Back at the Linux Foundation Austin Summit, VIA had announced plans to develop a new open-source initiative in a similar fashion what AMD has been doing. However, in the weeks following that they haven't done much for the open-source community.

We're taking a little departure this week from our sometimes successful attempt to be non-distro-specific, and looking at a neat little program that runs on Debian and Ubuntu flavors (including Ubuntu-derivatives, like Mint).

As a journalist, if a very different kind from Trudeau, I appreciate the sentiment. Looking back at 2007, who could have predicted that, after all the posturing by open source advocates, that the new version of the GNU General Public License would have caused so little division? Or that Linspire and Xandros would have followed Novell and made their own deals with Microsoft? Or that virtualization, which was such a hot topic in 2006, would have settled down to just another technology?

I've had a Sapphire ATI X1950 Pro video card for over 30 days now, and it's crossed my mind more than once to send it back to Newegg and get an nVidia replacement.

Device drivers can make or break an operating system. The best engineered kernel is useless if applications running on it cannot interface with the outside world or if device manufacturers cannot readily support it with their wares.

For MEPIS 7.0, KDE has been updated to version 3.5.8 and the kernel has been updated to 2.6.22-10. The nvidia driver has been updated to 100.14.19.

While Linux still does indeed lack drivers for some hardware, I believe that the lack of drivers is no longer the largest technological obstacle to Linux adoption. The thing Linux needs to focus mostly on now is completeness, not quantity, of hardware support. Read on, and allow me to explain.

We now have over 300 different developers signed up to help create, and maintain Linux drivers! What we need now is more companies participating in the project, we have the developers, but not enough work to keep them busy.