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Back in June we had exclusively shared that CrossFire would be coming to Linux as part of their Radeon HD 4800 series strategy. CrossFire (or CrossFire X as it's now known) allows the graphics rendering workload to be split between multiple Radeon GPUs to deliver faster performance. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's multi-GPU technology known as SLI (Scalable Link Interface) has been supported on Linux since 2005. While AMD is still working to address some issues with their ATI Linux driver, they have been working hard on new features like CrossFire. How does this feature work though on Linux and does it deliver similar performance gains to their Windows driver? Today we have a full rundown on ATI CrossFire for Linux along with benchmarks from the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870.

Olympics aside, summer 2008 will be remembered for at least two other reasons. It will be seen as a time when the noise over Linux as a platform for mobile devices reached a crescendo. Second: it marked Debian's fifteenth anniversary. Bringing both together, Debian developers have delivered a version of their Linux distro for Openmoko's FreeRunner handset.

A book on (gulp) law? Why would I want to read this? Well, if you're a developer (open source or not) and you are at all interested in protecting the fruits of your labors, you will want to know this the same way you want to know about locking your house when you leave for work each morning. The next question is, "Will I understand anything the author is saying?". Depends. If you're an attorney, the answer is "yes". If you're a software engineer, the answer is..."yes". What? How can that be? Turns out the author is both a software engineer and a practicing attorney (at least, according to the blurb on the back cover of the book). Is it possible he can speak to both audiences? Let's find out.

According to its past and present marketing, Foresight Linux has three claims to fame: Its user-friendliness, its use of the Conary package management system, and its role as a showcase for the latest in GNOME. In practice, its latest 2.0.4 version is not more user-friendly than any other GNOME-based distribution -- if anything, it is slightly less so because of its limited software selection and package management -- but its other claims are enough to make Foresight one of the more distinctive modern distributions.

Clay Shirky is a leading thinker about how the Internet is changing the world. In his writing, especially the recent book, Here Comes Everybody, he detailed how the networked world allows people to form leaderless groups that still do useful work. Through illuminating examples like his calculation that Wikipedia was created in about the same amount of time that Americans spend watching commercials each weekend, Shirky argues that humans in the post-industrial age are just coming to terms with how to spend their "cognitive surplus."

The collaboration is nothing but another attempt to stop Red Hat, Ubuntu and the rest of them, ensuring all of GNU/Linux is taxed and policed by Microsoft.

It's becoming increasingly clear that one of the key players in the open source ecosystem is Mozilla. This is a due to two factors. The first is the continuing move to browser-based ways of working: think Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook and the rest. The rise of cloud computing, which is also implicitly browser-based, will only accentuate this trend. This makes Firefox, with its steadily-rising market share, a pivotal program, and the organisation behind it a major force in computing.

Following some developer complaints of slow progress, Google Inc. on Monday released an updated version of the Android software development kit as well as a timeline for future releases. In addition to fixing "tons of bugs," the update includes a "ton" of user interface changes, according to a blog post written by Dan Morrill, a developer advocate at Google. It also includes new applications such as an alarm clock, calculator, camera, music player, picture viewer and messaging application.

Proponents of open source software are trying to make a case for using the collaborative approach to conquer the world's most vexing medical problems. However, established practices of avoiding the spotlight and protecting vested interests in breakthrough results still hamper the collaborative process.

The Ubuntu Live CD installer does not support software RAID, and the server and alternate CDs only allow you to do RAID levels 0, 1, and 5. Raid 10 is the fastest RAID level that also has good redundancy too. So I was disappointed that Ubuntu did not have it as a option for my new file server. I did not want shell out lots of money for a RAID controller, especially since benchmarks show little performance benefit using a Hardware controller configured for RAID 10 in a file server.

The Virtual Volumes View (VVV) project lets you index your data DVDs and perform searches to figure out whether a given file is backed up and what disc contains it. If you routinely back up a large amount of data onto DVDs, you can simply number your discs and keep them in numerically sorted order. When it comes time to find an image or digital video you burned to DVD, just use VVV to figure out the disc number and quickly locate the right disc in the pile.

Microsoft and Novell expand their interoperability partnership with Microsoft buying up to $100 million in SUSE Linux certificates. The partnership helps enable SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows Server to work together in the datacenter. Moreover, the companies will continue to work collaboratively on virtual-ization, systems management, directory and identity federation, document format compatibility, acces-sibility technology, and the Moonlight multimedia framework.

Malicious hackers are using booby-trapped Flash banner ads to hijack clipboards for use in rogue security software attacks. In the Web attacks, which target Mac, Windows and Linux users running Firefox, IE and Safari, hackers are seizing control of the machine’s clipboard and using a hard-to-delete URL that points to a fake anti-virus program.

When it comes to ATI hardware, one of the features we have been after for the longest time on Linux has been any overclocking support. Windows users have ATI's OverDrive at their disposal along with an arsenal of third-party utilities such as ATI Tool. NVIDIA also has various utilities for overclocking their graphics cards on Windows, but they also provide support for overclocking on Linux. Today though with the release of the Catalyst 8.8 Linux driver there is finally ATI OverDrive 5 support on Linux.

How to manipulating your disks using their Universal Unique Identifiers.

The demise of touch-screen voting has produced a graveyard of expensive corpses: Warehouses stacked with thousands of carefully wrapped voting machines that have been shelved because of doubts about vanishing votes and vulnerability to hackers.

Following some developer complaints of slow progress, Google Inc. on Monday released an updated version of the Android software development kit as well as a timeline for future releases. In addition to fixing "tons of bugs," the update includes a "ton" of user interface changes, according to a blog post written by Dan Morrill, a developer advocate at Google. It also includes new applications such as an alarm clock, calculator, camera, music player, picture viewer and messaging application.

Converting a PDF file into an HTML or a XML file has been made easy by a small useful utility called PDFTOHTML. PdftoHTml is a Xpdf based tool which can convert PDF files to HTML or XML format. PDFTOHTML also supports encrypted files and support for images in the PDF file by converting to PNG images files.

Google has released the 0.9 SDK Beta and admits that its ambitious project to produce the first complete, open, and free mobile platform is "converging on a final Android 1.0" release. It has also taken the bold step of posting an open letter to the security community which, in effect, invites them to hack the Android...

Some cloud computing vendors, such as 3tera and Nirvani, push their own proprietary platforms and tools, which forces adopters to limit their options and work in a restricted or closed architecture. When these established vendors say cloud, they mean their cloud. As a result, Web developers may believe that, in order to use cloud computing, they must accept limitations in the way they write and build their applications. But that view is a misconception; open standards for cloud computing are already in place and are being tweaked. This does not mean that a single cloud computing platform is universally available. But just as some vendors have developed their own proprietary platforms for working in the clouds, so have various open source companies and communities.