One day while doing my daily browsing through the web, I came across a message board post that was in response to a Linux zealot's rant. It went a little something like this, "If Linux had the market share of Windows, and Windows was the underdog you would be saying how great, and easy to use Windows is, and how it just works." My first reaction was of anger and dismissal, "Linux is open source Linux uses protected memory..." But the more I thought about it the more it disturbed me because I knew it was true. What do you do when you think an opinion you have may be in jeopardy of being wrong? You compare the facts and sort out the myths.

Day 2 of the KMDI Open Source conference started with Robert F. Young, cofounder of Red Hat, Inc. presenting a positive view about open source business models. At the end of a conference day lasting nearly 13 hours, Young returned to deliver the conference's keynote address.

In this article, six widely used algorithms in graphics rendering of indoor and outdoor environments are discussed, namely: quad-based static terrain, Roettger's approach to continuous levels-of-detail in terrain, real-time optimally adapting meshes, portals, BSPs and PVSs. In each case the algorithm is discussed and some aspects of implementation are considered, as well as analyize each algorithm for its application in modern graphics systems. More graphics articles here.

Kerneltrap covers recent progress with the Kqueue code in FreeBSD-current. Kqueue testing is a major focus area for the release of 5.3 and it looks like freebsd dev is making steady progress in knocking out major showstoppers. The code would also benefit from testing.

Arvan Reese wrote a guide for beginners explaining all about source-based Linux distros.

"The conclusion is obvious by the "Total Time For All Benchmarks Test." The best journaling file system to choose based upon these results would be: JFS, ReiserFS or XFS depending on your needs and what types of files you are dealing with. I was quite surprised how slow ext3 was overall, as many distributions use this file system as their default file system. Overall, one should choose the best file system based upon the properties of the files they are dealing with for the best performance possible!" Read the whole article at the LinuxGazette.