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Kudos, Red Hat: You beat financial estimates for your current quarter. Wall Street was impressed. Still, The VAR Guy was disappointed will one key data point you shared this week. Here's why.

I applaud Canonical for pushing Ubuntu beyond the desktop. But I wonder: Can Ubuntu really gain traction on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Or put more bluntly: Does the world really need another mobile operating system to compete against Apple iPhone, Google Android, Windows Mobile and all the mobile Linuxes? I applaud Canonical for pushing Ubuntu beyond the desktop — up onto servers, and down onto mobile devices. But I’m starting to wonder: Can Ubuntu really gain traction on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Or put more bluntly: Does the world really need another mobile device operating system? Frankly, I'm not sure.

You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for nearly 10 years, and has as yet modest success. Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters.

Large Chicago law firm Jones Day is suing a tiny Internet startup called BlockShopper over the use of the humble hyperlink. But BlockShopper has picked up a pair of allies in the form of the EFF and Public Citizen, and the two groups jointly filed anamici curiae brief with the court that points out the obvious:"linking is what web sites do-that is, after all, why it is called the 'World Wide Web'."

Many applications need to graphically display the relation between two data axes. Common examples are how one resource such as CPU load or an exchange rate varies over time. GtkDatabox makes presenting such information in a GTK+ desktop application much simpler. Version 0.8.2.2 is packaged for Fedora 9, while version 0.7.0.x is available for both Ubuntu Hardy and as a 1-Click install for openSUSE. I'll build from source using the latest version 0.9.0.1 on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

With the Atom-based ASUS Eee PC 901 we have already delivered disk encryption benchmarks and a Linux distribution comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. This Intel 1.6GHz Diamondville processor isn't the fastest, but it's performing quite well for a netbook. With netbooks and their users often on the go though, for those not using the suspend and resume mode the boot time can be equally important as the in-desktop performance. To look at this we are delivering boot performance benchmarks for the Eee PC 901 from Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and Mandriva 2009.

The students of a missionary school in Pakistan, from first graders to graduates, have become enthusiast Edubuntu users thanks to the cooperation between their administrator and an Italian LUG. Padre (Father) Aldino Amato is an Italian missionary who has been working for 25 years in the schools of the Rosary Christian Hospital, a nonprofit charitable institution in the village of Rehmpur, near to the city of Okara in the Pakistani province of Punjab. In 2006, during a holiday in Italy, a friend suggested Amato publish in an Italian missionary newletter a request for all the things his schools needed but couldn't find easily in Pakistan. The first item on that list was computers. A newsletter reader pointed Amato to Golem (Gruppo Operativo Linux EMpoli), an Italian Linux user group (LUG) founded in 2000 in Empoli, a Tuscan town about 30 kilometers west of Florence.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that decision makers in healthcare policy and especially in healthcare IT policy do not understand the real underlying problems of interoperability in healthcare applications. Dare I also say that most developers don't either?

IBM has announced a new corporate strategy regarding its participation in the hundreds of standard-setting organizations relevant to its products. Simply put, it only wants to work within an environment that is open and transparent."There is simply no justification for standards to be created in nontransparent ways," said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers. The controversial plan sparked debate over whether Oracle was trying to kill off Red Hat by taking away Red Hat's revenue stream. Oracle and Red Hat representatives questioned during this week's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco offered strikingly different perspectives on how well Oracle's plan has worked out.

The unveiling Tuesday of HTC's much-anticipated G1 handset for T-Mobile, the first device running Google's Android mobile operating system, looks to be the opening salvo in a battle for smartphone consumers between Google and Apple. Although the first-generation G1 and second-gen iPhone are not exactly the same, the two handsets offer consumers many of the same features and functionalities.

Part two of Charlie Schluting's overview of TCP covers the basics of TCP connections and flow control.

Good OS (gOS) has achieved a major new release of its Ubuntu-based operating system. Targeting OEMs that want quickly customizable Linux netbook OSes, gOS 3.0 integrates closely with Google Gadgets, as well as with Google Mail, Calendar, Reader, News, Applications, Picasa, and so on.

I saw a lot of FOSS sites covering GTD in the past few months so I decided to give it a go, read the book and play with all kinds of software. I quickly came across Tracks, a nice looking GTD application to manage your actions. Unfortnately it's written in Ruby on Rails which can be a bit of a pain to set up under Linux, especially if you want to use Apache as the webserver instead of the built-in WEBrick server. I’m already running Apache on my server and I didn’t feel like running a second webserver on a different, non-standard port just for this one app. It took me quite a bit of time to piece it all together, but here’s how I set up Tracks in Debian Lenny.

Google Maps opened up a whole new world of mapping on the Web, making it easy for companies and individuals to put their data on a map. But if you want more control over how your maps look, or have data that doesn't really work well with Google Maps, there are other options, including serving your own data with Geoserver. Geoserver implements the Open Geospatial Consortium's Web Feature Server and Web Coverage Server specifications, with an integrated Web Map Server. The current stable version is 1.6.5, although the developers recently released 1.7.0-RC2. Written in Java, it's available for Linux and Unix variants and for Windows, and it requires a Java Runtime Environment, such as Sun JRE 6, to run.

Apple picked a bad time to be fighting angry developers about how closed their system is. After all, Android, a completely open platform, just launched.

In the following story I will explain you how I made to work my laptop with Fedora. No, not my opinion or expectations of it but how I made it to work, what were my difficulties and how I solved them. At the previous part of the article I talked about the perfect symbiosis of my new laptop and Fedora. Yes and no. Of course I am surprised and excited of the work and I really expected more troubles but there is a lot more to be done.

Bad standards and standard wars are an all too common part of modern information technology. Now, IBM has announced that it's not going to put up with them anymore. And, yes, Microsoft, IBM is looking at you. In a statement, Ari Fishkind, public affairs manager for IBM Research's Development and Intellectual Property section, says that "IBM is announcing a new corporate policy governing its participation in the technology standards community. As members of that community, we are formalizing a commitment to behave in a progressive and transparent way as we promote open, high quality standards."

In her ROSE blog Linux Pro Magazine editor Rikki Kite reports about a discussion on the Ubuntu women mailing list. Some women are bugged by the phrase "Ubuntero", which led to bug report 27826. It seems Mark Shuttleworth thinks it's worth changing the name for Ubuntu activists to something gender neutral.

HP and Oracle are teaming up to release the HP Oracle Database Machine. The HP Oracle Database Machine has some analysts predicting that Oracle will disrupt the data warehouse market, as Oracle issues a direct challenge to data warehouse leaders like Teradata. Not too long ago, Microsoft sought to shake up the data warehousing market with the purchase of DATAllegro. Not to be outdone, Oracle jumped into the fray at its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. But instead of an acquisition, Oracle pulled the covers off a project three years in the making—the HP Oracle Database Machine..

[So let me get this straight, Oracle is making hardware? Oracle entering the hardware business with or without HP's help; is a major move for them and the market. - Scott]