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More on Linux power saving tips: Intel last week launched LessWatts.org, a project focused on reducing power consumption on Linux servers and desktops. Get some handy tips on reducing your consumption.

Last year, we reviewed Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives (NERO), a unique game in which players train forces of autonomous bots, then pit those forces against each other in hands-off, artificial intelligence (AI)-only competitions. NERO spawned a new major release a few weeks ago, and like its eponymous operatives, it has learned some new moves over time. NERO is developed at the Neural Networks Research Group of the University of Texas at Austin's Computer Science department, both as a class project and for ongoing research into machine learning.

"Ok, I think I'm getting close to releasing a real 2.6.23," began Linus Torvalds in hisrelease announcement for the eighth release candidate of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel."Things seem to have calmed down, and I think Thomas Gleixner may have found the suspend/resume regression that has dogged us for a while, so I'm feeling happy about things." Linus continued:"Of course, me feeling happy is usually immediately followed by some nasty person finding new problems, but I'll just ignore that and enjoy the feeling anyway, however fleeting it may be."The shortlog really is pretty short, and I'm appending the diffstat at the end too in case anybody cares, but basically it's just a number of fairly small but real fixes, with some support for a few new chips to the sky2 network driver.."read more |rsync.net - Offsite Unix Backups

Every time I write a review I get comments and e-mails asking me to review Puppy Linux. Puppy has lots of people who really seem to love and zealously support the distro. I invariably download a copy (most recently 2.17) and try and run it. I invariably give up on it very quickly.

One Laptop Per Child's "XO" device -- commonly referred to as the $100 Linux laptop -- will be offered as part of a "Give 1, Get 1" promotional program in the U.S. and Canada beginning Nov. 12, the organization's director of software said Sept. 24.

Red Hat is suffering from JBoss reflux, according to a pair of prominent open source software watchers. Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard has issued a fresh report in which he downgrades Red Hat to "neutral" from "outperform" due to what he sees as organizational struggles. The analyst once thought Red Hat's digestion of JBoss would result in a strong sales increase. Instead, Red Hat faces serious challenges learning how to be more than a one-trick Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) pony.

KernelTrap now provides a useful interface for reading numerous kernel-relatedmailing lists. At this time, we are actively archiving multpleLinux,OpenBSD,DragonFlyBSD,FreeBSD, andNetBSD mailing lists. In addition to providing a simple online browsing interface, we also provide multiple RSS feeds for each of our archived mailing lists.read more |Linux ThinkPads for Scientists

Forces are mashaling to oppose the open access movement, the open source-inspired movement to make academic research publicly available online. The American Association of Publishers (AAP) recently announced the creation of the Partnership for Research Integrity in Science and Medicine (PRISM), an apparent lobby group organized to resist efforts to compel academic publishers to make publicly funded research generally available. PRISM's methods appear eerily similar to those used to oppose legislation to make public documents available in an open format, as well as the actions against free downloads by such organizations as the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America.

The Brazilian winter was almost over, and while the mild winters in Florianopolis allowed me to work on the Agape, the coming of spring meant that it was time to set sail for new adventures.Grayson, the youngest of the Pollywogs, showed up early in the morning at the dock, as I got ready to sail."What are you doing?", he asked."I am getting ready to study algae", I answered."Algae!", he exclaimed,"why are you looking for that?"

There are many ways to process multiple virtual hosts on the same machine. One easy way is to setup different webalizer configuration files with different HostName parameters.

For an increasing number of people, Ubuntuis GNU/Linux. Yet, looking at the pre-releases of Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10, I found myself becoming disturbed by the degree to which this popularity has translated into uncritical acceptance.

Nowadays, many people maintain separate email accounts for work, for family and friends, to post into forums, and so on. I use several Gmail accounts, and I find it a challenge to read all those accounts without having to set up a POP client or disconnecting and connecting to the Gmail Web site with a browser over and over again. Gmail Manager is an OS-independent Firefox extension that can help anyone with that problem. With it, you can manage multiple accounts and be notified as soon as you receive a new message in any of them.

If you program in a distributed environment, you surely are used to working with tools such as CVS or SVN, two version control systems that allow many users to work on a group of files. However, those tools don't provide for real-time updates, and if two programmers work on the same piece of code, they will need to reconcile their updates, which can be troublesome. Gobby provides group editing capability, so two or more people can edit the same document at the same time, in a collaborative fashion, with every participant getting to see all edits at the same time.

A new GNUmed version is out. The version name is up to 0.2.7.0 which implies a whole new set of features.

"It took me quite a while to realize the real root cause of the VAIO - and probably many other machines - suspend/resume regressions, which were unearthed by the dyntick / clockevents patches," Thomas Gleixner explained regarding two patches for fixing suspend issues that Andrew Morton experienced with his VAIO laptop. He continued, "we disable a lot of ACPI/BIOS functionality during suspend, but we keep the lower idle C-states functionality active across suspend/resume. It seems that this causes trouble with certain BIOSes, but I assume that the problem is more wide spread and just not surfacing due to the various scenarios in which a machine goes into suspend/resume." Thomas concluded, "I really hope that this two patches finally set an end to the 'jinxed VAIO heisenbug series', which started when we removed the periodic tick with the clockevents/dyntick patches."

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: A security fix developed for KDM, covering KDE 3.3.0 to 3.5.7. A KioBrowser data engine, HDD monitor applet, and general layout work in Plasma. More refinements in Parley (formerly KVocTrain). GeoData subproject in Marble to support popular geographic data formats. An AI player added to Kombination. Development renewed on the KPicross game. Basic printing support in Gwenview...

If you've been following the current rift in the Linux community between Linus Torvalds and his minions squaring off against Con Kolivas and the mainstream Linux fanatics, you probably know that it's getting quite heated.

LXer Feature: 23-Sept-2007

Some of the big stories this week include: A non-profit that refurbishes computers with FOSS get hassled by the EPA, Microsoft wants in on the OLPC, SCO blames Linux for having to file for Chapter 11 and IBM joins up with OpenOffice.org and then releases its own free office suite. All this and more in the LXer Weekly Roundup.

Matt LaPlante reported that there's currently 151,809 bytes of trailing white space in the Linux kernel, requiring a 15 megabyte patch to remove it all. Andi Kleen argued that the white space didn't much matter, "you don't actually save anything on disk on most file systems (essentially everything except reiserfs on current Linux) because all files are rounded to block size (normally 4K). Same in page cache. And in tar files bzip2/gzip is very good at compacting them."

The KDE e.V. Quarterly Report is now available for Q2 2007, covering April, May and June 2007. Topics covered include the three scheduled developer meetings of the quarter (for Akonadi, ODF, and Oxygen) and reports from the Marketing Working Group, Human Computer Interaction Working Group, and System Administration Team. All long term KDE contributors are welcome to join the KDE e.V.