Customer Services: OSS, Grasp The Concept

Editorial 54 Comments
Commercial software companies across the industry have an often well-deserved reputation for poor customer service. Unfortunately, companies that sell Open Source Software are well on the way to establishing a reputation for being even worse than commercial firms. I believe I know why. The reason has its' roots in the origin of the free software movement, and in the cultural bias of the geek world. Here is my take on the subject, for whatever it might be worth.
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LFS 5.0 Released

  Submitted by Joseph Childrose Linux 14 Comments
The Linux From Scratch community is pleased to announce the release of LFS-5.0. This major milestone features a new method with strong emphasis on building a correct compilation environment and base libraries independent from the host system. Release 5.0 features the Linux kernel version 2.4.22, the GNU C Library (glibc) 2.3.2, the GNU Compiler Collection (gcc) 3.3.1 and a bootloader change from LILO to GRUB, amongst other package upgrades.
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XGI: A New Graphics Kid on the Block

3D 37 Comments
A new player dares to enter the graphics card market that ATi and Nvidia have dominated for so long. XGI (eXtreme Graphics Innovation), based in Taiwan, comes at the market leaders with a line of cards for a whole lot less money. Tom's Hardware looks at XGI's product range, and offer results of a beta model from XGI´s top model Volari Duo V8 Ultra. The site also has a benchmark article on the latest Nvidia cards Vs the latest Radeons, but it is interesting to see some new blood in the market that have left S3, SiS, Matrox, Trident and Intel i8xx as secondary players or in 'survival mode'.
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Open Source Not Ready for Desktop, IBM Told UK Government

IBM 122 Comments
"The UK government has a 'level playing field' policy for use of Open Source Software, but although it is supposed to be considering "OSS solutions alongside proprietary ones in IT procurements", this does not seem to have produced much in the way of significant deployments or contracts. And who is to blame for this apparent lack of movement? A smoking pistol placed before a Parliamentary Committee last week seemed to implicate that well-known partisan of Open Source Software IBM." TheRegister reports. And all this while the press is expecting IBM to give a talk at Desktop Linux Consortium's conference on Monday about Linux on the desktop.
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Another ex-Be Engineer Comments on YellowTAB Zeta

Zeta 76 Comments
Ex-Be engineer Dianne Hackborn (now at PalmSource) gave an interview at the BeOSJournal.org and comments on many different things, including YellowTAB's Zeta: "Personally I find Zeta depressing. From what I have seen, it is basically the work we had in progress at Be plus various things dumped on top. Unfortunately what we had at Be was half-finished, if that. I hate seeing all of the half-finished parts of the UI being thrown around as a real product." Dianne is not the first ex-Be engineer commenting on Zeta's potential (or lack there of). Another three ex-Be employees have also commented recently.
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Getting to Know Fedora Core 1

Fedora Core 96 Comments
I have installed Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) to see what has changed between it and Red Hat Linux 9 and to get a feel for this new and powerful Linux operating system. For some people, the name Fedora will not be a familiar name, for others (Red Hat Linux or OS enthusiasts), Fedora could (In some ways) be considered to be the 'new' Red Hat Linux 9.x or 10 release, the not so long awaited sequel to Red Hat Linux 9, which came out in late March 2003. However, Fedora Core 1 is not Red Hat Linux 10 (as I try to explain below), and to quote from the front page of the Fedora Project website:
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