Showing all newswire headlines

Hewlett-Packard's Unix team has rolled out a fresh release of the HP-UX operating system, and has yet again fiddled with the various flavors of the software that customers can acquire. HP-UX 11i v3 Update 2 (no, seriously) features some tweaks to the kernel and elsewhere, providing what HP claims is a 20 per cent performance boost over v3's initial release. HP also claims Update 2 can double the network speed for certain workloads.

Networking goliath Cisco is now opening its Integrated Services Router (ISR)platform to become a Linux-based application server platform. The move could have wide-ranging implications, as Cisco's gear has millions of deployments that now can be leveraged to serve applications directly.

Power management on computers has three parts: selecting devices that are more power-efficient, tuning your systems to run more efficiently, and configuring systems to use less power during periods of inactivity. Servers, desktop machines, and laptops usually need different power management schemes; there isn't a one-size-fits-all.

Tomasz Bednarski (Mandriva Poland) wrote a letter to PKN president, Tomasz Schweitzer, in which he expressed his concerns about the Polish OOXML ratification process which Bednarski took part of, as a member of the technical committee 182. We publish the translation of his letter and the response from Schweitzer.

The VAR Guy was guilty of hyping Windows-based Ultra-Portables from startups like OQO a year ago, but he has drastically changed his thinking about the Ultra-Portable computer market. He thinks current market dynamics greatly favor Linux over Windows in the Ultra-Portable industry. Here’s why.

Follow up post number 1, focusing on the specific pros and cons when it comes to building a NAS device based on Linux/BSD.

What sort of impact can you expect from switching a machine from the Gigabit Ethernet NIC that come on its motherboard to a higher-end Intel desktop NIC? I benchmarked two common gigabit NICs found on motherboards against two Intel PCIe desktop gigabit NICs, targeting the specific purpose of accessing an NFS share over the network. The short version: throughput for sequential read/write operations didn't improve much, but latency was much better, allowing anything that needs a network round trip, like create, delete, and seek, to work much faster.

A member of the European Parliament has raised the question as to whether Microsoft should be banned from all government procurements in Europe. Heidi Rühle, a member of the EU Parliament who represents Germany's Green Party, has formally tabled a question - which is actually more of a suggestion - asking if Microsoft ought to be deemed to have failed to meet the EU conditions required to participate in public procurements in European Union countries.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Mandriva 2008 Spring Free (Mandriva 2008.1) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Mandriva 2008.1, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

Open source advocates have long pointed to Asterisk's ascendancy as one of the movement's great success stories. But for the founder of the open source PBX (define) solution, Asterisk's success is just the beginning.

Software teams must act to protect systems and development projects from revenge attacks by disgruntled current and former employees. So says Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute's CERT, which is advising organizations take basic steps including code encryption, enforcement of code-change and access controls, reading their log monitors and denying access to non-project staff, such as systems administrators.

If you're looking for a GNOME desktop for the popular PCLinuxOS (PCLOS), then newly released PCLinuxOS Gnome might be for you. PCLinuxOS Gnome is a community-developed Linux distribution built on the official PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 distribution, which is a minimized system containing the bare-bones necessities for a running system, a skeletal window manager, and a remastering tool. PCLinuxOS itself, known for its ease of use, beauty, and functionality, is loosely based on Mandriva Linux. It retains the RPM package format, ports the Mandriva Control Center and live installer, and focuses primarily upon KDE. It also contains components from Gentoo, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, and Ubuntu. The distro's developers tend to adapt the best elements of some of the best distros available for their own distribution. They tweak, customize, and rebuild each package for PCLOS, creating a fast and stable environment.

A handy little set of scripts for KDE that puts video conversion for ipod/psp just a right click away.

Never mind that what I really need is an up-to-date "Absolutely OpenBSD," but since I'm in an I'll-take-what-I-can-get mood, I just secured a copy of "The Book of PF: A No-Nonsense Guide to the OpenBSD Firewall," which for all practical purposes is the most up-to-date book out there that has at least some focus on OpenBSD. In this book by Peter N.M. Hansteen, I hope to get somewhat up to speed on PF, the packet filter that originated in OpenBSD but which now is available in the other BSDs as well -- though not in Linux.

You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users. Unlike UNetbootin, which installs Linux on a hard disk partition, Wubi works by installing Ubuntu within a file stored on your Windows drive, and adding itself to the Windows boot.ini file to allow you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time. Wubi is based on Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support (LTS), which will be released this April. Both Wubi and Ubuntu 8.04 are available now in stable beta versions.

Mandriva today announced the release of Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring. The new release includes features such as full support for the Asus Eee, easy synchronisation with Windows Mobile 5 and later, Blackberry, and Nokia devices, a new parental control utility, the Elisa multimedia center, Codeina for easy installation of necessary media codecs, PulseAudio by default and much more. Software updates include KDE 3.5.9 (with 4.0.2 available from the official repositories), GNOME 2.22, OpenOffice.org 2.4, Linux kernel 2.6.24.4, X.org 7.3, Compiz 0.7, and more.

Ever been to a night club on a Monday morning? There's you, there are the chairs, and the potential to host a party on the weekend. There are lots of buttons, lots of potential, but no member except you. But unlike a night club, you don't have to wait for the weekend to host your friends on Elgg. Invite them as soon as you're done setting up the software. Elgg is designed to make it easier for you to invite people. If you've ever setup a blog or rolled your own website, how long did it take before you could invite your friends over? You had to put up all sorts of content to indulge them, and also fiddle around decorating the portal so that it doesn't look dull.

At first glance, you might think the headline to this blog entry is an oxymoron. In reality, Microsoft certainly does have an open source chief (Sam Ramji). And in some cases, Microsoft is downright happy to support open source. Skeptical? Allow The VAR Guy to explain.

Discover a tool that simplifies the creation and deployment of MapReduce applications. The Eclipse plug-in uses the Hadoop open-source MapReduce framework, which enables data-intensive applications to run on large clusters of commodity hardware.

Microsoft’s Windows juggernaut is collapsing as it tries to support 20 years of applications and becomes more complicated by the minute. Meanwhile, Windows has outgrown hardware and customers are pondering skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7. If Windows is going to remain relevant it will need radical changes. That sobering outlook comes courtesy of Gartner analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald. Half of a full room of IT managers and executives raised their hands when asked whether Microsoft needed to radically change its approach to Windows. “Windows is too monolithic,” says Silver.