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Regardless of which vendor you pick in the open-source database horse race, open source itself is a good bet, according to Yankee Group analyst Dana Gardner. Gardner told LinuxInsider that open-source databases generally hold a lot of promise, and there is room for multiple players.

Among other features, the free Linux package comes with the Xen virtualization software and version 4 of GCC.

Last week's 3.1 release makes this a great time to give Debian GNU/Linux a whirl. Debian's popularity has inspired dozens of variants, including many that circumvent your hard disk and run directly from a combination of CD-ROM and computer memory. Here's a look at some of the celebrities in the Debian family tree.

Open-source and standards compliance Linux quickly is becoming the enabler in today's complex IT infrastructures.

Dirac video Codec created by BBC R&D and co-developed since early 2004 with open-source programmers is set to remove one massive barrier to making available on the internet all BBC TV output – by saving the corporation very many millions of pounds in streaming license fees in coming years.

Novell's recent quarterly financial announcements brought a good news-bad news mix for NetWare that's almost becoming the permanent snapshot for the company.

Tom Adelstein has written a thorough review of the Ubuntu Linux distribution.

An open source solution enabling councils and registered social landlords to deliver video-based interactive eGovernment services is set to be made available through national government procurement frameworks in October.

Update 1 of Pie Box Enterprise Linux 4 was made available today. This update features numerous security and driver updates and is fully compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.

A system log is one of the most effective ways to monitor a server's health and underlying problems. Often before a major hardware or application crash takes place there are indicators of impending disaster within the syslog. As a good and attentive administrator, you should be reviewing your logs on a regular basis, but oftentimes these logs are forgotten due to other duties or important data is lost within pages of white noise telling about normal events.

"With the proliferation of free (open-source) software, it was only a matter of time before open-source beer became reality." So stated a spoof news article in 1998 that turned out to be prescient. There now is such a thing as free beer - or at least a free recipe for beer - thanks to a group of Danish artists and university students in Copenhagen. [Free registration required to read.]

You may have *thought* you were using the latest and greatest in open source software, but folks, today we have something really, really exciting for you.

Welcome to this year's 24th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! Today's release of Fedora Core 4 marks the end of the current "release season", with only some of the smaller project likely to make any new releases between now and October. What effect will the controversial Apple's switch to Intel have on Linux? Hardly any, we believe. The featured distribution of the week section had to go to Debian GNU/Linux, following its much awaited new stable release early last week. And if you are still struggling to rid your inbox of all the unwanted drug and mortgage offers, Robert Storey provides further tips in the second part of his article on SpamAssassin. Happy reading!

I recently asked Linus Torvalds for his thoughts on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Linux and BSD, and about how much synergy there might be between the Linux kernel and the BSDs.

I tried a whole slew of different Linux systems because I bought a book with a cover-mounted DVD containing five different Linux distributions. All in all, the HP Compaq Presario M2312 comes off quite well as a desktop PC rather than a laptop.

Companies are increasingly considering Linux, but persuading them to buy is a challenge. Resellers have to fight the perception that it's a risk Linux adoption in Canada is growing, in both volume and acceptance. According to a recent survey by IDC Canada, the server market for Linux grew more than 36 per cent here in 2003-2004, beating the Windows server market's growth of about 27 per cent for the same year.

What I started in 1984 was the development of the GNU operating system. All the operating systems for modern computers of the day were proprietary; users were forbidden to share them, and could not get the source code to change them. The only way to use computers in freedom was to replace those systems with a free operating system. That's what GNU was meant to do. The Free Software Foundation was started in late 1985 to raise funds for GNU development, and more generally to promote free software.

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors. [Note from Dave: it's a slow news day so here's something to read. Better than nothing, I say!]

One day I was searching the web and found either a SuSE or Red Hat site that was saying that you could set up your swap in a RAID fashion. They were talking about a large server with a lot of disk drives, and you could put a swap partition on many of them, and set all these swap partitions to the same priority. This way they would work more like they were in a RAID setup, and the speed of swap writing and reading from the disks would be improved.

The GNU General Public Licence version 2 was released in 1991. Since then the software sector and the free software landscape has changed significantly and the Free Software Foundation is working on an updated licence to account for a reflect these changes. Yesterday Richard Stallman and FSF legal adviser Eben Moglen released an article explaining a few of the issues at stake in drafting GPL version 3.