Putting off that New Year's resolution to get started on Linux? Here's a combination of book and distribution that will lay a strong foundation for Linux projects.

AMD has today announced the ATI Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series graphics processors, which are the budget-minded siblings to the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870. The graphics cards currently now shipping in these series are the HD 3450, HD 3470, and HD 3650. When the Radeon HD 3850 and 3870 were introduced, there wasn't same-day Linux support but it had arrived both in open and closed-source forms relatively quickly, but is that the same story for these lower-end solutions? Will the DisplayPort interface on these graphics cards be supported under Linux? In this article, we have answers to these questions.

Yes, invention is the mother of necessity, and my little XO is proof. Since I got it a week ago I’ve added all manner of doo-dads and thingamajigs, usually keeping to the green motif, and sinking at least another 7500 yen into it (that’s about $75, although that amount changes as the stock market flutters ;) ).

"...For an overview of extensions that will work with one of the Firefox 3 betas, check out this, somewhat obtuse, but largely functional chart, which tracks Firefox 3 compatible extensions..."

PCLinuxOS 2008 Minime is a boon for so-called advanced users, who like to keep their system free of flab.
It comes with a minimal set of applications and an amazing artwork.
This ultra small release also comes with a few good utilities including an easy setup for ATI/NVIDIA drivers.

My dirty walk-through to setting up an external modem in Linux using wvdial to dial into an ISP connection. I had some trouble finding a single place with a good write-up for doing such a task when I was setting up a Linux box for someone that had previously been using Windows and a little OS X. Finding dialing info, modem configuration, or slight troubleshooting, alone wasn't too difficult, but finding them in one place in a concise manner was. So I have attempted to compile what I have found, my tweaks and adjustments, and other hints that enabled me to setup a Linux box to use a dial up connection via external modem.

Some time ago, Mandriva decided to install the PulseAudio sound server by default in its distribution. Personally I did not really like the decision to activate PulseAudio by default in all desktop environments: I have been using Alsa with great satisfaction now for years, and I did not have any problem with that, so having to depend on yet another service did seem overkill to me. Nevertheless, I let PulseAudio be activated on my system too, in order to help as much as possible with bug hunting.