Among the many new features for Fedora 11, a newly added one is Nouveau becoming the default driver for Nvidia cards in Rawhide. Nouveau is an effort to create a completely free and open source 3D driver for Nvidia cards. Fedora 7 originally included this driver installed but not enabled by default. Red Hat recently hired Ben Skeggs, one of the primary Nouveau developers and Nouveau driver has been accepted by the Fedora Engineering team to be the default driver for Nvidia cards with the legacy nv driver as a fallback option. Nouvaeu already supports more chipsets, RANR 1.1 support, Accelerated XRENDER, Textured Video support for many cards that are not covered by the nv driver which has been hampered by a lot of obfuscated code as well. Phoronix has other details.

InfoWorld's Rick Grehan offers a two-part roundup of 13 specialty Linux distros, each of which constructs a user environment tuned to a specific application or, in the case of Ubuntu Christian Edition and Ubuntu Muslim Edition, to a specific community's computing needs. Whereas the first installment focused on small-footprint distros, system-rescue Linux, and Linux flavors geared for archaic hardware, the second installment showcases the advantages of customizing both OS components and user-level software, focusing on firewall Linuxes, a Linux SAN/NAS appliance, two Linuxes for musicians, and the aforementioned religious flavors of Ubuntu. 'These distributions are outstanding examples of flexibility of the Linux OS,' Grehan writes. 'Hats off to the designers and developers who build these specialized distributions and make the fruits of their enthusiasm available to all.'

Apple released the Safari 4 Beta today. Features: Tabs on top. "Top Sites" 'Speed Dial' feature. "Smart" address/search fields. HTML5 Canvas. HTML5 Audio/Video (though no Ogg). Acid 3. CSS Animation/Gradients/Masks/Reflection. CSS Web Fonts. New "Nitro" Javascript engine - "Up to 4 times faster than Firefox 3.1". 'Native' look and native font rendering on Windows Vista/XP. I can think of only one thing: "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!"

Whenever we're talking market share and Macs, it'll inevitably get late. There are different means of measuring market share, and different ways to interpret the resulting data, usually leading to heated debates about who is right and who isn't. Ars decided to take a look at the different methods of measurement and see what they mean.

Obviously, Linux vendors will not remain untouched by the economic downturn. Novell has already announced a number of lay offs, and the openSUSE Linux division has not been spared. openSUSE board members Pascal Blesser and Bryen Yunashko announced the lay offs.

Red Hat has announced it's virtualization plans for the future which includes a switch from Xen to KVM in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, three new virtualization products based on KVM, Solid ICE and the spice protocol. Red Hat which acquired these tools as part of the Qumranet acquisition will be making them free and open source software and develop them into a cross platform management tool.

In what can only be called "totally frakking awesome", someone installed Microsoft Windows 3.1 on a Nokia N95. By using DOSBox, Polish developer Marcin-PRV was able to install the ageing operating system on the Symbian-powered smartphone, allowing both operating systems to run side-by-side.

UNIX's method of handling file systems and volumes provides you with an opportunity to improve your systems' security and performance. This article addresses the issue of why you should split up your disk data into multiple volumes for optimized performance and security.

A new proof-of-concept application from Microsoft's research arm integrates elements from the Windows OS and its Windows Azure cloud infrastructure to let users share files from their desktops with Web users via social networking. More information can be found at the project's home page.

With Intel's Core i7 and Nehalem processors being out and about; Intel's "next-gen" processors are already here today. AMD hasn't been sitting still, and launched the Phenom II earlier this year. Ars decided to take a look at how the competition will go this year, and overclocked a Phenom II to 4.2Ghz, and benchmarked it against Intel's latest and greatest.

VectorLinux 6.0 has been released. "The final release of VectorLinux 6.0 (code name 'Voyager') is now available. This release is a major milestone in the ten year history of Vectorlinux. With the unbridled enthusiasm of a community gone wild, we have forged our very own stable GUI installer and our repository now hosts over a thousand packages. VectorLinux is the fastest Linux desktop in it's class. We have exceeded our original goals of VectorLinux 6.0 and produced a beautiful, full featured stable desktop for a rocket fueled experience. The main desktop is based on Xfce-4.4.3 with a custom theme and artwork again unique to VectorLinux. LXDE is installed as a secondary desktop option. Much work has been done on localization and we know users from all over the globe will find VectorLinux a stellar experience."

This week had some interesting things in it. In Sweden, they think they can stop piracy by sending The Pirate Bay to court, Apple faced its first Mac sales slow down in like forever but they're still high on customer satisfaction, and we wondered if a cat an agree to an EULA. This week's my take is from Jordan "weildish" Spencer Cunningham, and is about winter.

Asustek is going to start shipping only 10-inch and 7-inch Eee PCs, reports have claimed. Separate reports have also revealed how the manufacturer is contemplating putting the Android operating system onto netbooks.

Oh, batteries -- technology's weakest link. Back when we mostly needed them to run pocket calculators and wristwatches, things were good. The future was now, and the world was electrical. Now that the world really is electrical, and gadgets the size of those pocket calculators are sporting the computing power of yesterdays Crays, we're in trouble. Please excuse the fanboyism, but I'm a big fan of the iPhone, for all its flaws. With all battery-powered computing devices, you have to make some tradeoffs between processor power and battery life, but I think Apple did a pretty good job. Nevertheless, if you sit down for a protracted web browsing session, the combination of the screen and the radio really drain that battery. After an hour, you're pretty much dead. What to do?