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Occasionally throughout the summer I’ve been chatting and emailing with Saugatuck Technology analyst Charlie Burns about mainframes, IBM and Linux. Many people have argued over the past year that the mainframe is dying out (again), but Burns and some very telling market trends go against that grain with a 180 degree turn: the mainframe is surging, and it’s all thanks to Linux.

Kim Brebach, a Windows user and consultant with an Austrialia-based technology marketing group, recently took a long trip into the land of the Linux desktop and reports back on what he found. Now I, on the other hand, am an operating system expert. You name it -- OS/2, VAX/VMS, AIX, Windows, Linux -- I've run it. That's all grand, if you want an informed opinion on what's what in desktop operating systems. But, if you want to know what an ordinary, somewhat tech-savvy Windows user makes of the Linux desktop, I'm not your man. Fortunately, Kim Brebach is your guy to tell you what a beginner makes of desktop Linux.

When I've written about the inevitable march of Open Source, there are a couple of things I've failed to note, or that I just got wrong. Where I got it wrong was in equating open technology and the trends in that direction with Open Source, as defined by the OSI. Sure, the downward price pressure in software makes the current open source ecosystem viable, but that's not nearly the same as saying that trends towards openness will necessarily result in an Open Source end. The truth is, there is a wide range of points on the open spectrum.

"This patch implements a new version of RCU which allows its read-side critical sections to be preempted,"Paul McKenney said in a posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He described theRCU code contained in his 9 part patchset,"it uses a set of counter pairs to keep track of the read-side critical sections and flips them when all tasks exit read-side critical section." Ingo Molnar responded very favorably to the patch,"cool! Now after 2 years of development and testing I think this is one of the most mature patchsets on lkml - so i'd like to see this designated for potential upstream inclusion. I.e. everyone who can see some bug, please holler now."

Gigabyte has long been a very big name in computer hardware. They manufacture almost any sort of hardware you can imagine. High quality computer cases, motherboards, video cards, laptops, CPU coolers, you name it they have it (they even have a cell phone!). Like ASUS, they are able to diversify and cover a massive segment of the industry, and they are able to do this without sacrificing quality and performance. An impressive feat indeed. Not so long ago, Gigabyte made a massive splash in the enthusiast/overclocking world with their release of the board known as the DS3. The 965P-DS3 was one of the best overclocking motherboards ever to be released on the market. Not only was it brilliantly designed, but very importantly, it was brilliantly priced. Everyone could afford it because it was not only better performing, but also cheaper than the competition. Overclocking was BY FAR the easiest we have ever encountered in all our years of experience. This is also partially because almost all of the Core 2 Duos are simply beasts. The P35-DS3P that we will be looking at today carries the same DS3 mark. This board is really the successor to the incredible 965P-DS3 and should be held to the same standards of quality and performance.

After having spent the past year and a half living and working in the commercial open source software world, I still marvel at how “the community” supports and makes possible the creation of high quality software. At first glance, a commercial enterprise that produces open source software may look like an absurdly small number of people supporting a large number of projects and a huge number of users. But an open source project team isn’t just comprised of the people within the walls of a building in a particular office park. It also includes all the contributors, anywhere in the world, in the project’s community.

VMware introduced VMware ESX Server 3i, the industry’s next generation thin hypervisor to be integrated in server hardware from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, NEC and others. Building virtualization into the server hardware simplifies the deployment and management of virtual infrastructure. With VMware ESX Server 3i, customers will be able to go from booting up a server to reaping the benefits of virtualization in a matter of minutes. VMware ESX Server 3i represents a major advance in a radically small footprint for unparalleled reliability and security. VMware ESX Server 3i will be showcased this week at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

Slackware is the Un-Buntu. It's almost the Un-Debian, but definitely the Un-Buntu. Whether this is good or bad is not something I'm going to talk about. It's just different. As I get deeper into using Slackware 12.0, I find myself reading more and more about the distribution, which is not exactly front-burner blog material.

IBM has announced that it is joining the OpenOffice.org development community, with an initial involvement concerning code contributions it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product.

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This tutorial shows how to install and use ntfs-3g on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop to read from and write to Windows NTFS drives and partitions.

CCP Games, one of the world’s largest independent game developers, today announced a partnership with TransGaming Inc., a leading developer of software portability products for the electronic entertainment industry. The strategic relationship will enable CCP to deliver its popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), EVE Online, with Linux and Macintosh platforms later this year.

The Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna teams, already joined by some Fedora contributors, are proud to announce the RPM Fusion project. RPM Fusion aims to bring together many packagers from various 3rd party repos and build a single add-on repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We aim to provide support for all 'current' versions of Fedora including devel, for i386, ppc, ppc64 and x86_64.

Yesterday, OpenOffice.org announced that IBM would become a formal – and substantial - contributor to that organization. But press release was brief, as was an FAQ that was only available at the OpenOffice site for a few hours. As a result, I got in touch with IBM to see if I could interview someone to learn more, and was able to spend a half an hour on the phone with Doug Heintzman, the Director of Strategy for the Lotus division at IBM, someone who knows how the decision was made, and what the future may hold.

Every few years, I check in on how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. The first comparison came in 2002, the second in 2005. In those two comparisons, OpenOffice.org emerged as superior, not least for its greater stability. With Microsoft Office 2007 now out for six months and OpenOffice.org 2.3 about to be released, what's the situation today? To find out, I compared the two programs on the tools that most intermediate to advanced users are likely to use.

According to GPLMedicine.org and a company letter,AcerMed is officially dead. Fred Trotter opines:"The important thing to note here is what did NOT matter. The AcerMed people seemed decent enough: did not matter. AcerMed was CCHIT certified: did not matter. AcerMed was recommended in the industry press and by industry experts: did not matter. Companies get sued, people get sick. When will the medical community wake up to the fact that proprietary medical software is incompatible with medicine, incompatible with free thought and dangerous to patient data?"

South Africa's minister of public services, Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, this week accepted an invitation to be a patron of FOSSFA. On her acceptance, Fraser-Moleketi emphasised that she did not want to be a figurehead for an inactive structure, but rather wanted to be involved with something that was going somewhere. Tectonic spoke to FOSSFA to find out what the foundation has planned.

Mark Shuttleworth talks about about success, failure, and the lessons he has learned. He gives his thoughts on Linux gaming, KDE vs. Gnome in Ubuntu, Microsoft's patent deals, the OpenXML format, and tivoization. From the interview: ' I'm strongly encouraging KDE to adopt the same release schedule as Gnome, because I think they would become more widely tested and more widely adopted if they did this.'

When the Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) sought Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-2 validation for its OpenSSL toolkit last year, it was anything but smooth sailing. In fact, the whole process took so long that by the time it eventually wound its way through the validation process, it was already technically outdated. OSSI has just submitted a new OpenSSL update for FIPS validation but, according to Executive Director John Weathersby, things are bound to go much more smoothly this time around.

A take on the dialog regarding the strategic risks involved with the increased proliferation of .NET and Mono based software in GNU/Linux under the banner of Microsoft-Novell patent deal.

If you manage a system that's accessed by multiple users, you might have a user who hogs the disk space. Using disk quotas you can limit the amount of space available to each user. It's fairly easy to set up quotas, and once you are done you will be able to control the number of inodes and blocks owned by any user or group. Control over the disk blocks means that you can specify exactly how many bytes of disk space are available to a user or group. Since inodes store information about files, by limiting the number of inodes, you can limit the number of files users can create.