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Here's the deal: I've been fighting with Debian Lenny for months on The $0 Laptop (Gateway Solo 1450), where I have everything running great except for my persistent problem with screen refresh in X. I've replaced the Intel i810 driver with the plain Intel driver, I've tweaked everything that can be tweaked in xorg.conf. I can't really get work done while my display is slowly disintegrating during the course of a computing session.

In times of YouTube and Co., a free video codec offers a good base for video enjoyment on the Internet -- independent from the interests of commercial providers. After a long development and some criticism, Ogg/Theora seems to be getting there. Yesterday saw the release of codec version 1.0, with Ogg in container format.

openSUSE 11.1 is moving ever closer to its December release date. The fourth beta release became available Monday, with some new bug fixes, updated versions of GNOME, Banshee and the kernel, and webcam support re-enabled. One of the changes long time openSUSE users will notice right away is the new YaST disk partitioner.

Nautilus is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. It has ability to run add-on scripts written in any scripting language. This tutorial explains how to open a shell prompt or gnome-terminal at the current location while browsing directories and files via nautilus Linux / UNIX Gnome file manager.

Could Microsoft become the next Consolidated Edison? It could happen.

The openSUSE project has a new board, and the new board has big plans. The distribution's first board was appointed by Novell in November 2007, tasked with the unusual job of "bootstrapping" a community-elected board that could guide the project with a balance of Novell and non-Novell influence. Less than a year later, that community-elected board is now in place, and looking forward to its new role. Pascal Bleser was on the bootstrap board, and took part in laying the groundwork for the new, permanent board election process. "We first initiated the creation of Guiding Principles that were primarily driven by Cornelius Schumacher (who happens to also be on the current KDE e.V. board of directors) but discussed on our opensuse-project mailing list, growing with the input of community members.

Authors need to count the words in articles and manuscripts. But when it's an HTML document all full of tags, you don't want to count the tags. Akkana Peck shows a fast way to count only the words.

After Barack Obama's speech last night following his victory, CNN analyst Alex Castellanos -- a Republican pundit -- made a reference to "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and implied that the new administration may bring an "open source" mentality to American government.

IBM has started testing Lotus Symphony -- the open source application suite -- for Mac OS X. But that's not all. Big Blue is preparing a channel push and seeking integration partners to help promote Symphony to customers. Here's the scoop.

Python has a good reputation for tasks like systems programming, network programming, and scripting, but Python for the web is becoming red hot. Part of this has to do with the very popular web framework Django, that was developed at a newspaper to help quickly create Content Management Sites. . Another reason is that Google App Engine–Google’s Cloud Computing offering for developers–only exposes a Python API.

Here are 12 tips, tricks, tweaks and techniques to make you say "I didn't know you could do that in Linux." Sure, not every one may be your cup of tea but here are 12 items to help you have the most positive Linux experience you can and to show why Linux is a superior operating system to other alternatives.

A current U.S. court case would make it harder for software patent trolls to file for dubious patents and make legal claims based on existing ones

The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Change", (a.k.a KDE 4.1.3), another bugfix and maintenance update for the latest generation of the most advanced and powerful free desktop. Change is a monthly update to KDE 4.1. It ships with desktop workspace and many cross-platform applications such as administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, multimedia software, games, artwork, web development tools and more. KDE's award-winning tools and applications are available in more than 50 languages.

Data protection software developer R1Soft (www.r1soft.com) has announced its upcoming release of a free beta version of Hot Copy for Linux, a command line utility that takes instant snapshots of disks or volumes on any Linux server, providing an unprecedented level of flexibility for IT administrators.

The presidential election has nothing on the Apple-Psystar copyright imbroglio when it comes to drawn out affairs. The two companies filed paperwork with the California court hearing their dispute in which they ask the court to set a trial date on Nov. 9, 2009. In the joint filing, Apple and Psystar said they expect the trial to last about 10 days. The court has yet to approve the timetable.

This special edition of Fedora 10 will be available for the OLPC XO Laptop Give 1 Get 1 promotion.

Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM are expected on Wednesday to announce the Open Document Format Toolkit Union, an open-source project aimed at making it easier for developers to use ODF. Sun is contributing an initial set of code for an application programming interface (API) that developers can use to work with ODF files without having to know the ins and outs of the technical specification, the companies said.

Ultrasol is a collection of nearly 400 different solitaire or patience games. There are games that use the 52 card International Pattern deck, games for the 78 card Tarock deck, eight and ten suit Ganjifa games, Hanafuda games, Matrix games, Mahjongg games, and games for an original hexadecimal-based deck. It includes many different sets of playing card images and all under standard solitaire type window.

The One Laptop Per Child project, launched by MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte in 2003, was supposed to lead millions of children around the world to information technology and freedom. The plans aimed for low cost, enabling many children to use the machines, and free software, so they would have freedom while using them. I thought it was a good idea; I even planned to use one myself when I found in the OLPC’s promise of free software a way to escape the proprietary startup programs that all commercial laptops used.

"When times are good, people aren't as critical of their applications and they tend to overpay," Mark Hinkle, vice president of community at Zenoss argued. "The economic slowdown has helped to illustrate the value of open source. When times are tough, you start re- evaluating how you do business."