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I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around.

The Linux Plumbers Conference is a working conference. LPC brings together the top developers working on the "plumbing" of Linux - kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing system, etc. - and gives them three days to work together on core design problems. The conference is organized into several half-day microconferences focusing on individual subsystems. Since the microconfs are co-located, developers can meet face-to-face with experts from other subsystems to solve problems that span project boundaries. This kind of cross-project collaboration usually only happens in the unofficial "hallway track" at conferences. LPC makes the hallway track a priority.

Part two of a five part post series on setting up Linux and Unix servers securely.

Organic open source. Non-organic open source. Genetically modified free software. None of these are phrases that are in common usage but exploring what they mean is an interesting exercise. MySQL's Brian Aker used the first two terms when responding to a post by Linux kernel guru Ted T'so about what Sun was trying to do with its OpenSolaris project. I made up the third one myself! And whatever follows is my take on these terms.

DSL 4.4 was just released on June 9th, so this past weekend I installed it on my Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 800 Mhz machine. It only has 256 megs of RAM, so a lightweight distribution like DSL is a good choice for it. Their site claims you can run DSL 486 DX with 16 megs of RAM, so even this old Compaq should fly with what it’s got.

Most anyone in the free and open source Verio brings something extra to Linux: reliability. Click to learn about free test. Latest News about open source software realm can tell you not only that Linux is better than Windows, but also that it is an optimal alternative to the closed-source and proprietary operating system from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft. Anyone at a Linux-oriented event or group can assure you that you have no need or even legitimate reason to continue using commercial operating systems nowadays.

In a combination news story and podcast, SugarCRM CEO John Roberts describes the state of his company, growing demand for Sugar as a hosted service -- and even a potential IPO (initial public offering) around 2010. Here's the scoop from MSPmentor.

In this blog about programming with BLAS, discover five tips to gain maximum performance for the IBM SDK for Multicore Acceleration 3.0. These five tips will let you leverage maximum performance from the BLAS library.

Free Software development is often a fun task for developers, and it is its low barrier to entry (on average) that makes it possible to have so much available software for so many different tasks. This low barrier to entry, though, is also probably the cause of the widely varying quality of the code of these projects. Most of the time, the quality issues one can find are not related to developers' lack of skill, but rather to lack of knowledge of how the tools work, in particular, the compiler. For non-interpreted languages, the compiler is probably the most complex tool developers have to deal with. Because a lot of Free Software is written in C, GCC is often the compiler of choice.

Asus will bring the Eee Box desktop to the UK in August, the company announced today. However, it confirmed to Register Hardware that machine will initially only ship with Windows XP Home Edition. The compact desktop contains not Intel's desktop-oriented Atom 230 processor, as anticipated, but the less power-hungry notebook version, the N270, Asus revealed. Both CPUs are clocked at 1.6GHz and contain 512KB of L2 cache. But the N270 consumes 2.5W of power, while the 230 has a 4.5W TDP.

I'd been complaining for at least a month about how I couldn't install Google Gears to gain offline functionality for Google Docs because Gears only supported Firefox 1.5 to 2.x, and I was running Ubuntu 8.04 with Firefox 3 and Debian Lenny with Iceweasel. Now that Gears works with Firefox 3, Ubuntu is taken care of. But I could've done this weeks ago, had I only come up with this solution: I could (and now am) running Google Gears with Docs in Puppy Linux.

The makers of Wine claim that version 1.0 is the first such "stable" release and have said that although compatibility is not perfect, thousands of applications are reported to "work very well." Member and former president of Linux Australia Jonathon Oxer told ZDNet.com.au that the Wine project is "an attempt to make Windows irrelevant." "Essentially, it's an effort to supplant the underlying operating system layer and allow Windows software to run on a Linux platform without requiring Windows to be installed," he said.

Since the dawn of time -- or, at least, the dawn of personal computers -- the holy wars over desktop operating systems have raged, with each faction proclaiming the unrivaled superiority of its chosen OS and the vile loathsomeness of all others.

Today Novell makes a play for Linux users new and old with the release of its openSUSE 11 distribution. Version 11 introduces an installer, improved package management and updated key open source packages. The new distribution is Novell's attempt to put its best stuff out on the field as it ramps up the competition against Red Hat's Fedora and Ubuntu Linux in the growing Linux community.

Linux specialist Red Hat has announced it is developing an embedded hypervisor product that it claims will complement, rather than compete with, its existing virtualisation strategy. Launched on the first day of the company's annual user conference in Boston, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks. Although Mint is a great desktop, a few problems keep it from perfection. Mint is available in two editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs, and a light edition, which doesn't. Since I was unable to find a 64-bit version of Elyssa, I downloaded and installed the 32-bit main edition on my test machine, with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor, 2GB of memory, two Nvidia GeForce 8600GT video cards on a Scalable Link Interface (SLI), and a 160GB SATA hard drive.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use. Apart from any technical or funding issues, a major reason that ZFS support has not been integrated into the Linux kernel is that Sun has released it under its Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the GPL used by the kernel. There are also patent issues with ZFS. However, the source code for ZFS is available, and running ZFS through FUSE does not violate any licenses, because you are not linking CDDL and GPL code together. You're on your own as far as patents go.

Less than a year ago we shared with you the revolutionary steps AMD was taking to deliver significant improvements to their once infamous proprietary Linux display driver and at the same time the work they were doing to foster the growth of an open-source driver for their latest graphics card families. These steps have certainly paid off for both AMD and the Linux community at large. AMD's proprietary driver is now on par with NVIDIA's Linux driver and there are two open-source ATI drivers picking up new features and improvements on an almost daily basis. AMD also continues to publish new programming guides and register information on a routine basis for their latest and greatest hardware. This has been truly phenomenal to see, but AMD has now evolved their Linux support by taking it a large step further. AMD is in the process of pushing new high-end features into their Linux driver -- such as Multi-GPU CrossFire support -- and with the ATI Radeon HD 4850 they have even begun showing off Tux, the Linux mascot, on their product packaging and providing Linux drivers on their product CDs!

This guide explains how to set up WebDAV with MySQL authentication (using mod_auth_mysql) on Apache2 on a Debian Etch server. WebDAV stands for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning and is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allow users to directly edit files on the Apache server so that they do not need to be downloaded/uploaded via http://FTP. Of course, WebDAV can also be used to upload and download files.

Recently, I did a laptop install for an individual that needed to upload files to his home computer from his laptop. It was important to him to do so. He didn't need a full feature SSH protocol or anything remotely (sorry) close to it. Many of the files are too big to get past his email size limit so he was worried that his Linux Box wouldn't be able to do what his Windows install did. That is where droopy comes in. That fact that it is a Python script endears me immediately but more so, the absolute ease by which it is utilized makes it the perfect little app for almost anyone's use.