The nature of Novell's landmark deal with Microsoft -- thoroughly detailed in Novell's annual report and SEC filings -- demonstrates the riskiness of open-source players forging partnerships with proprietary software vendors, according to analyst Dana Gardner. "This development shows the brittle nature of intellectual property," he said.

"With all the tickless and other goodies going into the kernel in the last few months, there is a lot of hope that this helps Linux reduce power consumption," Arjan van de Ven began on the lkml, "and the good news is that it does...

The larger Linux distros now allow the user to download and install the Nvidia accelerated driver directly from repositories. While this is convienent, we tend to lose perspective as to the details of the driver package. It's the old case of "load first and read the documentation later, if ever". This article supplies an overview of the driver package as supplied by Nvidia.

Ubuntu includes some useful utilities to get your dial-up connection up and running. Here are the ways you can connect to your dialup connection:

Today I tried to help a Mac user save some pictures to a DVD. There were more than 1GB of photos, so it made more sense to use a DVD than two CDs. Unfortunately, Mac OS X thinks that you need to make movies when you insert a blank DVD disc -- it has no idea that you want to save data to it. What you, the user, want to do does not matter.

A review based on the out-of-the-box capabilities of the recently released Slackware 12.0. I recommend this for those interested in moving to Slackware as well as Linux newbies.

"Various theories are circulating as to why Microsoft has been so gung-ho about intellectual property enforcement lately. I have opined about it myself in other venues, basically putting forth the theory that the staff at Redmond is running a bit scared right now as they watch Linux slowly encompass the server market."