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In the wake of the Windows Update fiasco, LinuxInsider quoted Stephen O'Grady's explanation of why users trust GNU/Linux more than Windows where the auto-update features are concerned. His explanation is important, as it hits the nail on the head as to why many users are finding it easier to switch over to libre software. It all comes down to trust.

Thanks, Johnny Hughes. He commented on my previous CentOS odyssey, which led me to install version 3.9 on my VIA C3-equipped test box. He said CentOS 4.5 would run on it. I had previously tried the 4.4 live CD, and that wouldn't boot, so I never bothered to burn a 4.5 install disc. Johnny was right. I did burn the first CentOS 4.5 disc, and typing i586 at the boot prompt worked.

This week on Open News SCO Files For Bankruptcy, Sun Sells ... Windows?, and The Magic SysRq Keys.

Programmers have bypassed a new difficulty in providing Linux support for the latest-generation iPods.

Cavium Networks has launched two families of Linux-friendly network accelerator cards. The lower-end Nitrox PX XL PCI-Express cards target security appliances, storage equipment, and service-provider infrastructure, while the higher-end Octeon XL NICPro2 PCI-X cards target L4-L7 switches, session border controllers, and ad-insertion appliances, among other applications.

Performance Technologies is sampling a Core 2 Duo-based processor module in the AdvancedMC (advanced mezzanine card, aka "AMC") form-factor. The AMC121 supports PT's own NexusWare Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) implementation, and targets packet processing and general computing applications, including IMS, wireless, softswitches, and shipboard communications.

Linux Security Spaces is are micro-site focused on a Linux Security issues and development activity of interest to the Linux Security community. You can easily turn the Linux Security spaces into a Google Gadget, Netvibes module, or a Widget for your iGoogle page. Learn about Linux Security best practices including: Auditing, intrusion detection systems, firewalls, virus scanners, LAMP Security, network among other topics and Linux security tools; NMap, Snort, Chkrootkit, Rootkit Hunter, TripWire, Wireshark, SELenux and AppArmor. The community leader is Mayank Sharma, a contributing editor at SourceForge, Inc.

When Motorola released its smartphone running linux, I thought that it was a great match for my requirements. I later found that the synch. options were Microsoft only, so I contacted Motorola...

Performance Technologies today announced the availability of another member of its AdvancedMC(TM) compute module product line -- the AMC121. The AMC121 features a 1.5 GHz Intel Core Duo processor with enhanced Intel SpeedStep(R) technology for more efficient power use, 64-bit memory to 2GB, USB2.0, and support for both AMC.1 (PCI Express) and AMC.2 (Ethernet) at the card edge. It is fully integrated with the company's NexusWare(R) carrier-grade, Linux(R)-based operating system and development environment. NexusWare is built on the 2.6.20 Linux kernel, and is CGL 3.2 registered (4.0 ready) as well as POSIX compliant.

When scientists and engineers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC) in Indian Head, Maryland needed to ensure they could make reliable, qualitative predictions regarding the vulnerability and survivability of targets for U.S. Navy warheads, they turned to SGI for a new Altix system, capable to handle the data intensive application's demanding computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and finite element requirements. Running on industry standard SUSE(R) Linux Enterprise Server 10 fro Novell(R), the new system also features 28TB of RAID storage in two SGI InfiniteStorage 220 direct attached systems for data consolidation.

Josh Triplettannounced the release ofSparse v0.04. Originally written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Sparse has been maintained by Josh since 2006. Highlights of the new release include a new automated test suite invoked via'make check', a new utility named'c2xml' for generating an XML representation of C files, man pages for'sparse' and'cgcc', improved graphing, and numerous bug fixes.

A few weeks back I wrote a post on my blog page about this topic, and put some questions to my readers to know what everybody thought about it. I received a number of good responses, and so rewrote that post as an article (this one) so everyone can know more clearly what lies at the back of our minds when we use GNU/Linux as a home user.

Last week, we signed a deal with Microsoft. Remain calm. The good news is everyone paid attention. The bad news is it spawned a lot of questions - which I thought I'd answer here. The announcement was this: Microsoft will be supporting Project Virginia, Sun's soon-to-be-announced hypervisor platform - meaning we can consolidate and manage Windows (alongside Linux and Solaris). Secondly, Sun will support Windows virtualization - allowing Windows to do the same for Solaris. And finally, Sun agreed to package and support (or 'OEM') Windows for customers and partners that want to buy direct from Sun.

SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday. In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years." The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listedIBM ( IBM), Red Hat, Microsoft (MSFT), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

The word for today is disappointment. The New York Times says Apple is blowing its desktop opportunity, ignoring the channel, despite its incredible awesomeness. As to Linux, it’s still too geeky. This final verdict, issued by Walt Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal concerning a Dell laptop he reviewed with Ubuntu, has been spreading like wildfire on the Internets, even hitting some political blogs. Trouble is, Mossberg admits in his story that he talked to Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth who admits the current version of the software is not really aimed at mainstream users. He found it’s not something it admits it’s not, and somehow that’s a headline. Zonbu, which Mossberg did not review, is aimed at mainstream users. And early reviews on Zonbu are quite promising.

Anders Magnusson's BSD-licensed pcc compiler has been imported into CVS. He wrote to NetBSD's tech-toolchain list: "It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace. The big benefit of it (apart from that it's BSD licensed, for license geeks :-) is that it is fast, 5-10 times faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code. The only optimization added so far is a multiple-register-class graph-coloring register allocator, which may be one of the best register allocators today. Conversion to SSA format is also implemented, but not yet the phi function. Not too difficult though, after that strength reduction is high on the list."

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision last month to sell desktop PCs with Linux installed on them in Australia is giving hope to Linux advocates at the Encompass HP user group that a similar system may be on its way in the U.S. Steve Illgen heads the Linux special interest group within Encompass, an independent user group in Chicago and has about 15,000 members. He thinks that small and midsize businesses in the U.S. also need a Linux desktop to give them a less expensive alternative to systems running Windows Vista.

It used to be that taking advantage of Bluetooth on your system could be fiddly, and for the non-power user pretty intimidating; Fedora 8 hopes to change this with improvements to the interface and better integration of existing systems. To find out a bit more I spoke to Bastien Nocera, and had a play with the packages in Fedora 8 Test 2: read on to find out more and find a screencast of Bluetooth done right in Fedora!

I gave gNewSense a spin this weekend. It's mostly a good experience, but I am sticking with Debian for now. Here's why.

Whenever the topics of background wallpapers for plasma comes up, 99% of the time first question is: can they be animated? Animated backgrounds would be cool, but the consistency with which people ask that is pretty impressive. So before I continue on let me just get that question out of the way: "Yes, background wallpapers can be animated." Whew! Now on to what I've been doing with backgrounds since yesterday