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OSNews has been reporting on the Debian/Ubuntu/GNU/Opensolaris hybrid for several years. But for those of you who've never looked more closely at this interesting OS, a Nexenta developer has laid out some of its more noteworthy features and advantages. The Nexenta project, started in 2005, has had 6 releases (NexentaOS and NexentaCore), and is preparing for the upcoming NexentaCore Platform 2 release. If you are a Debian/Ubuntu developer, consider taking a little time to take a look at an emerging platform that provides a feature rich developer environment.

As promised (I think ;), we're back today with some code (not the entire script that encompasses the last 2 weeks worth of posts, of course) to grind out the final concept in this string of surprisingly wide-ranging topics all centered around the concepts of number pools and guaranteed matches. We've covered a lot of different aspects of mathematics, regular expression matching, etc just moving toward our Objective.

I thought Microsoft would announce they would buy Citrix a day or two before VMware's VMworld conference. Well, it is a few days before VMworld and I must admit I was starting to think I would have to write that there would be no deal and to eat a bit of crow, but today my inbox lit up with rumors.

The OLPC XO is a path-breaking, jaw-dropping piece of technology. And not just any traditional, consumer-focused (faster, shinier) way, but in specific and strategic areas that make the laptop perfect for developing world situations where it might be damp or dusty, the sun might be your light source at school, and you probably don't have reliable electricity at home. It happens to be that those same constraints also produce technological solutions that make the XO attractive to a certain set of users who want a no-frills, but highly functional laptop (like world travelers), as I mentioned in Part I -- it's lightweight, rugged, and low-power (solar chargeable), but powerful enough to connect to faint wifi, play movies, or review digital photos.

A while back, I wrote an article for Linux Journal's web edition entitled “Howto be a good (and lazy) System Administrator.” A couple astute readers, after reading the article, asked if I was familiar with the Nagios monitoring system, and I am. I've been using Nagios for a few years now. I had intended to write this article as a How-to on getting Nagios configured and running for the first time. However, it turns out that the documentation that comes with Nagios is really pretty good. And even if you do have problems, and I did, the user community is also quite responsive. So, rather than beating a dead horse, (with sympathy to horse lovers) I decided to continue the Good and Lazy Administrator Theme and discuss extending Nagios with custom service checks and custom notifications.

The splash screen for Writer's World Maker (WWM) announces that the program is designed to "help you to summon your imaginary worlds to the printed page." And, considering its flexibility and thoroughness in some areas -- especially defining characters -- at times it almost realizes this goal. However, interface problems, as well as a fannish orientation at the expense of detailed planning in other areas, makes it a program more suitable for wannabes than working writers. Now at version 1.0.31, WWM is available as source code and Debian, Fedora, Mandriva, and Ubuntu packages. If the Debian package is any indication, though, these packages are not set up for dependency resolution. You must install the Gambas programming language packages for your distribution before you install WWM. You will also need to install Qt support if you do not already have KDE installed.

Normally, when Google releases a new application, I'm right there standing in line to be one of the first to try it. However, that was not the case with Google's latest effort, Chrome. Reports that the Web browser acted as an oversized keylogger through its OmniBox were not reassuring.

Hypervisors - bare-metal virtualization solutions that don't depend on an underlying operating system - used to be the high-priced spread of the virtualization world. You can still pay a pretty penny for hypervisor solutions from some vendors. But an announcement from Sun yesterday increases the pressure on purely-commercial solutions: Sun's own xVM Server is now open source.

One of the cornerstones of the landmark interoperability deal between Novell and Microsoft was, and is, virtualization. Two years after they struck their agreement, Microsoft and Novell have extended their partnership. The partners are now finally rolling out a supported Linux on a Windows virtualization solution.

Lenovo Group Ltd. is cutting back on sales of desktops and laptop systems with the Linux operating system pre-installed. The PC maker said yesterday that it will no longer take online orders for computers pre-loaded with any flavor of Linux. Ray Gorman, a spokesman for the company, said that it will continue offering such machines only through its own or partner direct sales teams.

Elisa is an open source cross-platform media center connecting the Internet to an all-in-one media player. While primary development and deployment platform is GNU/Linux and Unix operating systems, elisa also currently support Microsoft Windows. Elisa runs on top of the GStreamer multimedia framework. In addition to personal video recorder functionality (PVR) and Music Jukebox support, Elisa will also interoperate with devices following the DLNA standard like Intel’s ViiV systems.

Canonical, the corporate backer of Ubuntu Linux, is hiring a team of designers and developers to make desktop open source software easier and more appealing to use. Canonical head and Ubuntu founder, Mark Shuttleworth, said in a blog post yesterday that the company plans to hire a team of designers and user interface experts to contribute to not only Ubuntu’s usability but also to other upstream open source applications.

Find out about the recent updates made to the Post-Link Optimization for Linux on POWER, also known as FDPR-Pro. This technology is a performance-tuning utility used to improve the execution time and the real memory utilization of user-level application programs, based on their run-time profiles.

Sun released the code for its open source server-virtualization software Wednesday, and will make a commercial version of the xVM Server available next month. xVM Server can virtualize Windows, Linux and Sun's own Solaris operating system on x86 hardware from such vendors as Sun, HP, IBM and Dell, says Steve Wilson, Sun's xVM vice president. Previously, Sun's server-virtualization strategy focused on its own operating system and the Sparc chipset, he says.

Imagine a world without Linux. There'd be no cute Tux penguin or any notion of software freedom day. Netbooks would not have come about. But more strikingly, there wouldn't be the modern powerful tools that Windows systems administrators have come to love. That's right; Linux is keeping Microsoft honest and I'm going to expose the new Windows Small Business Server for what it is, along with those who resell it.

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), today announced the availability of Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) support, integrated with Pentaho’s Data Integration and Data Mining modules. PMML support from Pentaho can provide interoperability or migration alternatives for end user organizations that have traditionally been subject to the extremely high acquisition and maintenance costs of traditional, proprietary analytical and data mining platforms from companies like SAS Institute, SPSS, and Microstrategy. Now those organizations can take advantage of the cost benefits of commercial open source BI from Pentaho, while reusing their existing investments and providing continuity in their deployments.

Where will your next Desktop Operating System be located? This article analyzes the Qumranet acquisition by Red Hat for an answer.

In part two of this series, Akkana Peck takes us on a solar system tour via XEphem. We'll visit the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and learn how to get detailed information on thousands of far-away objects, and travel in time, both past and future.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British-born inventor of the World Wide Web, says he doesn't like to express preferences among Web browsers. But he does have an issue with one of them: Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Berners-Lee, director of the standard-setting World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C, said in an interview this week that Internet Explorer is falling behind other browsers in the way it handles an important graphics feature.

Windows Vista suffers from 10 key technical and marketing challenges. But the biggest challenge of all is summarized perfectly in this cartoon, reports The VAR Guy.