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It has been a full week now since the news about hacking group FailOverflow’s discovery of the PS3 “root key”, which would allow homebrew developers to sign their own applications, began to filter out of the 27C3 (Chaos Communication Congress) Hacker Conference 2010. It seems that Sony executives either hadn’t been paying attention to the reports, or simply discounted them as another easily-corrected security hole, as they had not released any type of statement regarding the discovery until today. (LOL reference: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25/ )

This update is released as a normal update for existing Fuduntu users and as the first quarterly Fuduntu ISO release for 2011.

Following a challenging week for Intel's Sandy Bridge Linux support in other publications getting the open-source graphics drivers working, Intel came forward to supply us with a Sandy Bridge processor so we can carry out the tests using the needed Linux Kernel / Mesa / DDX / libva Git code. We don't even need to wait for Intel to send out any hardware, as it was hand-delivered today during a meeting with them.

The Puppy Linux developers have released version 5.2 of their independent Linux distribution known as "Lupu". Puppy Linux is a popular small release that is usually just over 100 MB in size, focuses on ease of use and can run entirely from RAM.

In the wake of the news that open source online conferencing and collaboration provider Dimdim is being swallowed up by cloud CRM provider Salesforce, one conclusion seems clear: Many long-standing open source applications are low hanging fruit for powerful proprietary software companies to acquire and metamorphosize for their own purposes. It's easy to be lulled into thinking that this is happening at the same rate that it used to, but the rate at which well-known open source technologies are being flipped under the wing of proprietary software companies is in fact picking up pace exponentially. In Dimdim's case, there are positive and negative aspects of the buyout.

Blender is an incredible open source cross platform suite of tools for 3D creation. And if you are unaware of the capabilities of Blender, you should watch these stunning Blender made short films and animations you probably haven't seen ever before. Blender 2.56 beta is the fifth beta release of Blender 2.5. Blender 2.5 is undergoing massive changes and the final release date is still quite uncertain.

By default you can't assign a Compiz hot corner to the Grid plugin which would be really helpful for moving windows to various corners of the screen with a simple click/hot corner, but you can achieve this by using a package called "xautomation" and the Compiz Commands plugin.

Warren Woodford has announced yesterday, January 6th, the immediate availability for testing of the SimplyMEPIS 11.0 Beta 1 operating system, available for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

Bioware's Infinity Engine was home to many great games in past that totally defined RPG game genre with deep storyline, engaging gameplay, isometric graphics, and dungeons and dragons rules based gameplay. Almost all the games under infinity engine became hugely popular and are even today considered to be best games in their genre with huge dedicated fan base.

Recently, the future of the SUSE Linux Project (as compared to the Novell commercial Linux distribution based on the work of that project) has become rather murky, as reported by Pamela Jones, at Groklaw. Apparently, Novell is facilitating some sort of spin out of the Project, which is good but peculiar news.

New winetricks 20110105: improved download error recovery, added first-run optin dialog. New winetricks 20110105-alpha: menu divided into categories, added 35 games.

Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting usersnagios_logo when things go wrong and again when they get better.In this tutorial will show you how to install Nagios in freeBSD (Tested on FreeBSD 8.1 and 8.2).

If you ever find yourself wishing that other applications had Vim-keybindings, I have good news for you. At least, if you're a Firefox user. The news? Vimperator. It's a great add-on for Firefox that brings the power of Vim to Firefox. Have some time this weekend? You can be an expert with Vimperator by Monday.

The most common Linux file-systems we talk about at Phoronix are of course Btrfs and EXT4 while the ZFS file-system, which is available on Linux as a FUSE (user-space) module or via a recent kernel module port, gets mentioned a fair amount too. When it comes to the FreeBSD and PC-BSD operating systems, ZFS is looked upon as the superior, next-generation option that is available to BSD users. However, with the DragonFlyBSD operating system there is another option: HAMMER. In this article we are seeing how the performance of this original creation within the DragonFlyBSD project competes with ZFS, UFS, EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs.

One of the points that Linux users commonly say in lobbying hardware vendors to provide open-source drivers and/or documentation -- particularly for GPU drivers -- is that the open-source community will take the released code or documents and from there develop it into a reliable, working open-source Linux driver. However, that isn't exactly true.

This year’s CES featured more tablets than Michael Jackson’s bathroom cabinet, and they’re pretty much what you’d expect: flat glass slates with few buttons and a strong resemblance to a certain Apple product. Despite manufacturers’ best efforts the interesting tech isn’t the hardware: it’s the software, and Google software in particular. Honeycomb, Android 3.0, is the star of CES so far.

We’ve talked a lot about the rise of Linux in embedded devices lately: from our embedded Linux training classes to the Yocto and Meego projects, to a new Linux Foundation fellow. But what about the end users, the people who are deploying Linux in their products?

After about eleven weeks of development, Linus Torvalds has released the Linux kernel 2.6.37. The new version of the main development line has many improvements. Advances in the Ext4 file system mean it should be able to compete with XFS on larger systems and new discard functions can inform slow SSDs of vacant areas, without negatively affecting performance.

For those of you who don’t follow tech news, here’s a brief summary: OpenOffice, supported by Sun, has long been known as a excellent free alternative to MS Office. When Oracle bought Sun, many feared that Oracle’s control might not necessarily be a good thing for the project. Some members of the OpenOffice team decided to create The Document Foundation as a central place for the work to continue in an open community fashion, and even invited Oracle along in the hopes that “we can all just get along”. Well Oracle declined, and the result is that The Document Foundation will soon release LibreOffice, a community-based fork of OpenOffice which has already received backing from the likes of Canonical, Red Hat, and Google. While the final release is not yet available, we can get our hands on the release candidate which should tell us what kind of changes we’re in for.

While I do believe that most people would be better off running Linux, I fully understand that for some people this is just not feasible, for one reason or another. Even I have to run Windows occasionally at work. Fortunately, some of my favorite Linux programs are gradually becoming available in Windows. This makes using Windows at least a bit more bearable for me.