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With his characteristically dry British humor, Matthew Garrett outlined the current situation with x86 platform drivers at LinuxCon. These drivers are needed to handle various "extra" hardware devices, like special keys, backlight control, extended battery information, fans, and so on. There are a wide range of control mechanisms that hardware vendors use for these devices, and, even when the controller hardware is the same, different vendors will choose different mechanisms to talk to the devices. It is a complicated situation that seems to require humor—and perhaps alcohol—to master.

Tux Linus Torvalds has published the fifth release candidate of Linux 3.1. As the main server for kernel.org is not completely back up and running after the break-in that was made public last week, Torvalds uploaded the git repository with the mainline Linux sources to GitHub.

Android is growing at a stupendous rate and so is Android Market. Number is applications in Android Market is nearing 300,000 now and the rate of growth is only increasing. Trying to pick the very best of Android games from that enormous list is tough. I will try to give it my best shot anyway. Here are the games I enjoy playing in my Android 2.3.3 powered Galaxy S2.

Ubuntu App Developer Week starts today at 1600 UTC. Find out more about the schedule of events and how you can join in

Several times a month while looking for updates for our Facebook and Twitter feeds, I run across articles by an unknown writer who pens a blog called The VAR Guy. He’s usually Linux and FOSS friendly, but not always. If you don’t know, VAR stands for “value-added reseller,” so sometimes he can understandably turn downright proprietary – right when you least expect it. Mostly, however, he’s pretty fair, or as fair as you can expect someone to be who would profit by getting you to sign up for long term vendor lock-in.

While Sapphire Technology is a brand more commonly associated with graphics cards than motherboards, after having great experiences with the Sapphire Pure Black P67 Hydra motherboard, we accepted their offer to look at the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 motherboard. The Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 is a motherboard for AMD Fusion "Llano" APUs and packs quite a number of features. Here's how the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75 works under Linux.

In this guide I will show you how to upgrade VMWare ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 4.1 Update 1 (Free Version) without going through the pain of reinstalling your host server and then restoring your VMs.

LXer Feature: 05-Sept-2011

The latest installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

I took the plunge to migrate my personal / business desktop PC from Mandriva 2010.2 to Mageia 1 today (Sunday, 4 September 2011). I used the instructions from this page: Migrate from Mandriva Linux. ...

SSH is one of the most widely used protocols for connecting to remote shells. While there are numerous SSH clients the most-used still remains OpenSSH’s ssh. There is a plethora of tips and tricks that can be used to make your experience even better than it already is. Read on to discover some of the best tweaks to your favorite SSH client.

DigiNotar B.V., a unit of VASCO Data Security International, Inc., is an Internet Trust Service Provider based in the Netherlands. Part of their business involves issuing digital certificates. DigiNotar’s security system was compromised and they failed to notify everybody they were supposed to. A result of that breach is that fake certificates were issued – in DigiNotar’s name – for Mozilla and some others. The extent of the damage is so bad that The Mozilla Foundation revoked certificates issued by DigiNotar. If updates have not been issued yet, delete DigiNotar from the list of Certificate Authorities. Here’s how to do it.

While Texas Instruments released an open-source driver last year for the Linux kernel within the DRM area (the TILER driver), it didn't make it into the mainline tree for the lack of open-source user-space applications/drivers that could take advantage of it, i.e. the usual ARM graphics mess. Yesterday, however, Texas Instruments released a new open-source DRM driver for their OMAP platforms.

Many have predicted, that tablets will replace netbooks completely. While I cannot agree with this absolute statement, I admit that tablets serve a set of use-cases better than netbooks. The touch-interface and low power-consumption of tablets make content consumption more comfortable (e.g. no heating, no fan-noise, longer battery runtime, less weight to lug around…etc). That said, there are areas where tablets just cannot give enough. For example, any kind of work which requires more serious input while being mobile. The problem of efficient input can be solved with accessories like a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. Usually, when you prepare your tablet for extra-home journeys, you buy a case which also hosts the keyboard.

MarBall Odyssey is an extremely well polished and addictive game which follows the theme of the classic game marble madness

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Pinguy OS desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Pinguy OS 11.04 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 11.04.

We’ve already taken a look at the alpha versions of Oneiric Ocelot (more commonly known as Ubuntu 11.10), and found a lot to like. All of this comes during a time of growing turmoil and disruption in the PC space: HP has announced it may leave the PC business, sales growth of Apple’s Mac systems are climbing at a break-neck pace, and use patterns are in the midst of a revolution. The last time there was this much disruption in the PC space was during the revolt against Windows Vista and PC makers including Dell, Lenovo and HP decided for the first time to ship desktops and notebooks that ran Linux-based operating systems.

git rebase somehow, is lesser known command for casual user of git. The reason could be that it is better used for some advanced configuration and its bit tricky to use. There are number of useful functionality which can be accomplished using git rebase very easily. This blog post explain one of such function where we can need change already commited/pushed tree

The default port for tomcat is 8080 because developers are assuming you may have a apache server set up on port 80. There are two issues with changing the port to 80.

As of today I find myself in the position of deciding whether or not to stick with my previously preferred distribution, Mandriva Linux. This is a bittersweet realization for me.

A while back I did a review on Bodhi Linux. There were some implications that I didn’t take a close enough look at the operating system, and I have to agree. So here’s a follow up to the original review on Bodhi Linux.