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If you have been reading our ATI/AMD Linux display driver reviews for some time, you will know that there are periods where it doesn't look like the fglrx driver is actively being worked on, but in fact changes are being made "under the hood". We are going through one of these droughts right now where not many new features or bug fixes are being introduced, though a lot of work is going on internally. We have decided to dissect the last 19 months of driver releases from ATI/AMD to expose some interesting facts and what should be coming in the future.

Why the fuss about the idea of forking the Linux kernel to create a desktop-optimized OS? It seems the community doesn't grant the same freedoms as the GPL!

T-DOSE 2007 - In the weekend of 13th and 14th October 2007 the free Open Source Event T-DOSE (Technical Dutch Open Source Event) will take place at the Fontys College of Applied Science in Eindhoven, ,The Netherlands (GoogleMaps) . During this event there are 2 central tracks an open source market and several developer or community rooms. There is still room for more Open Source projects and Talks.

* All Open Source Projects that want a booth can reserve one at abstracts@t-dose.org
* All speakers can sent their abstracts and small biography to abstracts@t-dose.org

For more information about T-DOSE see http://www.t-dose.org

[ T-DOSE was held for the first time last year - I was one of the attendants, and I can recommend the event to anyone involved with open source, talks were very interesting. I'll try to be there this year - hkwint ]

SourceForge announced the winners of its second annual SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards in Portland, OR, at an evening celebration held during the OSCON conference. The awards recognize open source projects that have the most supportive community following, and those that the community’s members believe are built with the highest quality, productivity and ingenuity.

This tutorial shows how to harden PHP5 with Suhosin on a Fedora 7 server. From the Suhosin project page: "Suhosin is an advanced protection system for PHP installations that was designed to protect servers and users from known and unknown flaws in PHP applications and the PHP core. Suhosin comes in two independent parts, that can be used separately or in combination. The first part is a small patch against the PHP core, that implements a few low-level protections against bufferoverflows or format string vulnerabilities and the second part is a powerful PHP extension that implements all the other protections."

I am a Linux user, and I recently got an eMachines laptop. Since I'm Uruguayan, my mother tongue is Spanish, and that presented a problem: laptops usually have an American-style keyboard, and Spanish (as well as Portuguese, French, German, and other languages) requires some special keys that aren't on American keyboards. Here's how you can get international characters on your American keyboard -- and as a bonus, we'll see how you can enable the special"media" or"Internet" keys on some keyboards that aren't supported by Linux out of the box.

Apparently, some people take pride in attacking Free software. With statements such as “we would like to strike similar patent deals with all the Linux vendors, but we had to start somewhere” or even “the Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn’t exist in 2007. Even Linus has got a job today,” Bill Hilf is no popular figure these days.

The Linux Expo of Southern California has opened the Call For Papers for the 6th Annual Southern California Linux Expo, to be held February 8th, 9th, & 10th, 2008.

A recent story entitled, "Dearly Departed: Companies and Products That Didn't Deserve to Die" didn't cover Linux or open-source companies. That got me to thinking. So here, without further adieu, is my list of five Linux companies that died before their time.

"After 6 months of careful integration and testing, I'm happy to announce availability of Linux 2.4.35," 2.4 maintainer Willy Tarreau announced on the lkml. This is the second stable 2.4 kernel released since Willy became the 2.4 kernel maintainer nearly a year ago in August of 2006. Source level changes can be viewed through the linux-2.4 gitweb interface.

Web pages have become a major functional component of the daily lives of millions of people; you, the Web developer, are in a position to make that part of everyone's lives better.

At my work the employees are in the fortunate position that they are free to choose whatever OS they want to work with. The only thing that's banned (unofficially) so far is Windows Vista. In such a heterogeneous environment it makes sense to share our files through Samba. It's one of the few protocols that any OS can speak. If you're running Windows Server 2003 then you can't use the smbfs driver that most Linux distributions ship by default. You'll need to use the CIFS filesystem driver and you'll need to edit /etc/fstab. Adding the required fstab entries is actually quite easy as I will show, but on Debian and it's derivative distributions you get a nasty "CIFS VFS: No response" error when you subsequently try to reboot or shutdown your machine. I will show you how to get rid of that too.

In what could prove to be of major importance to the future of motherboard and component data transfer rates, the Photonics Technology Lab at Intel has announced a silicon laser modulator that can encode data at 40Gb/sec.

On her weblog, Mozilla Corporation CEO Mitchell Baker has announced that Mozilla Thunderbird is to move to a "new, separate organizational setting" as the Mozilla Foundation continues to focus ever more closely on Mozilla Firefox. While the Mozilla Foundation supports a number of projects, its taxable subsidiary the Mozilla Corporation is responsible for only Firefox and Thunderbird. However, it has become increasingly clear that Firefox is the priority. The resources allocated to Firefox dwarf those allocated to Thunderbird and recent projects such as the initiative to improve Mozilla support exclude Thunderbird.

Configuration can be a maintenance mess and add to a developer's burden. This article introduces a Java framework with which developers can define their application's configuration in terms of high-level interfaces; the framework then generates automatic implementations of these interfaces backed by a physical configuration source, like a properties file or database. This approach, designed and detailed by Merlin Hughes, is intended to improve on the practices of using string constants and manual type conversion when handling configuration data, while maintaining compatibility with existing configuration tools and files.

The Open Source Initiative approved on July 25 its first new license in quite some time: the Common Public Attribution License, which is essentially the Mozilla Public License with a new attribution clause. But the road to approval was long and expensive, Ross Mayfield, CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, which submitted the license, told eWEEK in an interview at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference here.

Mozilla Corp. CEO Mitchell Baker announced yesterday on her weblog that because of"the enormous energy and community focused on the Web, Firefox, and the ecosystem around it," the organization is seeking"a new, separate organizational setting" for the Thunderbird email client.

On July 22nd a new set of kernel packages was released for Vector Linux, my chosen primary and current favorite distribution. This was the second build of the 2.6.21 kernel with Con Kolivas’ CK2 patchset, replacing a test build released on July 8. In the past the only reason I’ve recommended upgrading a kernel is to close security vulnerabilities or to add support for new hardware. Recently, though, there is another very good reason: noticeably improved performance, particularly if you are currently using kernel 2.6.19 or earlier.

Yesterday the OpenBSD Foundation debuted as a Canadian nonprofit organization intended to serve as"a single point of contact for persons and organizations requiring a legal entity to deal with when they wish to support OpenBSD in any way." Developers Bob Beck, Kjell Wooding, and Ken Westerback will serve as the foundation's directors. Membership, according to the bylaws, "shall be limited to persons interested in furthering the objects of the corporation and shall consist of anyone whose application for admission as a member has received the approval of the board of directors of the corporation." However, the foundation's Web site notes, it is "not actively seeking new members at this time."

Microsoft realizes it has a schizophrenic relationship with open source software but can't seem to find any meds capable of correcting the situation. During a speech today at OSCON, Microsoft's open source chief Bill Hilf revealed that Microsoft will submit its Shared Source License to the Open Source Initiative (OSI) for approval. Microsoft's decision to make peace with the OSI – the self-proclaimed protector of open source software – ends a rather combative, multi-year debate between the parties.