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A new linker is not generally something that arouses much interest outside of the hardcore development community—or even inside it—unless it provides something especially eye-opening. A newly released linker, called gold has just that kind of feature, though, because it runs up to five times as fast as its competition. For developers who do a lot of compile-link-test cycles, that kind of performance increase can significantly increase their efficiency.

Open Graphics Project founder Timothy Miller recently noted on the project's mailing list that they are set to announce that their first hardware, the OGD1, is ready for pre-order. "The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now," he began, explaining that they've been setting up a way to process pre-orders for the first 100 boards. The board will retail at $1,500, with a $100 discount offered for the first 100 pre-orders. "These are pre-orders, not orders, Timothy continued, "that means the lead time is unpredictable. We don't have a stock. We will purchase a stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will be unable to fulfill them; all pre-orders would be canceled, and no one would be charged anything."

Joomla! is a world class content management system that allows you to easily create high-quality, professional Websites. Out of the box, provides a very robust feature set, and with the recent release of 1.5 Stable, the programing API allows it to be extended far beyond most people's wildest dreams. Highlighting some of the features Joomla! supports out of the box would take up an entire article all on its own, but here we'll touch on some of the highlights!

I've been running OpenBSD 4.2 on my test box -- the VIA C3 Samuel-based thin client -- for a couple of months now. That's at least a year in dog months, and since I'm anxious to put Dru Lavigne's new "The Best of FreeBSD Basics" book to work, I wanted to do something I've never done before: Install a BSD on the $15 Laptop, the 1999 Compaq Armada 7770dmt.

My goal, Dear Reader, is not to prove anyone, that Windows’ command-line features are identical to those of Linux. To be honest, this text does not aim to cover the Windows shell features, at all. It is not a goal, it is a measure. The goal is to present you with a few thoughts about “the human nature”, as would Agatha Christie say.

As I have said before life at the terminal is a joy. I constantly struggle with keeping myself organized. I actually work pretty well keeping most things in my head. But one of these days I’m going to fall down and hit my head and forget everything. So try and try again to keep myself organized and documented do I. I was recently pointed to TicGit its a ticketing system that is meant to integrate right into your repository. Well I’m not a developer but I can see the benefit for a terminal todo list and general ticketing for myself as well as my little script repository that is actually maintained in git. Well ok maybe maintained is a bit strong of a word. Anyway on to the good stuff. TicGit howto, command line ticketing system

To bolster growth, Red Hat must pursue the high-volume Linux space. Five years ago, Red Hat sent a shock wave through the Linux community when it announced a new bleeding-edge development pace for its flagship distribution, Red Hat Linux.

Many times, shell scripts evolve into menu-based scripts, and the scripter wants to display more to users than simply scrolling text. Regardless of the complexity, scripters have always needed a way to change their output to bold, underline it, reverse the highlights, and so on. That's where tput comes into play.

"Twice a year I get to release the song & lyrics, and write a little commentary on something the project dealt with other [than] the release. Hope you guys enjoy," said OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt, including a link to the latest OpenBSD song. The OpenBSD project maintains a six month release cycle, with the upcoming 4.3 release officially scheduled for May 1st, 2008. Each release includes a song relevant to issues faced by the project during the past six months. The song for the upcoming 4.3 release is titled, "Home to Hypocrisy", with scathing references to some recent postings on the OpenBSD -misc mailing list by Free Software Foundation creator Richard Stallman.

With 4 million routers now enabled to be Linux application servers, the world's greatest networking vendor is the penguin's biggest fan.

With tinc you can create a virtual private network (VPN) that lets you communicate between two machines over an insecure network such as the Internet with all of your traffic encrypted between the hosts on your virtual network. Another interesting application for tinc is connecting your laptop to a Wi-Fi router at home. You might already be using WPA2 to ensure that only valid hosts can connect and communicate with your Wi-Fi router, but you might not be able to assign a fixed address to the laptop when it is connected over Wi-Fi. So if you want to connect to an SSH daemon on the laptop itself or access an NFS share on the laptop, you have to play guessing games as to which IP address the Wi-Fi router has given the laptop this time.

It's been a long time in the making, but the xf86-video-radeonhd 1.2 driver has just been pushed out the door. RadeonHD 1.2 is the first new release for this open-source ATI R500/600 driver since December of last year. The RadeonHD 1.2 driver includes support for new AMD graphics processors, 2D XAA/EXA acceleration, and other changes.

I came away from the second annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit with mixed feelings. I mean, it's hard not to support the group that pays Linus Torvalds to spend his time continuing to lead the poster-boy project for free and open source software. But at the same time, those golden chains are my biggest concern about the Linux Foundation.

One of the great things about Linux is the ability to not only install it on your home desktop computer, but the ability to install it on a USB Key. Installing Linux on a USB Key makes it very mobile and today I am pleased to review a commercial version of Linux on USB key called Mandriva Flash 2008.

Mandriva Linux is a predominantly KDE-centric Linux distribution originating from France. This desktop-oriented Linux distribution which began its production in 1998 owes its popularity to its ease of installation and graphical productive draktools. I decided to review Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring (aka Mandriva Linux 2008.1) when I got to know that, this new Spring edition has a full support for the Asus Eee PC and also improved support for mobile device synchronization.

As the release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS rapidly approaches, the all important question is beginning to form in everyone's mind. Upgrade, or freshly install. It's always an interesting discussion to have with fellow Linux users, because there seems to be an almost religious divide between the two camps. Some feel that to really get the full experience of a new version, a clean install is the only way.

They say that every dog has its day. Could the growing popularity of Asus's low-cost EEE notebook launch Puppy Linux into the limelight? The EEE (pictured at right) comes with Xandros Linux, by default, with Windows XP also an option on the newest model. But there's a third dog in the race now, and one that's capable of running circles around either of the weightier contenders.

The annual conclave of free graphics software developers, users, and artists known as the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is set for May 8-11 in Wroclaw, Poland, this year. LGM organizers are holding a fund-raising campaign this week to help volunteer developers travel to the event. Now in its third year, LGM gathers programmers, users, and designers representing all of the major free graphics applications -- the GIMP, Krita, Inkscape, Blender, and Scribus -- and other apps, plus related projects like OpenICC and the Open Clip Art Library. The conference allows the developers to collaborate, share ideas and code, cooperate on cross-application standards, and simply get to know one another. End users and artists are an integral part of LGM, too, participating in meetings with developers, showcasing work, and contributing tutorials.

As you may recall, six US states considered open format bills last year. One of them was Texas, where the result was to charge a committee to do further research and make recommendations about what the Longhorn State should do with its documents. A few days ago, I gave testimony at a hearing before that committee along with ODF Alliance members, Microsoft, and others. Here's what the hearing was like.

Linux, long the laggard to the Windows desktop, is pushing into emerging markets, onto mobile devices and other client form factors, and is poised to give Microsoft something to really compete against, according to attendees at the annual Linux Foundation Summit.