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.

We have already discussed how to install VirtualBox 2.1.0  in ubuntu one of the important change is Host interface networking made easy with Host Interface Networking, VirtualBox uses a device driver on your host system that filters data from your physical network adapter. This driver is therefore called a “net filter” driver.

Earlier this month Adobe released a Flash Player 10 release candidate (10.0.0.569) for Linux. Over the previous betas, this release has improvement performance, fixes bugs, better V4L2 camera input, and fixes fullscreen video playback.

Flash Player 10 adds new filters, 3D effects, better typography support, and more. For Linux users this version offers windowless mode support (transparency through Flash, and page elements rendered above Flash), V4L2 camera support, smooth fullscreen video playback, and better performance.

Bluecherry released an open source driver for version 2 of its Linux-based compression card for MPEG-4 digital video recording. Redesigned around the Linux kernel's API for Video (Video4Linux) and Audio (ALSA), the GPL-licensed driver primarily targets the Bluecherry compression cards and related Ubuntu-based video surveillance software, but can be used for a variety of video applications.

After a while of using vi I started to appreciate it's tremendous power. Nowadays I use it whenever I can. I must say vi has a steep learning curve but when you get past the first steps and have the feeling of the interface it's an incredible time-saver.

3 Dimensional screens

The latest K Desktop Environment, KDE, features two modes of interacting with the desktop – the classic Desktop interface and the Netbook interface. On recent KDE-based distributions that I have reviewed for this website, the default is the classic Desktop, but switching to the Netbook interface is an easy, few seconds process.

Network device drivers have been using the increasingly misnamed NAPI ("new API") interface for some time now. NAPI allows a network driver to turn off interrupts from an interface and go into a polling mode. Polling is often seen as a bad thing, but it's really only a problem when poll attempts turn up no useful work to do.