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VMware ended a long-running battle over its strategic direction on July 8, ousting co-founder and CEO Diane Greene and installing Microsoft veteran Paul Maritz in her place. Investors pounded VMware's once high-flying stock on the shakeup and a warnings on sales growth. Still, Maritz's ascent could be just the tonic investors have sought as the company squares for a fight with the new CEO's former employer and grabs turf in the emerging cloud-computing market.

I had the privilege of giving not one but two talks at the Red Hat Summit, both about open source systems management topics. A good deal of this content was also shared with a different audience at FudCON, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. This was a great trip to Boston, and a fantastic chance to talk with users, administrators, and developers of all types. The first talk I had a part in was Func, which I co-presented with Adrian Likins.

Microsoft achieved its dominance on the desktop in part by adding more and more features into Windows and Office - for free - that others wereselling as standalone products. The result was to not only wipe out their competitors, but innovation as well. Now Google is offering more and more services for free to help sell ads. Withe the shoe on the other foot, will it fall now to Microsoft to ensure that competition and innovation continues in these areas?

You can easily configure IPv6 Tunnel under Debian or Ubuntu Linux to browse IPv6 ready websites and use IPv6 utilities. If your ISP is not ready with IPv6 native transport, you can easily set IPv6 tunnel under Debian or Ubuntu Linux using tspc (tunnel setup protocol client). tspc provides a mean to configure a tunnel obtained from a tunnel server which is compliant to the tunnel setup protocol (TSP).
How To Setup Debian / Ubuntu Linux IPv6 Tunnel Using tspc

Nokia released version 4.1 of it's Linux-based Internet Tablet platform Maemo last month. 4.1 is a minor update to the operating system, but it boasts two important features that answer long-held complaints: an improved open source email client, and migration to a package updating system more like that of a desktop Linux distribution. Tablet owners can download the update for N800 and N810 devices by visiting tablets-dev.nokia.com. As with previous releases, a valid device ID is required to download a firmware image. Upgraders can make a backup of their settings onto one of their tablet's memory cards, including a list of installed applications, which can be automatically reinstalled following the update.

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases, according to official company blog posts and documents. "Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

The computer proletariat is rising up - and computing will never be the same. Tiny, sub-$500 "netbooks" like the Asus Eee are the hottest thing going in notebooks today. And some surprising things are happening. Like housewives on Linux. Asus is forecasting worldwide shipments of 10 million 7 to 10 inch screen netbooks this year! And a billion in 2018.

In his latest blog post, helios called for positive letters to the residents of Felton, California. I am also offering a place where people can write as well due to helios having to deal with spam bots, which is never a fun thing.

Hans Reiser has led authorities to a body believed to be that of his estranged wife in the hills of Oakland, Calif. The area where the body was recovered is less than a mile away from where Reiser lived. She disappeared in 2006; he was found guilty of her murder in April.

Alienware, the PC manufacturer known for their high-end gaming notebooks and desktops, has been evaluating the business opportunity in providing a Linux OS option for some of their products. Phoronix reader Ahmad Yasser had contacted us to remind the Linux community that Alienware is running a Linux-based system survey to "gauge the level of interest consumers like you have in buying a new computer that features a Linux-based operating system."

At a time when graphical DVD rippers and encoders propose to make the backing up of your movies just a click away, a text-based application may actually be the best tool for the job. I've tried graphical rippers such as AcidRip, dvd::rip, thoggen, and RippedWire, with varying degrees of success. However, I've also had my share of headaches. Most times, any crashes or problems I experienced were related to the graphical components of the application or the desktop. It's not pleasant (to say the least) to leave your computer eating electricity all night, only to find in the morning that the ripping and encoding of a DVD failed because of an error purely related to GTK+ or Qt. It's even more frustrating when you realize that most of these applications are front ends to command-line programs.

Washington State University bookkeepers scratched their heads this spring when David Cillay submitted an invoice, for about $50, for an island. It was awhile before they learned he was buying land in Second Life, the online immersive virtual world where WSU has begun offering courses for students from across the globe.

HTML Purifier is a project that helps you ensure that HTML is valid and does not contain cross-site scripting attempts or other nasty attacks. With HTML Purifier you can allow users to post HTML content without letting them insert nasty code that will run in the browser of anyone viewing that HTML. An assortment of plugins let you use HTML Purifier with CodeIgniter, Drupal, MODx, Phorum, Joomla!, and WordPress. To get an idea of the cleanups that HTML Purifier can perform, head over to the demo page.

The basic framework of the intellectual property (IP) regime aims to “close down access to knowledge” rather than allowing its dissemination, Professor Joseph Stiglitz said at a 5 July lecture on “Who Owns Science?” Stiglitz, a 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Professor John Sulston, a 2002 Nobel Laureate in Physiology/Medicine, launched Manchester University’s new Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation.

mod_defensible is an Apache 2.x module intended to block spammers/hackers/script kiddies using DNSBL servers. It will look at the client IP and check it in one or several DNSBL servers and return a 403 Forbidden page to the client. This guide shows how to install and use it with Apache 2 on a Debian Etch server.

This is a new concept for anyone who's spent their computing life running Windows. We are going to introduce them to our world and that being so, I would like you to tell Felton just how important this decision is. Write a one or two paragraph "welcome" letter. Tell the people of Felton why this decision is important to them and how much better operating their computer will be. Now..this may sound odd coming from me...

The announcement by the GNOME Foundation that it is appointing Stormy Peters as its Executive Director confirms a suspicion that I've harboured for a while: that we are witnessing the evolution of major open source projects into new kinds of players in the computing world, ones that require full-time staff not just to run them, but also to articulate what exactly they are trying to do *beyond* the code. The pioneer in this field is obviously the Mozilla Foundation, which has grown from an apparently doomed attempt to hack the original Netscape Navigator code into something half-usable, to a high-profile, media-savvy outfit that is not just winning market- and mind-share, but starting to frame many of the most important discussions within the open source world.

Tom McCallum, VP of investor relations at Red Hat, on July 7 wrote a blog that attempts to clarify Red Hat's recent quarterly results. Is McCallum trying to tactfully rally investors around Red Hat? Check out The VAR Guy's analysis.

A small tutorial on how to use awk, Perl and the shell to double space between lines. Hopefully this answers all requests for additional material :)

IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a protocol for text-based internet chat created by Jarkko Oikarinen in 1988. Ever since it was developed, IRC gained more and more popularity and currently it's one of the standard ways for projects and distributions to provide online help, for developers to meet and discuss aspects regarding their work.