Linux Tricks

“Linux users in the UK could face a greater threat from Microsoft than previously thought, but experts agree that British open-source users are in far less danger than US users from Microsoft’s claim that open-source software infringes its patents.

“Microsoft has claimed that Linux and other open-source software infringes 235 of its patents. Although the company has refused to say which patents are involved, the risk must be lower in the UK than the US, because the company has far fewer patents in the UK, argued Andrew Katz, a solicitor at Moorcrofts, last week…”

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“When it comes to binary display drivers under Linux, NVIDIA is generally known as the company that’s able to offer drivers that are on par with their Windows driver. Unlike the known performance issues with the ATI/AMD fglrx driver where it’s not uncommon for the driver to be 50% slower than the Windows Catalyst equivalent, the NVIDIA Linux driver has performed roughly the same if not faster in some cases. This has also been true for the NVIDIA Solaris driver as the performance bastion can largely be attributed to the shared driver code-base between all NVIDIA-supported platforms (Windows, Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD).

However, with the GeForce 8 series we have come across some unusual issues that are limiting the performance of the GeForce 8 series under Linux and Solaris. In this article, we have additional information on these austere performance problems along with benchmarks showing the frame-rate differences between Windows XP and Linux…”

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“Even though patent talks between Microsoft and Red Hat broke down last year before Microsoft went on to sign a technical collaboration and patent indemnity deal with Novell, Red Hat is still willing to work with the Redmond software maker on the interoperability front.

“But the Linux vendor wants to limit those talks to pure interoperability between Windows and Red Hat Linux, with the goal of solving real customer problems, Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s executive vice president of engineering, told eWEEK…”

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“Microsoft’s relationship with the open source development community continued to evolve last month, with the company adding three suppliers of the Linux operating system to cross-licensing agreements.

“Among the deals announced in June were agreements with Linux supplier Xandros Inc., Linspire Inc. and mobile device manufacture LG Electronics. The agreements are the first since Microsoft and Novell Inc.’s landmark cross-licensing and patent-liability indemnification pact in November…”

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