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This year's second-most anticipated cell phone, the T-Mobile G1, is significant not because it's elegant or stylish like the most anticipated phone, the iPhone 3G, but because of what's inside. It's the first phone with Android, an open source mobile operating system largely developed by Google that will ship with other phones in the future.

While not commonly mentioned at Phoronix, Alien Arena is an open-source sci-fi first-person shooter that has been around since 2004 and uses the CRX engine, which is a derivative of the Id's GPL source-code. Version 7.20 of Alien Arena 2008 was released this week and a few features had caught our attention. In addition to a number of game-play improvements, Alien Arena has received a number of improvements to its graphics renderer with GLSL program management, parallax mapping, new lighting, new shaders, and other work.

Linus Torvalds has integrated a large collection of patches prepared by (Ext) filesystem developer Theodore Ts'o (tytso) into the main development branch of Linux. It contains a patch for Ext4 which allows it to present itself as ext4 instead of ext4dev. This signals that with the next kernel version 2.6.28, the successor to ext3 will finally leave behind its "hot" development phase. The kernel developers integrated an early version of Ext4 in the main development branch of Linux 2.6.19 in order to jointly develop it to maturity there.

Google Chrome is an open-source web browser from Google, currently available only for the Windows platform. It aims to have a minimal and easy to use interface. Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which was developed from KHTML, and it is used in various browsers like Konqueror on KDE4 or Safari (on Mac OS X).

As some of you know that I’ve taken up the development of the ultra-cool xwinwrap tool that allows you to use movies, screensavers etc as wallpapers for you linux desktops. Here is version 0.02 for you consumption that fixes a bug because of which the generated window was overlapping other windows.

You would think that it's a hard enough job taking on Microsoft's desktop dominance. Ubuntu's community lead Jono Bacon, however, may actually have an even more audacious goal in mind: completely change the economics of the music industry.

In case you were wondering, Microsoft thinks the battle of open source vs. proprietary software is basically over. "Today, but increasingly in the future, we are all going to be 'mixed source'," Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer said in a lunchtime interview on Thursday. To bolster his claim, Horacio Gutierrez notes Microsoft is releasing plenty of stuff as open source, while open-source companies like Red Hat often license commercial software alongside their open-source products. "I actually think the war between proprietary and open source is a thing of the past," he said.

A week ago we shared that Linux Game Publishing, the company that has ported games to Linux such as Cold War and X2: The Threat, was bringing Jets 'n' Guns to Linux. Just a week later this 2D side-scrolling arcade game is now being distributed to LGP's closed testing community. We have our hands on the first beta of Jets 'n' Guns for Linux and in this article are a few screenshots.

Red Hat Exchange, the online marketplace launched by Red Hat in March 2007, is finally hitting its stride. More than an online Linux store, RHX offers a range of third-party software. Quarterly sales recently doubled, and big customer purchases have included MySQL and Zimbra deployments.Here's the scoop.

In a shocking revelation today, millions of Chrome fanboys across the web have realized that Google has not yet lost interest in their one month old browser.

Boy, I wish I'd been at Gartner's Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, Fla. this year. That way I could heard with my own ears, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tell an audience of high-level business people that if they want to wait for Windows 7 to switch from XP, instead of going to Vista, "They certainly can."

OpenSolaris 2008.05 had given a new face to Solaris through a vastly improved desktop experience. While OpenSolaris 2008.05 was not perfect, it was quite pleasant and a very nice first step. Sun Microsystems is now preparing for the release of OpenSolaris 2008.11 to incorporate their latest set of changes. In this article we are looking at some of the latest advancements in this pre-release.

At least I'm not the only person being paid beans to manage myself and the 5 departments I performs all essential functions in ;) This Saturday's post is from a pretty interesting site dealing with all things Linux. It goes by the name of reallylinux.com. This piece, that I found on there, interested me because, especially in dubious economic times like we find ourselves in these days, I'm often amazed at the sheer amount of diversity and depth of experience employers seek to acquire for less-than-bottom dollar.

By now you have probably heard about these newfangled netbooks, products like the ASUS EeePC and Dell Inspiron Mini 9. I've suggested that the biggest growth potential for these devices would come from emerging markets. But after a closer look, I've seen some trends that most likely will cause greater demand in the U.S. and Europe as well.

Almost a month ago, on September 24th, fellow zdnet blogger Mary Jo Foley filed a report under the title: Microsoft: Windows and Linux offer same TCO in emerging markets, which she introduced as: "While Linux may be cheaper up front, but over time, Windows and Linux offer roughly the same total-cost-of-ownership to customers deploying large numbers of PCs in schools in emerging markets."

Books, articles, and training courses mostly teach Photoshop as though it were photography itself. Me, I think giving so much as one devalued red cent to Adobe is equivalent to saying "Why yes, I am for corrupt corporate control of everything and vandalism of fundamental civil rights" because of what they did to Dmitry Sklyarov. To this day no one at Adobe has apologized or admitted error; they stubbornly cling to the "we must protect our precious IP" party line. Call me a moldy old hippie, but in my world due process, fairness, and civil rights trump Adobe's precious IP. Which wasn't so precious at all, but closer to laughable.

The procedure down here has been developed due to virt-install failure to handle OpenSuse 11 PV DomU install at Xen 3.3 (3.2),(3.1) CentOS 5.2 Dom0 either via NFS or HTTP shared directory. Perform initial connect to Apache Server running at Dom0 , deployment and configuration (until first DomU reboot) via profile openSUSE11PV.cfg When OpenSuse DomU first time goes down for reboot, shutdown Suse DomU via “xm” and switch to pygrub profile for loading scp'ed images created via vm-install at OpenSuse 11 Dom0.

Not long ago I watched a free software developer totally lose his cool with a user who (admittedly very frustratingly) posted a “bug report” in Spanish on an English-language project that amounted to “it doesn’t work”. He posted a very sarcastic reply in a couple of random languages (one of them through a machine translator). It was an understandable reaction, and in a way, kind of funny if you could understand all of the languages involved, but it wasn’t exactly good public relations. It was a sure sign of burnout. He had forgotten one important point: you are not obligated to help just because you wrote the thing. Read Terry Hancock's advice to hard-pressed software developers on how to cope at Freesoftware Magazine.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 16, 2008, with your host, Marcel Gagné. Today's stories include EVIL androids, EVIL firewalls, EVIL cameras, EVIL content filters, a super fast graphical browser, and some Linux blogs some Linux blogger says you should follow.

Linux has all the power and flexibility you need to power your network, both for servers and networking devices. Carla Schroder shows you how to select hardware, software, and not spend money unnecessarily on pricey commercial software. Which is probably Linux or BSD-based anyway.