CrzyP writes "AnandTech.com has benchmarked the most popular graphics cards from ATI and NVidia on the Linux OS (SuSE 9.1). It is interesting to see that they have also written a custom benchmarking tool which can also be downloaded from the article. Take a look at Kristopher Kubicki's "Linux 3D AGP GPU Roundup" to see how each of the mid to high end cards performed on the Penguin flavored system."

OctaneZ writes "DistroWatch is reporting the first release of Mandrake 10.1 for PPC, this is the first PPC upgrade from the Mandrake camp since April of 2003. Release 10.1 includes stepping up to kernel 2.6.8, Gnome 2.6, and KDE 3.2.3. Release Notes and Torrent are available."

Amy Kucharik writes "Two new reports on open source validate office suite application alternatives like OpenOffice.org and StarOffice and their push into the mainstream against market giant Microsoft Office. "

worm eater writes "On September 29, Terra Soft Solutions delivered the final release of Yellow Dog Linux v4.0 to their CD manufacturer. It is currently available for download by ydl.net subscribers. Yellow Dog Linux v4.0 is built upon Fedora Core 2, offering both KDE 3.3 and GNOME 2.6.0 desktops with an all new presentation for both the Installer and post-installed desktop environment. Expanded USB support includes many cameras, printers, adapters, and storage devices. FireWire support is now built-in with bootable FireWire made possible through manual configuration. Mac-On-Linux offers the ability to run Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X and now offers automatic network configuration."

JL writes "Recent news about Ubuntu had peaked my interest. Debian based, good development team, the Ubuntu philosophy and an active community. I lurked about on Freenode's #ubuntu channel and got a feel for the community. I found them to be helpful and a valuable asset to Ubuntu. I decided to give it a go on my laptop. "

jSpectre writes "Remember how much you loved The Bard's Tale? Or maybe you're looking for something a little different than the current crop of RPG games? Then check out Devil Whiskey for both Linux and Windows. The developer also promises to release the source after some of the development costs have been recovered! O'Reilly has an article discussing development of the game as well."

Anonymous Coward writes "The Inquirer is reporting that a claim by Gartner that Linux desktops are used for pirated copies of windows has been dismissed by the Open Source Industry Association (OSIA). OSIA told The Sydney Morning Herald that 'if Gartner's conclusion that pre-installing Linux encouraged people to steal copies of Windows were correct.... It would be possible to state that pre-installing Windows encourages people to pirate application software.'"

An anonymous reader asks: "Data Forensics has been discussed in the past. I am entering the field soon and aside from rifling through Slashdot and Google and reading some technical data on the software that I am going to be using I haven't had much time to learn everything about the position (I will be officially trained when I move over to the role). I am wondering, though, if Linux has played a strong role in the courtroom when it comes to validating evidence that has been used in a lawsuit case. Those in the field who are reading this, have you used open-source software to prove facts to the court? I don't mean using dd to make an image of a disk but rather a suite of tools whose purpose is to analyze data, indicate relationships, create hash tables, et cetera. That being said, if that software is not available (the programmer side of me asks), is there enough interest in the community to create a package that rivals and is as accountable and recognizable as commercial products?"

rgovostes asks: "I've been looking around for a (hopefully low-cost) Linux-based handheld device with WiFi capabilities for some network testing and security evaluation. I need to be able to ping, list nearby WiFi signals, and run Ettercap. I'd also like it to be Mac OS X compatible without much work. I found handhelds.org (Coralized), which has some information, but I'm not very handheld-savvy, so it isn't too helpful to me. Am I asking for something unrealistic or is something like this possible? Any advice on the matter would be appreciated."

Eloquence writes "Much of the debate about GNU/Linux and open source is dominated by rhetoric rather than facts. David Wheeler has just released a new version of his "paper" (which, at 440,000 characters, is more of an e-book now) 'Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!'. According to David, this paper 'examines market share, reliability, performance, scalability, security, and total cost of ownership. It also has sections on non-quantitative issues, unnecessary fears, OSS/FS on the desktop, usage reports, other sites providing related information, and ends with some conclusions.' May come in handy when talking to your boss about Linux."

KrisWithAK writes "According to a press release, Red Hat is acquiring parts of the Netscape Enterprise Suite including the directory server and certificate management system. I am definitely looking forward to more open source competition with OpenLDAP!"

LostCluster writes "CNET is reporting results from a Gartner Group report that claims 40% of desktop machines sold with Linux on them are being used to run pirate copies of Windows! The report goes on to say that this stat reaches as high in 80% in 'emerging markets', the same places that the stripped down lite version of Windows is being aimed at. Gartner's making a bold prediction that the number of machines sold as Linux desktops may eclipse the number of machines actually running Linux."

riggwelter writes "FootNotes reports the availability of GNOME 2.8.0 packages for SUSE Linux. For the first time, a new GNOME desktop release is available for SUSE within a couple of weeks of the source release."

Jaime writes "The CRUX PPC port reached version 2.0 yesterday. The announcement has been done during the SND Forum in Frankfurt, Germany. This is a new nice piece of software that has a PPC port."

Florian Becker writes "A new Wiki with hardware information for newbies and developer has opened. The site can be found at linux-driver.org." The site is designed to collect driver information about as many pieces of Linux-friendly hardware as possible, "like specifications, developer specifications, installation and the actual state for Linux driver and support. The new page reached the 500 contents in just one week." Update: 09/29 16:08 GMT by T : Jeremy of linuxquestions.org writes "Just wanted to point out that LinuxQuestions.org has a user-created Linux Hardware Compatibility List that already has over 1,500 items." Thanks!

kbahey writes "The Information and Communication Technology for Development in the Arab World (Arab Dev) has teamed up with Egypt's LUG to provide training for school children in upper Egypt with training on FOSS and GNU/Linux. As you may recall, a while back Slashdot interviewed Egypt's LUG. Here are the questions and here are the answers."

MonkeyDev writes "Yahoo is reporting that Munich is ready to move forward with plans to 'abandon Microsoft Windows in favor of upstart rival Linux. The council is expected to take a calculated risk and vote through the move, despite concerns about possible software patent infringements in the face of coming European Union legislation that caused months of delay.' Not everyone is excited about it. A software developer at MySQL claims 'Linux violates 283 U.S. software patents.' How does the Linux community respond to these claims?" (Florian Mueller, the MySQL developer mentioned, isn't opposed to Munich using Linux, though -- just the opposite.) Update: 09/29 02:22 GMT by T : Marten Mickos of MySQL AB writes with a correction: "Florian Müller is an independent software developer and entrepreneur. He is ALSO an advisor to MySQL AB but he does not work for the company. He is presently engaged in coordinating opposition against software patents in EU, and thereby doing all of us within free software and open source a great favour."

Paul Lamere writes " This story on ZD-Net and this recent story on Slashdot describes the recent open sourcing of IBM's voice recognition software. This release, unfortunately, doesn't include any source for the actual speech recognition engine. Olaf Schmidt, a developer on the KDE Accessibility Project , is quoted as saying 'There is no speech-recognition system available for Linux, which is a big gap.' In an attempt to close this gap, we have just released Sphinx-4, a state-of-the-art, speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition system written entirely in the Java programming language. It was created by researchers and engineers from Sun, CMU, MERL, HP, MIT and UCSC. Despite (or because of) being written in the Java programming language, Sphinx-4 performs as well as similar systems written in C. Here are the release notes and some performance data."

toarney writes "This is a few days old, but I just noticed that OpenZaurus 3.5.1 was released on 9/19/04. It is the first release based on the OpenEmbedded build system. You can get it in Opie or GPE Palmtop Environment flavors. Now if I could just get that 'magic bullet' program to compile on my Zaurus."

Avidwriter writes "Lycoris has developed into a decent desktop Linux distro but hasn't really had anything to offer on the server end. Now it's taking over the old e-smith server project, one of those that always got plenty of love but never seemed to really find a home as it bounced from one corporate sponsor to another. Will this work out? An analyst quoted in the NewsForge story about the buy has doubts, but says it might be okay."