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How serious is Red Hat about pushing beyond Linux? Take a look at Red Hat’s latest quarterly results, disclosed yesterday, and a cloud seminar that’s set for today. You’ll get a feel for how the open source company is striving to reinvent its business amid a march toward $1 billion in annual revenues. Here's the evidence.

The open-source developers working on the drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon and NVIDIA (via the Nouveau project) graphics hardware have tossed all their weight behind the Gallium3D driver architecture. The Gallium3D drivers have surpassed the "classic" Mesa DRI drivers in terms of capabilities, performance, and stability. The only strong holdout to Gallium3D has been Intel since they aren't convinced that it's the appropriate choice and they aren't interested in overhauling their Linux driver stack once more with the large upfront investment that's required in rewriting their user-space 3D driver in moving from classic Mesa to Gallium3D.

Many programs come with modules that can registered and loaded. Some are on demand, others compiled in while still others are precompiled and can be loaded on demand (several Operating System kernels come to mind that have such a capability). In this text, an example of a program that allows a module to be written and compiled onto a program with relative ease. The example program is the dnet test program which ships with libdnet written by Dug Song.

To a Windows user, Linux is disorienting not so much because of what is missing but because of the different way one goes about solving problems," said Slashdot blogger Chris Travers. "Windows relies very heavily on commercial, off the shelf software for solving problems." Linux, on the other hand, "tends to rely on more flexible solutions ... . Yes, everyone can use Linux. But at present not everyone will.

More details have surfaced about Android 3.2, including support for seven-inch screens and Qualcomm processors. The release may appear on Amazon.com's Android tablets, which are rumored to be arriving in August bearing Texas Instruments processors and could hasten the fall of the monochrome Kindle....

The Dutch may become the first in Europe to use Skype and other web-based services on smartphones for no extra charge. On 22 June, the Dutch Parliament passed a law stopping mobile operators from blocking or charging extra for voice calling done via the net. The bill must now pass through the Dutch senate, but its passage is expected to be a formality. The move may prove crucial in Europe's on-going debate over net neutrality.

In an update today, Synaptic Package Manager has been removed from the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot CD, but it's still available in the repositories so you can install it via Ubuntu Software Center.

The sixth ODF Plugfest will take place on July 14th and 15th 2011, Invalidenstr. 48, 10557 in Berlin (Germany). This Plugfest is a two day interoperability workshop on open document exchange formats hosted by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology in Berlin, in collaboration with OpenDoc Society, the OASIS ODF TC, OASIS ODF OIC and the OASIS ODF Adoption TC.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on an Ubuntu 11.04 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

It seems that the new generation of cloud vendors has learned it's better to work together to promote cloud computing and make integration across products easier, than it is to fight one another or to be all things to all people. A case in point is the recently announced deal between Google and Box.net to integrate Google Docs directly in the Box interface.

Many users can be slightly confused when first using a new desktop environment. The Bodhi team has put together a desktop user manual that provides both a text based and graphical means for learning about the E17 desktop.

Fabio Erculiani proudly announced a few minutes ago the immediate availability for download of the Sabayon Linux 6.0 operating system, designed for Linux enthusiasts who want the latest packages and the best performance, but don't want to spend days getting things working properly.

It's no secret that the new Unity interface in Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" has been less than entirely successful at pleasing some fans of Canonical's free and open source operating system.

If you wanted LibreOffice in Debian Squeeze until very recently, the package could be installed either from the Testing or Unstable archives. Now there’s a “better,” safer way for Squeeze users to run LibreOffice: The LO suite is now available in Squeeze Backports.

Mozilla has officially released Firefox 5, only 3 months after the releases of Firefox 4 following the rapid release strategy of Google Chrome. The idea behind is to bring about changes in the browser as soon as possible and keep the browser up-to-date by creating different development channels.

Mozilla is continuing development for Firefox not in the 4.0.x series but in 5.x. So there will presumably be no security updates for Iceweasel past 4.0.1, which is what I’m running now from the Debian Mozilla Team’s repository.

While Linux still has trouble getting a grip on the desktop, everywhere else Linux rules. No where is that clearer than it is in the fastest of the fast: the supercomputers.

If the kernel is the heart of Linux, then key applications like LibreOffice and Firefox are its arms and legs. This week, all parts of the Linux Planet body of work were in motion as development pushed forward on Linux 3.0 and Firefox 5, and LibreOffice announced its advisory board.

Intel's current-generation "Sandy Bridge" processors continue to sell incredibly well and perform phenomenally relative to AMD's current offerings and Intel's previous-generation hardware. Under Linux, the Sandy Bridge support is now excellent if pulling in the latest components (namely the Linux kernel, xf86-video-intel, and Mesa) and only continues to be improved over time with advancements like their new driver acceleration architecture. By year's end, Intel is expected to launch their "Ivy Bridge" processors as the successor to Sandy Bridge. Intel is already preparing the Ivy Bridge Linux support code.

One major feature of IPv6 is its ability to auto-configure the host portion of the IP address using the MAC address from the Network Card. We may have seen this already with the local-link address, however, in this tutorial will look at configuring the RAdvD on openSUSE 11 to advertise the Network Prefix and default gateway so we can work with global addresses without any configuration on the hosts. This will differ from DHCP as we do not need to configure the RAdvD with the host addresses. These will come from the hosts own MAC address helping us reach Zero configuration networking. Or at least very little configuration.