makes more sense than a lot of other things you might get from those initials ;). The point being, we never stopped to take a look at zones and lay down some simple procedures for working with them.

Dutch Linux consultant Armijn Hemel clarifies in his recently issued GPL Compliance Engineering Guide how to check for GPL breaches of electronic devices.

Slowly but surely, Canonical plans to add a range of third-party Ubuntu Linux applications to the company's online store. The strategy could convince more businesses and VARs to deploy Ubuntu Server Edition, reports The VAR Guy.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is India's largest political party, with around 20 million Ordinary Members and about 4 million Active Members. In June, BJP announced its goal to become one of the most high-tech political parties in the next two years, and free and open source software (FOSS) will play an essential role in this project.

Motorola is reportedly working to create its first Android-based smartphone. The first phone based on Google's open mobile operating system -- T-Mobile's G1 -- will show up Oct. 22, and Motorola will apparently be joining the party at an undisclosed later date. Still, a fashionably late entrance could be just fine.

The Linux Foundation - the non-profit consortium that gives Linus Torvalds his paycheck and facilitates the growth of Linux and Linux standards - has announced the first beta of the Linux Standard Base 4.0. There are many Linux variants, and they use different kernel releases and software libraries, depending on the technical preferences of the people putting together the distros. Variety may be the spice of life, but it can cause compatibility issues if it is taken too far, and the LSB effort has established many years ago to provide a consistent set of specifications that allow the many distros to remain compatible despite their individual choices and, using LSB tools, to test operating system and application code to ensure that they adhere to the specs.

There is still a day left for the first Android based Device, T-Mobile G1, to come out into the hands of general public but I was in a for a small surprise as I went through my Google Analytics report for the last week. It had a mysterious number of 2 sitting at the bottom of my “Unique Visitors by Operating Systems” filter report. The “mysterious” part coming from the fact that the left most column displayed Android

If you were born before 1975, you may have a collection of records that you want to convert to digital format. Some open source software and a cable are all you need to convert your prized vinyl to something portable. If all you want to do is create MP3 files from you LP tracks, the only software you'll need is Audacity. If you want to convert vinyl to CD, you'll need cdrdao and cdrecord as well. All are readily available in most distributions' package repositories or from the projects' sites.

Last week, the Linux Foundation held its first Linux Foundation End User Summit in New York. Representatives from many companies were in attendance, including Merrill Lynch, Fidelity, JPMorgan Chase, Dreamworks, the NYSE, and folks from the U.S. Navy were there, too. The folks at the Linux Foundation sent over some highlights of the summit, which you'll find here.

Is it really possible that Apple is -- in some respects -- worse than Microsoft when it comes to respecting the fundamentals of software freedom? Christopher Tozzi, a blogger on Works With U, the independent guide to Ubuntu, makes his case against Apple. Here's the scoop.