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Earlier this week David Lin reviewed the Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3S and on the review bench today we have the GA-P31-DS3L from Gigabyte. This P31 motherboard supports Intel's Core 2 45nm processors, DDR2-1066 memory, all-solid capacitors, and many of the other innovations found on the GA-P35-DS3S. Nevertheless, is the GA-P31-DS3L that currently sells for about $75 USD able to perform well under Linux like the GA-P35-DS3S?

So, it's finally happened. Unhappy with other media players being better than iTunes, Apple have apparently decided to stop them from working with the new range of iPods. There's no iTunes for Linux, so popular Linux iPod management tools like gtkpod and Rhythmbox will not work with the new range of iPods. The iPod keeps track of the songs and playlists in your iPod with a database file. At the very start of the database, a couple of what appear to be SHA1 hashes have been inserted which appear to lock the iTunes database to one particular iPod and prevent any modification of the database file.

This is release 0.9.45 of Wine, a free implementation of Windows on Unix. What's new in this release:

* Many improvements to the crypto dlls (should make iTunes work).

* The usual assortment of Direct3D improvements.

* A number of fixes to sound support.

* Many more WordPad features.

* Lots of bug fixes.

Embedian has started shipping a tiny embedded processor module available with Linux and a development board with LCD. Roughly half the size of a credit card, the COM-7211 is based on an ARM9 processor, and targets industrial automation, portable devices, POS, transportation, medical, and defense applications. The COM-7211 is shipping now, preinstalled with a Debian ARM filesystem and Linux 2.6.18.1 kernel.

So in my tradition of one post per month (which, I know, needs to change), I present you with some updates from the world of Awn. There have been lots of cool applets popping up, especially since the python bindings were committed a week or so ago. The move to launchpad has also created some very cool branches of Awn by other people which focus on new ideas, or new ways to implement existing ones.

Today is second day of my OpenMoko 2007.2 testing. I do it as part of my work for OpenedHand and this gives me possibility to discuss bugs with applications authors before reporting to get some details. Today I'll be looking at the new UI.

This week I have generally been diving a bit deeper into the Amarok and even kdelibs code to debug some pretty serious issues. The KIO system is in a bit better shape than it was at the beginning of the week, thanks to KDE dev. Thiago, and as I use this intensively for the services, Magnatune not least of which, this is really good news.

When it rains, it pours, they say. First, SCO files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and now on the same day Judge Dale Kimball has denied SCO's Motion for Reconsideration or Clarification of the August 10, 2007 Order. Here's his Order [PDF]. I wrote an article earlier today about SCO's Reply Memorandum in support of this motion, and as you'll see, I am not surprised at the denial.

Nation's largest transportation agency chooses Novell to secure and manage its employee identity infrastructure.

When I started using GNU/Linux eight years ago, I was dumbfounded to encounter Debian users who started their day by upgrading their entire system. Yet now, with the updaters that sit in the notification trays of recent GNOME and KDE-based distributions, I realize that these daily upgraders were not daredevils, but pioneers in the idea that all upgrades are desirable. Never mind that this idea is an nuisance and an unwarranted assumption -- let alone that constant upgrades are unsuitable to many styles of computing and contrary to responsible system maintenance.

"In the patch you really remove _a_lot_ of stuff," commented Roman Zippel in his reaction to Ingo Molnar's latest updates to the Completely Fair Scheduler. Roman has been consistently critical of Ingo's efforts, asking questions and criticizing Ingo's feedback. He continued, "you also removed a lot of things I tried to get you to explain them to me. On the one hand I could be happy that these things are gone, as they were the major road block to splitting up my own patch. On the other hand it still leaves me somewhat unsatisfied, as I still don't know what that stuff was good for."

To quote from the "Who Should Read This Book" section: "This book is intended for anyone who is interested in learning about the foundational components of application acceleration and WAN optimization, including IT directors, network managers, application infrastructure engineers...". Ok, I get the idea and hopefully so do you. In other words, please have an admin level background and skills if you want to understand what's going on here. The real goals of this book are to instruct network engineers as to the ins and outs of this technology and to illustrate why implementing this solution is value added in the corporate environment.

Loop-based music composition is the practice of sequencing audio samples to create the various parts of a musical work. A sample may contain only a single event such as a bass note or cymbal crash or it may contain a measured pattern of events such as a drum beat, a guitar chord progression, or even an entire piece of music. The former type is sometimes referred to as a"one-shot" sample, while a longer sampled pattern is often simply called a loop.A loop is usually created at a specific tempo in a precise time period (musical beats and measures) for exact concatenation with other loops. Sequencing a series of timed loops creates realistic tracks that can convince a listener that he or she is listening to a part specifically performed for the piece.

This tutorial shows how to install and use SpeedyCGI (also known as PersistentPerl) on a Debian Etch system. SpeedyCGI is a way to run Perl scripts persistently, which can make them run much more quickly. It keeps the Perl interpreter running, and during subsequent runs, this interpreter is used to handle new executions instead of starting a new Perl interpreter each time.

Many of you, Linux users, have Windows installed on your PCs for only one reason: it’s a game or a program, written only for the Redmond’s system. In the last few years true alternatives have appeared: Cedega and CrossOverOffice. Cedega is the WinAPI’s overlay, based on the open source Wine. It lets you play games designed for Microsoft systems.

I come from a MySQL background, and I have been given the challenge of learning Oracle. I can’t just play around with our customers’ databases.So I decided to install my own Oracle database, which I’ll be free to destroy in every way I can think of… and of course, free to bring it back to life.

Adobe has released an update for their Acrobat Reader product on Linux and SPARC Solaris. Adobe Reader 8.1.1 for Solaris and Linux features a new user-interface, improved performance, single document interface mode, and an always-available search toolbar. Adobe Reader 8.1.1 for Linux also features better desktop integration through complying with XDG-UTILS as well as support for Debian (deb) package installation. Some of the other new features include supporting multimedia-enabled PDF documents, new tools, updated review tracker, Orca accessibility support, and new additions to the digital ID feature are among the noteworthy improvements.

Admit it. You enjoy using the command line in Linux. You only have a graphical interface so people in the office don't look at you strangely. So why not embed a command line in your desktop?

Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves, Project Manager of the Spread Open Media project, discusses the project's beginning and goals, namely to help spread awareness and adoption of Free/Libre media formats.

The Journaled File System (JFS) is a little-known filesystem open sourced by IBM in 1999 and available in the Linux kernel sources since 2002. It originated inside IBM as the standard filesystem on the AIX line of Unix servers, and was later ported to OS/2. Despite its pedigree, JFS has not received the publicity or widespread usage of Linux filesystems like ext2/3 and ReiserFS. To learn more about JFS, I installed it as my root filesystem. I found it to be a worthy alternative to the bigger names.