It was just one week ago that NVIDIA released a stable Linux driver update, but today for those wishing to live on the bleeding edge of NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver development, the first beta release in the 260.xx series is now available for testing. The NVIDIA 260.19.04 Linux driver brings a lot to the table.

You could argue that Google's Android, so popular on smartphones now, is the most popular Linux of all right now. There's only one little problem with that: Android has continued to be apart from the Linux mainstream. People became aware of the Android and Linux split when Ryan Paul reported that "Google engineer Patrick Brady stated unambiguously that Android is not Linux."

It seems like almost every day someone in the tech press or someone commenting in a technical forum will claim that Linux adoption on the desktop (including laptops) is insignificant. The number that is thrown around is 1%. These claims are even repeated by some who advocate for Linux adoption. Both the idea that Linux market share on the desktop is insignificant and the 1% figure are simply false and have been for many years.

Previously we looked at the throughput performance of bcache by running IOzone on a common SATA disk, an Intel X25-E SSD, and Bcache using the SSD to cache a single drive. This article explores the IOPS performance of the same configuration hoping to find areas where bcache might shine.

Michael Geist writes about: "Three key competition concerns driving CRTC [Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission] Internet provider policy."

[This story continues to unfold -- will keep you posted. - Barbara]

We love feel-good stories about how open source software helps improve living conditions in third-world countries or comes to the rescue in times of crisis, but this one really takes the cake. A Canadian non-profit foundation specializing raising awareness about schizophrenia was saved from going under by deploying open source software to manage its day-to-day office needs. If FOSS developers need a reminder of why you grind away at code for so little in return, here it is.

Even the seemingly simple right click menu in Ubuntu Gnome is getting designer's attention. Has anybody noticed that, there are already about 20 or so entries in the right click menu of a folder in Nautilus? Somebody has. Take a look at this 'right click menu alternative' mockup.

There are a lot of WordPress themes out there. Whether you’re looking for a souped up, paid premium template or a free alternative, it seems everyone and their grandma has created a tweak on the basic two-column or three-column WordPress model. While it can be a little daunting to sort through the many options, the explosion of available templates is a healthy sign of a vibrant, sometimes prolific, design community. This is good news, of course, if you’re a designer. This is not such good news if you’re a small business looking for a simple, free, and adequately outfitted theme for your company.

Have you been missing your weekly fix of The Alexandria Project? If so, you're in luck. I've been re-working the book in preparation for approaching a literary agent, and figured it needed a quicker, edgier start than the original. What's your opinion?

The GNU Project Debugger release team has published the second point update to version 7.0 of its standard debugger for the GNU software system. The GDB debugger supports a wide variety of programming languages, including Ada, C, C++, Objective-C, FreePascal and Fortran, and, in the new release, adds support for the D programming language.

Some weeks ago, after reading the Droid X reviews on Ars Technica (here and here), I got myself one. Sure enough, I loved it, and like any good, patriotic smartphone consumer, I started downloading lots of Android apps. How did I find them? I clicked on the Market Store, of course, and typed in a search word.

I’ve written software on Linux, compiled kernels, set up servers, and a whole host of other pretty technical feats. Having been a die-hard Linux user for 10 years, I thought I had handled just about every situation a desktop user is likely to encounter. That is, until I installed Linux for a friend, who then said to me “Ok, so how do I add new fonts?”. Such a simple thing, yet I had absolutely no idea how to answer. It just never came up. To help restore my credibility, I did some research to find an easy way for a Linux newcomer to manage fonts, and came across FontMatrix. It’s a simple and powerful way to add, remove and configure your system fonts.

'Attention to detail' or 'enhanced UI experience' are not the kind of terminologies normally used in the Linux world. At least, that is how it used to be. It's all changing now. KDE 4.0 is a typical example. Developers completely revamped KDE from scratch and gave it a uniform user friendly appearance. Canonical's flagship Ubuntu is the next candidate. A lot of changes already happening and a ton of innovations are in the pipeline.

Many Linux users use the ‘find’ utility when searching for files using the command line on their system. There are times though where I’m just looking for something and I don’t want to have to wait for the command to scan the entire directory tree in order to track it down. That’s where locate comes in with quick and simple results.

Making Linux and Windows play nice together isn't easy, but it's essential to the continued growth of Linux in the enterprise, according to Likewise engineer Michael Szymczak. He will discuss that topic at this year's Ohio LinuxFest 2010 September 10-12, 2010 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. Michael Szymczak will talk at Noon on September 11 in the FOSS in Other Worlds track.

In this article we will take the realism of our scenes to a higher level using textures. With textures, the "magic" really happens! There are basically two types of textures, which are procedural and non-procedural textures. For us, the bitmap textures will be used most often, to allow us to create scenes with more realism.

I didn’t like the Digg beta. But, then, I thought, “It’s a beta, they’re often rotten.” So I waited for the new version, Digg 4 to be released. I didn’t like that either. But then I thought, “Well, I’m just not used to it. I’ll wait a bit.” So, about two weeks later, I think [...]

Back in February we reported on the first signs of open-source support for Intel's Sandybridge, a.k.a. their sixth-generation Intel graphics processor integrated on their upcoming CPUs that succeed the Clarkdale/Arrandale CPUs. The Sandybridge hardware still has not launched nor will it until late this year or early next year, but the open-source support has been underway for months and from time to time we see new Linux code patches related to Sandybridge.

Both Linux and FreeBSD are built on strong networking stacks, and both make first-rate firewalls and routers. Many commercial products are based on these. Eric Geier rounds up four firewall/router projects for our perusal.

Sometimes, a utility or an application that you want to install is impossible to find in the format of your distribution. Alien is a utility that can convert one package type into another. It can get you out of a fix when you can't find a package for your distribution, and it is also useful for package maintainers who want to distribute packages for distributions that they don't run. It can work with Slackware, Debian and RPM packages as input and output types.