Hey Matthew, What do you see? Matthew Szulik is leaving Red Hat and is being replaced by Jim Whitehurst. That was the biggest news for me since a while, it really took me by surprise. Red Hat was the first distro to get me into Linux; it was the one that made me a full time user. I tried others, very weird and now unknown distros like Yggdrasil, but they never stuck.

The previous CEO's at RH all carried the OSS philosophy with them, they were technical capable and although there have been some interesting strategy changes, they always stayed very 'open'. I don't know what his replacement might do or how his views differ from Matthews. Interesting times are ahead.

The folks at OS2 World are organizing a second petition to IBM to open up parts of the OS/2 system. You can add your name to the petition list if you like this idea. At least, try read the petition page to understand what they want to achieve with this.

Last week I was able to get some hands-on with a PS3. A wonderful machine in its own right ofcourse, but I still got myself a Wii because I really believed in the concept. For me Nintendo was doing all the right things since the release of the DS (Which I also own).
Ofcourse the graphics were crisp, vast and highly detailed, but the controls were lacking on the PS3. It's totally amazing, but after a year of Wii action I couldn't even handle a PlayStation controller anymore in a decent way to keep my character alive in the game.
When I owned a PS2, there were some games that always seemed troublesome to me, like the famous GTA3. And this was confirmed when the PC versions was released and all the reviewers lauded the mouse based controls.
It must be said that some game are still excellent control wise, like GT, no problems there.

Previously on Ubuntu I has been using Qemu as a means to virtualize running PC sessions. This worked pretty well, and in Feisty the kernel module was available from the repositories (although, unfortunately not compiled). In Gutsy, you get something better. VirtualBox is now available straight from the Ubuntu servers, just start up Synaptic and search for the 'virtaulbox-ose' package, select it and you will get the kernel driver with it.
For people in the dark, VirtualBox is beautified Qemu. It's more user friendly thanks to the included GUI and some patches that are not in the Qemu versions.
After the download and install complete, you will need to add all people that need access to VM's through VirtualBox to the virtualbox user group (quickly done through the 'users & groups' tool from the 'Systems/Administration' menu). The kernel module is added automatically to the 'modules.conf' file so there is nothing left to worry about.
VirtualBox is great, it allowed me to run OpenSolaris (which was not possible in Qemu). Ofcourse any Windows release works just as well (and fast!), ideal for the rare desktop application that won't work in 'wine'. For me it's a great tool to test several Linux/Unix distributions without too much hassle.
One thing that VirtualBox seems lacking appears to be USB support, this could be one last reason to keep on using Qemu after all.

You know the one classic question in Linux on how to get a list of all the hardware of the machine, and the answer is to compile the output of several '/proc' entries and several 'lsusb|pci|*' commands. There is another nice tool, now available in the latest Ubuntu - lshw. Packages are available for both command and graphical environments (it will put itself in the 'Systems/Preferences' menu in Gnome).
I really recommend you give it a try to get a better and cleaner view on your systems hardware then supplied by 'HAL Device Manager', which is supplied by default.

By default Ubuntu is missing some packages that enable you to watch dvd or encode mp3 files and other every day necessities (at least, according to some people). Gutsy has a new package available called 'ubuntu-restricted-extras'. This meta-package will install all these things for you, it contains:

gstreamer ugly/bad plugins, MS fonts, Java 6, unrar, flash 9, LAME and dvdread.

One new exciting package that is included in Gutsy is PowerTOP. It is an absolute must if you're running Linux on a laptop, and it's now available from the repositories.

Leave it running for a while (with root rights), and you can see how well (or badly) you're doing to preserve battery power. At the bottom tips will be displayed on what you can do to prevent the top power using entries from occurring. A good idea is to put these suggestions in sysctl.conf and specific commands in /etc/rc.local, as long as they don't cause any problems for you, that is.

After implementing most of the suggestions made by the tool my battery lasted 25% longer then normal, that is a huge improvement.