QNX has opened up the source for their QNX Neutrino OS, it is not using the GPL or any other official OSS license though. Still, access to source code is mostly always good. Amazing, how many well known, widely used operating systems are still closed?

A lot of things are happening in OSS-land. Hot of the needle is the announcement of IBM that will be joining OpenOffice.org development efforts. They will bring new technology into the product, mainly from Lotus Notes and in return they will also be adding OOo stuff into their products.

The last few days there was also a lot of talk about AMD/ATI, who will be opening the specs for their gfx-cards. They will not open up the source of the current closed drivers, but that should not be a problem as long as the details of the inner workings of the cards are know. We can only hope NVidia will make a similar move, I fully understand that it is impossible to open source the drivers (containing 3rd party code etc), but specs should never be a problem! Common NVidia, if you want to stay the fastest Linux 3D card, you better make a move.

People complaining about Firefox memory footprint, might be happy to hear that there is a patch available from Federica Mena Quintero. By some smart image management he was able to reduce the memory usage by significant amounts.

Gutsy Gibbon is not out of the door yet (you'll have to wait until 18 October), and already Hardy Heron is announced. You can expect Hardy somewhere near April 2008, this will be the next LTS release as well. No features or implementation plans have been announced yet, they will be discussed and decided during the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

The Linux Desktop Survey 2007 results are available. Ubuntu tops the most popular distro for this year, and as a surprise Gnome and XFCE have increased in popularity. Gnome even takes 1st place from KDE, probably due to the success of Ubuntu that uses it as its default desktop environment.
Another surprise is that Wine enough and have resources plenty to run Windows at a decent speed if needed and with a higher rating then Wine (not to dis this fabulous project, I think it is tops the list for ways to run MS Windows applications, I would have thought other solution based on virtual machines would be more popular. Today's computers are certainly powerful enough and have resources plenty to run Windows like this with a greater compatibility (not to dis Wine, I think it is truly great).

Performance/Recovery/System Freeware Utilities :

1. backup/restore the gconf database : cp / tar (command line)
2. burn/create CD/DVD iso image files : built-in / brasero
3. capture all text written to screen : script (command line)
4. completely wipe/delete a file : shred (command line)
5. completely wipe/delete a hard disk : shred (command line)
6. defrag the hard drive : defrag (command line)
7. display CPU information : system monitor
8. display TCP/UDP endpoints and applications using them : lsof (command line)
9. display all file activity in real-time : fwatch (kernel package)
10. display all processes running : system monitor
11. display hard drive status information : system monitor
12. display system information : system monitor
13. display/edit gconf entries neatly : gconf-editor
14. find which program has a particular file or directory open : lsof (command line)
15. monitor bandwidth usage : system monitor
16. optimize TCP/IP settings : sysctl (command line)
17. remotely control another computer : ssh (command line) / TS client
18. scan IP/ open ports : nmap (command line)
19. tweak security settings : bastille
20. view/kill running tasks : system monitor

This is a list of tools that are available in, at least, Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).

Ubuntu amazed me this weekend, when my desktop started and everything was as much as loaded a pop-up appeared at the lower right corner;

A nice warning about the battery level of my wireless mouse, I didn't have to do anything to get or enable this feature. It is just there, no fuzz, no hassle, a default feature!

So you installed the latest Ubuntu, enabled the 3D effects you've been seeing on YouTube and find that it runs dog slow on your PC. It appears the default install has some swapping settings that have a negative effect on desktop performance, luckily they are easily solved.

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10

This should speed things up for you (you could even set it to zero if you like), keep the change permanent by adding it to '/etc/sysctl.conf'.