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At the end of our ATI Year in Review for 2006, we had stated, "next year will be a very interesting time for ATI/AMD Linux users." Looking back upon that statement, it has certainly turned out to be true, but perhaps an understatement for all of the AMD Linux work that has actually went on this year. The Catalyst Control Center was finally ported to Linux; there is now AIGLX support for use with Compiz, and the most substantial improvement being a brand new code-base for their proprietary Linux driver. Aside from their binary driver, they have developed a strong interest in better enabling the open-source community through releasing GPU documentation to the public (without NDAs!) and collaborating with Novell on the development of the RadeonHD driver. It has been one hell of a year for AMD, and in this article, we are going to look back at their twelve major driver releases from the year as well as re-benchmark all of these different versions.

How long did you think it would take for an Ubuntu-based machine to make it into Walmart, complete with Google applications scattered all over the place? Apparently it was sooner than we had expected. As I type this, I'm attempting to download a copy of the OS now so I can get a feel for just how much Google feel this Ubuntu variant is really offering.

There are a number of newcomers who migrate to Linux and then find themselves at ends with the confusion regarding restricted formats and codecs in the US. The laws regarding usage are confusing and all over the map, thus leaving many Linux distributions forced to mark them as possibly illegal to use in some countries, despite no solid evidence to actually support this outside of MPAA and RIAA rhetoric, which is hardly a court's decision.

If you've been running Linux long enough to have upgraded your system more than once, you probably have several Linux kernels lurking around your system. If you discover that a certain application no longer works for you, you can go back to a previous kernel to try to run your program. GRUB, the boot loader found in most Linux distributions, lets you choose among operating systems and kernels installed on your box. Many people, however, fear that messing with GRUB may ruin their system, because of its many esoteric options, and configuration file text that often contains no help comments. QGRUBEditor can help you view and edit the GRUB boot loader from a graphical user interface.

Find out more about Nipper, an open source network devices security auditing tool, and why companies can benefit from it.

The Asus Eee PC has already sold more than 350,000 units, over 50,000 more than the previous goal of 300,000. These numbers are huge compared to sales of Dell Ubuntu computers.

I'm a little old to believe in Santa Claus, but then again, there are some things I believe in that are even more far-fetched than Saint Nick. We'll get back to that later. It was 2:30 in the morning and I had been working for a friend, delivering some computers and helping those who received them get them set up. It had been a long night and I stopped by my "boss's house to drop off the company van and get into my own truck to go home. I was surprised to see the lights on and knowing that everyone should be in bed, I walked quietly to the front door and slowly turned the knob. It's ok, I almost live there anyway and I have a key. I work pretty close to my "boss".

No, this isn't some esoterical or philosophical musing upon the meaning of Christmas or any other day for that matter. For this instance, you can take ol' helios literally. Just don't get used to it. ;-)

College computer science students often find it difficult to get started in programming languages like C++ and Java, largley due to the disconnect between simple middle-school languages like logo and advanced object-oriented programming (OOP) languages. To help bridge the gap, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have developed an OOP language to create computer animations using 3-D models, called Alice.

As the open-source movement gains momentum, patent companies are suing.

ARAHUAY, Peru - Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago. These offspring of peasant families whose monthly earnings rarely exceed the cost of one of the $188 laptops — people who can ill afford pencil and paper much less books — can't get enough of their "XO" laptops.

Many people have created prediction lists for 2008, but I want to know what you want to happen in 2008. I will compile a list at the end of the year with the most popular/interesting suggestions.

In 2005 we started our annual AYiR (A Year in Review) articles for looking at the progress of the proprietary ATI and NVIDIA Linux display drivers over time. Now in our third year of doing this, it's time to see how NVIDIA's binary driver has panned out over the past year. NVIDIA had introduced GeForce 8 support this year as well as a few other features, but nothing major like in past years, and how has the OpenGL performance changed? With benchmarks in hand, we have the scoop for you today.

MEPIS has released SimplyMEPIS 7.0. This release contains a new desktop theme and a detailed user manual, both developed and contributed by the MEPIS community. Screenshots by The Coding Studio.

The release schedule for KDE 4 is now clear, and it will be released during the development cycle of Kubuntu 8.04. Since KDE 4 is a major change to the platform, it is not currently at one of these natural rest points so would not be suitable for long term support. Instead, due to the very high interest, development efforts will be directed towards KDE 4 and releasing Kubuntu 8.04 with the option of using either KDE 3.5 or KDE 4.

The development team of VectorLinux have announced the release of VectorLinux 5.9 Final GOLD edition. This is the fruit that has resulted from several months of coding, debugging and testing by the core development team and the Vector community. This release follows our legendary tradition of stability (inherited from SlackWare-12), blazing speed on even modest hardware and simplicity of design and function.

Mozilla has released the latest beta of Firefox 3 today, and the Linux efforts behind it are starting to show even more. This release, being a beta, is surprisingly stable. Here’s the killer that makes this beta release amazing: more GTK support.

It was expected by some. For the third year in a row the Dutch Cartel Office (NMa) decided there were no reasons to look into the Dutch software market, despite requests made by people in the field of commerce and education and by the Dutch parliament. In a letter send to me (and perhaps the other writers as well, link to Dutch text), the NMa explains that there is no evidence to suggest an abuse of the domination market position by Microsoft in such a way that it prohibits other operating systems and software to compete.

paint-mono is a port of Paint.NET. The only way it could be built in the past was using a development version of MonoDevelop and there was no way of generating packages for it. Since then, MonoDevelop has progressed to the point where it can generate standard Unix makefiles and generate the proper scripts, pkg-config files and produce code that conforms to the Mono Application Deployment Guidelines from a Visual Studio solution. It is now easier than ever to try Paint.NET on Linux

The Ubuntu development community has officially announced the release of Ubuntu 8.04 alpha 2. Ubuntu 8.04—scheduled for release in April 2008—is a long-term support (LTS) release, which means that it will be supported on the desktop for three years and on the server for five years. This second alpha, which is available for download from Ubuntu's mirrors, is a development release that is primarily intended for testers.