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One of the special abilities of ATI's R600 GPU family is the integrated 5.1 surround sound audio support through HDMI. Many Radeon HD 2000 and HD 3800 series graphics cards also ship with a DVI to HDMI dongle, so that one can experience the full video playback capabilities of these discrete graphics cards. But what level of HDMI support can Linux users expect when using these latest ATI graphics cards? We have done some testing internally and have the initial ATI Linux HDMI video and audio results to report in this article.

Canonical has been pushing its Ubuntu Server Edition, but I believe that they should instead be pushing their desktop version and dropping their server version altogether, because Ubuntu has a unique advantage on the desktop that they should not abandon.

Here's a step by step tutorial on how to get Windows XP up and running on the XO laptop. Get your SD card ready, your portable USB CD-ROM and let's go!

[All I can think of is..why? - Scott]

In a Ministry of Justice report, which can be found on the New Zealand Open Source Society Web site, the ministry addresses traditional concerns about open source, and concludes that although "open source software [OSS] was once an extraordinary way of thinking, limited to academia and small guerrilla projects in a community of hackers...[it] can lead to a more stable, supportable and cost-effective IT environment, and should be pursued for pragmatic reasons".

A long time ago in net time (so around 1999) I wrote an article about setting up DNS. The article I wrote was terse to say the least. Recently I had the opportunity to work on a new DNS installation that grew to become somewhat complex. I decided to do a series on DNS covering the scope of what I have dealt with in hopes that it might help others. Although the scope I have dealt with is really mild; we have to start somewhere. In this first part of the series - an extremely simple DNS server with very few hosts is covered to get the feet wet.

I've been using and advocating free software for around six years. When studying and then working as a freelance writer, migrating an office seemed so simple -- draw up a list of comparable programs and, over a reasonable period, move your staff across. But over the past few weeks I've been trying to use Ubuntu Gutsy on my desktop PC in a Windows-based office, and whilst most things work just fine, it's far from the seamless integration I was hoping for.

The federal government doesn't seem to have too much time for what some call "social media" - Facebook, MySpace, blogs and so on. Access to many such sites is restricted in many government offices, presumably because they are seen as time-wasting devices for the office slacker.

[Interesting article that talks about copyright law and the RIAA in Canada - Scott]

While the use of Linux continues to sail along at a nice clip, the number of people kicking the tires is shrinking, for all the right reasons. While Linux and complex RTOS products offer such attractive capabilities, they're also correspondingly difficult to learn and use due to these robust arrays of services. Linux includes hundreds of system services, virtual memory, and tens of millions of lines of open-source code. High-end commercial RTOSs also include many features and lots of code, making them (and Linux) a challenge to master.

A number of corporations are moving into the free software arena, and this has resulted in legions of programmers, paid by companies, moving into free software communities, Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun said Friday at FOSS.IN, a conference on free and open-source software in Bangalore, India. This development has thrown up questions about how open-source developers on corporate payrolls can protect their freedom and rights from the demands of their employers, and resist corporate influences that may run counter to the free software community's interests.

At the end of November, LWN posted a pointer to Novell's announcement for its SUSE Linux Enterprise Realtime offering. The resulting comments were surprisingly negative. Readers questioned the need for realtime response in "enterprise" settings. Anybody who is still wondering about the value of that product will be doubly confused now that Red Hat has announced a realtime distribution service of its own. It's not surprising that the two companies most interested in selling Linux-related services into the enterprise market have announced offerings within a week of each other. What is surprising is the amount of silly sniping which has come with these releases.

If you are old enough to remember CB radio (i.e.: mid-30s and up), you pretty much understand IRC-at least in the human sense of the experience. The younger crowd can think of IRC as a suped-up free version of text-messaging in serious steroids.

Distros have changed. In the past, they were made up of a small, tightly knit group collaborators working toward a common goal. With distributions today we now have an informal, large group of collaborators...some of which may not even be aware of the main goal of the distro. That informal collaborator may just want package foo version 2.2 included in his/her distribution so that he/she can use it on their desktop. How does that informal collaborator become empowered? How can the developers reap what that collaborator sows and harness the collective collaboration of thousands of informal contributors? The answer for many software projects is version control. But how can this system benefit package management?

The KDE Education Project is developing high-quality software for the K Desktop Environment. Its primary focus is on schoolchildren aged 3 to 18, and the specialized user interface needs of young users. Several programs were also made to aid teachers in planning lessons, and others that are of interest to university students and anyone else with a desire to learn. Here are some of the KDE-made programs that you may find interesting and useful.

Illegal downloaders of music and movies are at the forefront of technology—and it's time the industries caught up.

The "brains" of the Ares I rocket that will send four astronauts back to the moon sometime in the next 12 years will be built by Boeing, NASA announced today—but the specifications will be open-source and non-proprietary, so that other companies can bid on future contracts. The avionics unit will provide guidance, navigation and control for the launch rocket, which will carry the Orion crew vehicle into Earth orbit.

Adobe Systems today announced it will release the remoting and messaging technologies used in Flex, Flash and other Adobe products as open source projects. Because the technologies are fairly mature, Adobe isn't so much looking for help from the open source community as it is looking to get its technology into more hands. Adobe intends to release the remoting and HTTP-based messaging technologies in its LiveCycle Data Services ES along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification under the named BlazeDS. They will be made available as public betas under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) v3 and downloadable from Adobe Labs.

go-mobile, a provider of popular extensions for SugarCRM, has released ZuckerDocs version 2 which integrates the open source KnowledgeTree document management system into SugarCRM. Using ZuckerDocs users can access KnowledgeTree's document management features from within SugarCRM, including version control and full-text document search. Documents within the KnowledgeTree repository can also be associated with SugarCRM objects such as accounts, opportunities and leads.

As the date for the February BRM (Ballot Resolution Meeting) on ISO/IEC JTC1 DIS 29500 (a/k/a Ecma 376, a/k/a Microsoft OOXML) approaches, more and more attention is being paid to how Ecma will propose the disposition of the comments submitted during the general voting period. Yesterday, Ecma issued a press release that offers a bit of a peek behind the curtain.

Palamida, the San Francisco company that helps companies to audit their use of open source software, has released a list of what it calls "the top five most overlooked open source vulnerabilities." To this list, Palamida has added an additional five vulnerabilities exclusively for Linux.com.

GNOME theme engine designer Andrea Cimitan has implemented support for transparent widgets in the Murrine GTK theme engine, bringing Vista-like translucent glass effects to the GNOME desktop. Cimitan used RGBA colormaps to implement the feature and says that, with only 10 or 20 extra lines of code, translucency can easily be added to other theme engines that support RGBA.