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Richard Stallman, an American software freedom activist, has profound views on what freedoms should be provided in software. He strongly believes that free software should be regarded in the same way as free speech and not free beer. Rest assured, this article is not going to become embroiled in an ideological debate, but instead focuses on a subject which really is essential for life itself.

Reader David Gurvich writes the following: I also have a system that uses the i830m chipset for graphics, the Thinkpad X30. All of the problems are related to kernel mode setting, particularly your current one. The new xorg video driver eliminates all user mode setting and is useless on systems that use i830. I've never gotten kernel mode setting to work with i830 systems and now that is the only option on new installs.

Canonical, the lead commercial sponsor behind the Ubuntu Linux project, has a new CEO this week. Jane Silber, the former chief operating officer of the company, has now officially taken the reins from Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth -- and is already talking up what's ahead for the popular Linux distribution.

Building a Linux distribution with the novice user in mind has been tried many times over the years. If you had to pick one area where many new users struggle, it would have to be installing new applications. Missing dependencies or improperly configured repositories lead to frustration and, ultimately, abandonment of the entire platform.

Last week brought the arrival of a new Linux kernel, version 2.6.33. With it, came quite a few changes likely to interest device developers. So, here is a breakdown of the most significant mobile/embedded updates to come in the latest kernel. For instance, Android patches were dropped from the staging tree, due to lack of maintenance. Many were surprised that Google has apparently opted to maintain its kernel patches "out-of-tree." However, the ensuing discussions certainly stand to raise the general awareness level around embedded Linux best practices, which generally start with "work your changes upstream.

By now you've probably read endless takes on the news that Elliott Associates, one of the oldest hedge funds, with over US $16 billion under management, has made an unsolicited offer for Novell. But what happens next?

Another day, another company developing Linux-based tech falls into line with Microsoft's intellectual property wonks. Japanese Flash maker I-O Data Device Inc has agreed to cough up an undisclosed sum of cash to Microsoft under a Linux software deal. This is the latest such agreement Microsoft has made with a tech company that uses Linux in its products.

We've spotted some new screenshots in the "wild" with the new Ubuntu 10.04 themes having the window controls on the right corner so it seems the buttons will be on the right after all. But what's more puzzling is a screenshot from the new Ubuntu website mockups which features the Global Menu. Even more Apple?

Canonical’s CEO crown officially transitioned from Mark Shuttleworth to Jane Silber on March 1. During a phone discussion with The VAR Guy yesterday, Silber shared her top priorities for Canonical and Ubuntu. She also disclosed plans to make another key executive hire at Canonical. And, Silber shared some views on Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx), the cloud — and the potential sale of Linux rival Novell to a hedge fund. Here’s a recap.

Just a week and a half after signing a patent licensing deal with Amazon covering the e-tailer's use of Linux, Microsoft announced it has inked another Linux patent licensing agreement, this time with a Japanese hardware company. Neither Microsoft nor the Japanese company, I-O Data Device, revealed details of the agreement. However, in a short joint statement, the two said the deal "will provide I-O Data's customers with patent coverage for their use of I-O Data's products running Linux and other related open source software."

The North Korean government appears to have developed its own graphical Linux-based "Red Star" operating system, though its people still prefer that symbol of Yankee high-tech imperialism, Microsoft Windows. That's according to the blog of a Russian college student, 'Mikhail,' studying at a university in North Korea's capital city, Pyongyang. According to translations of the blog by Russian satellite news channel, Russia Today, as well as Google's Translate tool, installation DVDs of Red Star can be freely purchased in Pyongyang for $5 and come in both client and server versions.

This tutorial shows how to combine four single storage servers (running Fedora 12) to one large storage server (distributed storage) with GlusterFS. The client system (Fedora 12 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

You might think that stories of booting any Linux distro in under a second would be good news, but it seems that some still insist that Linux sucks when compared to Windows.

The LiMo (Linux Mobile) Foundation has endorsed a new Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) industry group established by mobile carriers to devise a common app format. The WAC format will build upon two web-based mobile widget standards: the Open Mobile Terminal Project's BONDI and the Joint Innovation Lab's JIL initiative.

The topic of the difficulties women face in the open source community comes up often. Here at OStatic we've discussed everything from the gender bias and harassment some women say they face, to highlighting the projects that are helping change the way females experience the developer community. A new project has gotten underway recently that aims to foster a healthy and respectful environment between female PHP developers and the PHP community. PHPWomen has teamed up in a partnership program with six open source projects that it feels represents the best the community has to offer in terms of an open, respectful, and friendly community.

Ever wondered how attackers know what ports are open on a system? Or how to find out what services a computer is running without just asking the site admin? You can do all this and more with a handy little tool called Nmap. What is Nmap? Short for "network mapper," nmap is a veritable toolshed of functionality to perform network scans. It can be used for security scans, simply to identify what services a host is running, to "fingerprint" the operating system and applications on a host, the type of firewall a host is using, or to do a quick inventory of a local network. It is, in short, a very good tool to know.

Canonical has revealed the style of the new default theme that will be used in Ubuntu 10.04, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution. In a significant departure from tradition, Ubuntu is shedding its signature brown color scheme and is adopting a new look with a palette that includes orange and an aubergine shade of purple.

Open-source software is one of the great success stories of the past few decades. The Apache HTTP Server is the world's most popular Web server, Linux has more than held its own against Unix and other proprietary operating systems, and Mozilla's Firefox browser has given Microsoft's Internet Explorer strong competition over the years. Could the same philosophy — the free and public dissemination of underlying code and specs, with multiple developers from disparate sources contributing to the design — work for tech gadgets as well? Will we one day commonly use smartphones, netbooks or other gadgets that have been developed under an open-source model, maybe even preferring them over proprietary products like the iPhone?

Recent pulling GRUB2 supporting CSs into xen-3.4-testing.hg immediately makes sense to build xen 3.4.3-2.fc12.src.rpm to be able to set up current version of 3.4.3 Xen Hypervisor on Fedora 12 working pretty smoothly with Libvirt packages ( vs Xen 4.0) and the at same time supporting GRUB2 PV DomUs , say Ubuntu 9.10 Server or Debian Squeeze.

Ubuntuzilla is an APT repository hosting the Mozilla builds of the latest official releases of Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. This repository should also work on Linux distributions that are derivatives of Ubuntu, and probably also on any Debian derivative.