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And Please...don't respond by mentioning in any way, shape or form how the "Linux Community" is going to rise to the challenge. There is no "Linux Community". Those who believe there is...go ahead. Leave that tooth under your pillow one more night. The Tooth Fairy probably just got behind in her rounds.

We've talked all too often about AtomBIOS and there being two different open-source drivers that support the same ATI Radeon hardware with the key architectural difference between the two just being the use of this video BIOS abstraction layer. From the beginning, AMD was planning to have their Novell partners use AtomBIOS when writing this new (at the time, R500/600) driver, but the developers ultimately declined. These developers have expressed their opinions on AtomBIOS, which range from it being an unbearable mess to this design being nothing more than writing open-source code to power someone else's closed-source work. However, under pressure by AMD, the developers are now preparing to use AtomBIOS to a much greater extent within the xf86-video-radeonhd driver. In this article we'll tell you more about what's gone on and where you can checkout this AtomBIOS-bearing RadeonHD driver.

Technology Review interviewed Mitchell Baker, chairman of Mozilla, about plans for a mobile version of Firefox, which might be available later this year.

Apricot is the newest project from the Blender Institute with the goal to build an open-source game instead of a Blender video this time. The characters used in the game are from the Big Buck Bunny movie, the last free movie developed using Blender under the name Project Peach.

Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has touted its "green computing" image following a recent independent test that ranked Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5's power efficiency over Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 on three different hardware platforms. The server tests rated power consumption on IBM, Dell and HP machines in three conditions: active mode optimized for power savings, active mode optimized for performance and quiet mode.

If you're in the EU, please write to your MEP. There's an important vote on some amendments to telecommunications legislation that threaten to sneak in a number of measures that could be catastrophic for the Internet: allowing media companies to snoop through your traffic, take control of your computer, and generally play cop, prosecutor and judge.

Acer’s Aspire One is finally on sale in Australia and represents Acer’s first true foray into territory already claimed by computers such as the Asus Eee PC, the HP MiniNote 2133 and the MSI Wind. Other manufacturers such as Pioneer Computers also have similar devices, and Dell’s upcoming “E” subnotebook will also be a challenger. But the Aspire One, at AUD $599 for the Linux version, with a $99 cashback via redemption through Acer making it only AUD $500, and AUD $699 for the Windows XP version, also with a $99 cash back, making it $600, puts additional pressure on the Asus Eee PC.

I want to wish all you Yanks a happy 4th of July. - tracyanne

This article gives you a jumpstart on performing benchmark on filesystem using iozone a free Filesystem Benchmark utility.

This tutorial will walk you through setting up Shorewall (Shoreline) 4.0 firewall on CentOS 5.1, this can easily be adapted to any other Linux distribution out there.

Lately, there has been quite some bitching on the fringes of the KDE project about KDE4 and the direction it takes. Some people go as far as saying: “Give us back our old desktop!” I beg to differ. The old desktop has served us well for thirty-odd years since its invention by Xerox. It is beyond its due date by now. We need something new that meets the reality we are living in now.

Not Linux, but relevent in light of discussions on security........ One of the cardinal rules of computer programming is to never trust your input. This holds especially true when your input comes from users, and even more so when it comes from the anonymous, general public. Apparently, the developers at Oklahomaâ??s Department of Corrections slept through that day in computer science class, and even managed to skip all of Common Sense 101. You see, not only did they trust anonymous user input on their public-facing website, but they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

On June 11, Red Hat announced that it had reached a settlement in the software patent lawsuit it was defending against Firestar Software, Inc. and DataTern, Inc. This settlement is of interest to the community; it may point toward how how such cases may go in the future. Unfortunately, the amount of information which has been released so far leaves as many questions as answers, including the fundamental question of whether this settlement is as good for the community as Red Hat is claiming.

A look at how I/O redirection works slightly differently in different shells.

Why does AT&T Wi-Fi work in Linux but not OpenBSD (for me anyway)? That's a good question.

Women working on Debian have been getting death threats from a nut job who believes they're killing free software. A poll by new project leader Steve McIntyre into whether people are happy on Debian revealed one female coder had been getting the threats as thanks for her hard work. Further daggering soon revealed she was not alone. McIntyre told The Reg: "I have since discovered that several of our female developers and documenters were threatened. It was some kook in the US who made quite a name from himself harassing women for supposedly destroying the free software movement."

The mobile phone operating system world was rocked recently by the announcement that Nokia had acquired all of the shares of Symbian that it didn't already own, and that it planned to transition the OS to an open-source licensing model. How significant is this move?

Michael Robertson, chairman of Linspire, said the assets of his company were sold to Xandros after "years of frustration in trying to achieve the goal of desktop Linux." Robertson couldn't disclose the terms of the deal with Xandros, a rival Linux distributor, but said Linspire's Click'N'Run download technology would fit in well with Xandros' own bid to establish Linux on end-user machines. To date, its biggest success has been on the Asus Eee PC, a small notebook with long battery life and a low price tag from Taiwanese laptop maker Asustek Computer. It comes with either Xandros Linux or Windows XP.

Being an avid fan of aircraft and flight (ref: extreme high performance flying), one of the things that has always caught my interest was the ever improving design of aircraft, engines and avionics. The enhancements and improvements in aircraft, systems and instrumentation has been nothing short of miraculous. But by now you might be asking yourself, "So what does this have to do with Linux?" A lot. Linux has become quite the integral part of the aviation industry these days, so much so that in some respects, Tux has grown wings. Just how is this happening? Let me show you.

I have never written a review of a Linux distribution, but I've read more than I can count, and many of them have been maddeningly incomplete and not worth the time it took to read them. Here's a list of items you need to talk about in order to write a thorough review, covering every aspect of the distribution from the initial download to the final recommendation and everything in between. Not every item below applies to every distribution; you need to choose which items to include and which to ignore. For example, if the distribution is for an embedded device, there's probably not much point in discussing window manager themes. However, the more you include, the better your review will be. You can cover some of this information in a simple table, but many of the points deserve more explanation.