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Back in May we shared that the Ubuntu Intel graphics performance was still in bad shape after testing out very early Ubuntu 9.10 packages. The netbook experience was killed in Ubuntu 9.04 after a buggy Intel Linux graphics stack led to slow performance, stability issues, screen corruption, and other problems. Months have passed since we last exhaustively looked at the Intel Linux graphics stack, but we have just carried out some new tests using Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3. This new development release of Ubuntu carries the latest kernel, Mesa, and Intel driver packages as we see how the graphics performance is with an Intel 945 and G43 chipsets.

Mozilla's popular Firefox web browser is quickly approaching one billion downloads for all versions since it was officially launched. According to the Firefox Download Guesstimator, the total number of downloads should reach one billion between 13:30 and 15:00 GMT today.

The Gnome team has released an update of the Gnome Desktop Environment, version 2.27.5. The highlights of this new release are Brasero 2.27.5, fixed memleaks, lot's of bug fixes, added documentation to libbrasero-burn and lots of Translation updates.

Sony Pictures Imageworks, the award-winning visual effects and digital character animation unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions, is launching an open source development program, it was announced today by Imageworks' chief technology officer, Rob Bredow. Five technologies will be released initially: OSL, a programmable shading language for rendering, Field3d, a voxel data storage library, Maya Reticule, a Maya Plug-in for camera masking, Scala Migration, a database migration tool and Pystring, python-like string handling in C++.

It has been roughly four months since Red Hat, Synnex, Alfresco, EnterpriseDB and other open source companies unveiled the Open Source Channel Alliance. The effort aims to promote open source applications and Linux to IT consultants, integrators and resellers. Here are the top three questions I plan to pose to the alliance on Aug. 3.

They call it the Zii EGG handheld, the first device running on the Plaszma open source platform (built on top of Linux) and utilizing the ZMS-05 chip. Apart from the amazing Zii stuff, it also comes with an accelerometer, WiFi, GPS, BlueTooth, 32GB internal storage, and an SD expansion slot. This being Creative, it also comes with Creative's X-Fi audio processing chip. Pretty darn impressive.

The headline says "Why Code For Free", but it's really more complicated than that because there are many FOSS developers who are paid to work on FOSS projects. In this final part of our series, more developers speak on the rewards of being part of the FOSS community.

Miro is a great application for watching videos and high-definition TV podcasts in Linux. The latest release is 2.5.1, a bug fix release for the 2.5 series, which has a faster start-up time, a new, revamped library interface, new keyboard shortcuts, a refined interface and lots of bug fixes. Miro is an awesome multimedia application, especially if you like watching videos at high quality.

Canonical on July 31 will launch a so-called “Switch to Ubuntu” initiative — including support and migration services — to help individuals and small businesses that are “seeking cost-effective alternatives” to Mac OS X and Windows-based desktops. Here’s the scoop.

Last week's story about Nicholas Negroponte saying that Sugar should have been an application and the inevitable subsequent Slashdot story created a lively discussion in many places. Among them was also the OLPC devel mailing-list where Carlos Nazareno asked a related question: "Is anyone actually doing Windows on XO work here?"

When does free speech become a club that actually stifles the free flow of ideas? That's just one potential ramification of the question posed to the FOSS community this week: What makes someone a "shill"? This negative label can come with a pretty sharp sting. Does concern over negative criticism and even ostracism cause some people to keep their good ideas to themselves?

Online media company Phoronix Media has announced the availability of version 2.0 of its Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) and the pre-release of PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (code named "Gernlinden"). According to Phoronix founder Michael Larabel, Phoronix Test Suite 2.0 and PTS Desktop Live 2009.3 (beta) will both be available on the 4th of August.

This post is part of a series of articles I am writing about SUSE Studio and software appliances. In my last post, I gave an overview of software appliances. In this post, I’m going to get more technical and boast a bit about one of my favorite features in SUSE Studio. SUSE Studio is a web service that makes it fun and easy for anyone with a couple of years of Linux experience to build a software appliance, or your own custom Linux distribution, in less than ten minutes.

The headlines in the US media warble every day with dispatches of how the government wrestles with the question of providing better healthcare for the nation's residents. The debate now in Congress has proven to be a lengthy one, and there is little doubt it will be contentious right up to the passage of any legislation (and, most likely, beyond). But as the US watches this debate unfold, many constituents may not realize that steps have already been taken to improve the US healthcare system, both with recent legislation and with 30-year-old software code--code that one company is harnessing with open source practices to improve clinical care across the country.

The only references to software source code that I found in TomTom’s prospectus related to a discussion about copyright protection of source code (as opposed to “object” code, not open source code). I searched via a .pdf “find” and admit that even after apparently illegally obtaining the TomTom prospectus, I did not read it. In fact, TomTom appears very concerned with its intellectual property (IP) rights, particularly patent protection. TomTom’s position would appear to be a no-no among true-believer open source companies (if you believe there is such a thing) and FOSS zealots.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Wednesday, July 29, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. On today's newscast . . . an unholy alliance (or a really good one, depending on who you ask), Yahoo turns B-movie monster, Alfresco cosies up to Ubuntu, TUX is in your pocket, and "What are you? Color-blind!"

CentOS is not dead or going away. The signers of the Open Letter are fully committed to continue the CentOS Project. Updates and new releases will continue.

What will happen as Linux continues to grow, and especially as it reaches increasing numbers of unsophisticated users? Doesn't common sense dictate that it will suffer increasing levels of attack and compromise?

Ever since I started working with OpenSolaris (release 2008.05 to build 118: 2010.02), I have been suffering through some of the longer load times. While the distribution is maturing fairly well and quick, the boot times are just horrible. And to my understanding the culprit is ZFS. OpenSolaris utilizes ZFS as its default file system. On top of that, one thing that I still cannot understand is why GRUB defaults its timeout value to 60 seconds. 60 seconds! Why!?! Who needs this 60 seconds and/or who wants to be constantly annoyed to hit enter to the default kernel image, initiating the boot process? Either way, this can be modified. On OpenSolaris, editing the GRUB boot options is a little different from your traditional UNIX/Linux operating system. Note that this article is for Intel architectures and not SPARC.

By now, most readers will be familiar with the local kernel exploit recently posted by Brad Spengler. This vulnerability, which affects the 2.6.30 kernel (and a test version of the RHEL5 "2.6.18" kernel), is interesting in a number of ways. This article will look in detail at how the exploit works and the surprising chain of failures which made it possible.