Having the right people in the right places pursuing the right goals is key to Gentoo’s success. Keeping in mind the Pareto principle (20% of the effort produces 80% of the results), I’ve come up with some ideas.

Red Hat's Matthew Garrett has actively been working on improving power management with graphics processors via the various open-source X.Org drivers. There is quite a lot of work involved, but at the FOSDEM X.Org meeting he shared an update on his progress. In particular, Matthew is trying to conserve power with the GPU, memory, outputs, and displays.

"We had one client who moved from a Novell/Microsoft-based environment to a Debian-based one and they saved something like 80 percent of the cost in the first year - they couldn't have done that moving to Red Hat - not when their licences cost £1000,"Callway said.

In the first part of this piece I introduced zenity : the handy tool for providing GUI interaction with your shell scripts. In this second part I'm going to delve a little deeper into the type of things you can do with this versatile tool.

At FOSDEM 2009 in Keith Packard's talk on the rebuilt Linux desktop, he shared the progress made in composited 3D, monitor auto-plugging, 2D/3D/media shared objects, kernel mode-setting, and kernel-based 2D drawing. Allowing these problems to be addressed was the Graphics Execution Manager for kernel memory management.

In a day of laptops and remote systems, it's often impractical to keep the same ssh session going to a specific server indefinitely. There are times when I want to reconnect from home to an ssh session that I started at work. Unfortunately, ssh doesn't support that sort of thing. But the screen utility lets you do something similar to this.

Somebody on the Ubuntu Forums was asking how to get their server to shut down automatically when no other computers are online on the network. This can be useful if you have Wake-On-Lan enabled on the server, and you're only using it for things like printer or file sharing. I responded with a little php script I whipped up that does the job nicely.