Phoronix tested Ubuntu’s power consumption across many versions of Ubuntu, including the latest 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) which will be released on Thursday. Interestingly, although Ubuntu 7.10 outperformed 7.04, in many cases it did not outperform older versions of Ubuntu.

Just after Redhat stated that they do not believe Linux violates any patents, they got sued (Slashdot) over this patent, which covers workspaces. I am not making any prediction.

The developers working on GIMP, a popular image editor/Photoshop-replaement for many OSs including Linux, have created a blog where they are posting submitted images from anyone who has ideas about what the new GIMP UI (user interface, the buttons and stuff) should look like. I hope this process turns out a really great UI, and I think it will. One of the things that, in my opinion, Linux applications sometimes lack is a good/original UI and I think this will fix that problem.

Mandriva 2008 is finally out as of October 9! Here is the blog post announcing it, and here is Mandriva’s home page where you can download the new version.

LinuxWorld has a video of a Novell developer talking about the Linux Driver Project, a project that is making drivers for hardware makers that want to have Linux support for free, at FreedomHEC 07. The video is a little long and gets very technical near the end, but I recommend you watch the first part, if you are interested.

I have been playing around with OpenSUSE 10.3 a lot more and I have some additional thoughts. Most of my notes from last time have been about the installation, but now that I have worked with 10.3 some more I have a better feel of the real OS.

I really only have one complain against OpenSUSE 10.3. My complain is that to access your any applications except for your “favorite” application and the two most recently used applications (yes, I know you can change the configuration of GNOME.) I also don’t like that the “Install programs” application gives the package name, not the name of the application, and that the update manager does not tell you anything about the updates, but these are minor problems. Overall, great distro.

I don’t think I will do a full review, but here are my thoughts on OpenSUSE 10.3. I am writing them down as I install/use 10.3. (This time not in a virtual machine.)

- The green theme is nice.
- The installer is nice for new users, but annoying if you need to change the advanced settings you need to find them yourself from the “Installation Settings” screen.
- The partitioner is one of the worst I have ever seen. There is no graphical representation of the partitions. There is no way to see the amount of space used in each partition. To make a new partition you need to tell it the number of the cylinder to start at! Do your partitioning in GParted!
- Under advanced on the “Installation Settings” are the boot loader settings. The default location for my hard drive setup is the partition I am installing it to. Yay!!! It also picked up the other Linux distros on this computer!
- Now installing…
- There is a slide show of cool features of OpenSUSE (although it changes kind of slowly), detailed information about the installation, and release notes to look at while the installer works away. It is not a live CD, though, so no surfing the web while you wait.
- Now rebooting… choosing to install again… Oops! That was wrong! I was supposed to choose “Boot from Hard Disk”, I think.
- Hmm… it booted into the first time setup… I think that means that it overwrote my GRUB…, grr… (It did, but it also recognized the other OSs.)
- Allows you to update from within the installer.
- Installation Done!

- Seems like a very nice distro, but only time will tell. Compiz Fusion is pre-installed and easy to set up. I have only two complaints: It did not detect the right resolution automatically and the Install Software application gives the name of the packages, not the name of the program which can be confusing to new users.

Overall, I like OpenSUSE 10.3 so far. I will update you if I have anything new and interesting.

Phoronix reports on a new (and expensive) motherboard from ASUS that includes a quick-booting Linux system with Skype and a web browser. This would be very useful for diagnosing problems if with a new computer, if you could at least get as far as booting it.

eBay recently preformed an analysis of the security threats facing them and found something quite surprising. Apparently, many phishers are using Linux machines with rootkits, pieces of software that hide files and activities of a piece of malicious code, on them to serve the fake web pages used in phishing attacks. Although it is not certain, it is likely that the vulnerabilities used to put rootkits on Linux PCs come from third-party software, not the base system, which would mean that real servers may not be at much risk.

Luckily, there are a number of utilities, such as rkdet (I have not tested rkdet or others myself.), to detect rootkits on Linux.

Yesterday openSUSE 10.3 was released. I have it downloaded and was running it in a virtual machine. I was planning on doing a review, but things sort of messed up when I got it installed and started up the control center. I started getting errors about my graphics card. I can be just about certain that the virtual machine is the problem here. I don’t know if I will get a full review out or not.