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I don't think it's an accident that suddenly companies like Oracle and Amazon are looking at the success of Red Hat's support model and the advantages a locked OS/hardware scenario can present and are now trying to model their own business strategies in a similar fashion. Of course, such advantages are good for the companies, but not so much the end user. As I already pointed out, trying to un-do the commoditization of Linux does the customer a huge disservice, because you're essentially introducing vendor lock in again. Ultimately, I think the customers should get wise to this and resist such "tuned" versions of Linux.

OpenStreetMap is a diverse project with hundreds of thousands of people contributing data and making use of it in different ways. As a result, many of the resources that mappers have created and use are scattered around the Internet, but the project data and much of the documentation is hosted at openstreetmap.org, on servers operated by the OpenStreetMap Foundation. In this article by Jonathan Bennett, author of the book OpenStreetMap, we'll cover: 1.The main features of openstreetmap.org—the main website for the project 2.Creating and personalizing an account on openstreetmap.org 3.Using the map viewer and the tools associated with it 4.Using the documentation in the OpenStreetMap wiki 5.Communicating with the OpenStreetMap community using mailing lists, forums, IRC, and other channels

System Administrators (SAs) need a set of tools with which to manage their often unmanageable systems and environments*. These ten essential Linux administration tools provide excellent support for the weary SA. Those listed aren’t your standard list of tools deemed essential by industry bystanders. These are tools that have proven track records and have stood the test of time in the data center.

This file is an edited version of the EU OSS Strategy draft with the input of Jonathan Zuck, President of the Association for Competitive Technology, an organisation that has strong ties with Microsoft.

The GNU General Public License (GPL) and other open source licenses dictate the things you're allowed to do with code. Simply because the GPL allows parasitic behavior, doesn't mean that Oracle can't be called out when it's not being a good community citizen. Some see the GPL's reciprocal requirements as restrictive - but even the requirements to give back changes and share code only go so far. Open source licenses leave a lot of room for companies to behave poorly while still complying with the license. Oracle could ship GPL'ed code on DVDs in wallets made out of the finest baby seal pelts housed in ivory boxes, and it wouldn't be against the GPL. But that doesn't mean the house that Larry built should get a pass if it chooses to do so.

LXer Feature: 26-Sept-2010

In the Roundup this week we have Mandriva saying "We're not dead" and news of their assets being sold to a Russian firm, Linux From Scratch 6.7 gets released, Dave Newman leaves .net, living through the wild west of FOSS history, the future of KDE, Carla Schroder gets a shiny new laptop and what is the best way to move 60 million files from one Windows server to another? Linux of course. Enjoy!

In Linux, there are two types of file links: hardlinks and softlinks. This article shows the difference between hard and soft links, how they work, and explains when you should pick a softlink over a hardlink.

Snort Intrusion Detection Software (IDS) is a great out of the box easy to use system to monitor a network for possible threats. While there are many ways to receive alerts, one very simple approach is to periodically parse the alert log and simply mail alerts to whom it may concern. In this text a simple example of parsing a snort alert log using Perl. Note this alerter could probably be used for other loggers and there exist other tools available like Splunk which might be more suited for larger installations. The thesis of this text is to show how a relatively useful utility can be quickly hacked together to provide an elegant solution.

Besides talking about the X.Org Server development process and the X.Org Server 1.10 plans, Keith Packard also talked about not running the X.Org Server as root (also sometimes referred to as a "root-less X Server") during XDS Toulouse. Thanks to kernel mode-setting and other improvements to the X.Org Server, we are basically there, but it's something that has been said for over a year. Moblin though has been running the X.Org Server as a user since their Moblin 2.0 release and now with the MeeGo operating system while others are now looking to get in on the root-free action.

This tutorial requires a little bit of creativity and imagination for the painting step, but don’t worry it is all very easy to get the hang of and the rest is a breeze!

Ubuntu is one of the most polished Linux distributions available, fusing the work of a global community of contributors who provide a diverse range of skills to make Ubuntu what it is. While we all enjoy the fruits of a new Ubuntu release every six months, many people have asked the team over the years how this wide range of contributors manage to come together to build a new Ubuntu release.

Avant Window Navigator(AWN) is an awesome dock application for Linux. Over the years, AWN has evolved a lot and is now the almost-perfect dock application for Ubuntu/Linux users.

Mandriva Linux gets a new lease on life and a new name. Mandriva Linux has once again escaped a potential grave and will live on as Mageia. This is not the first time that Mandriva has undergone a resuscitation and name-change.

Gespeaker 'Text to Speech' utility is a GTK+ frontend for Espeak , that allows you to listen to text in many different languages. The utility also allows you to listen received messages from Empathy and others instant messengers.

We have featured a number of mobile phone concepts before, Nokia Morph Concept Phone for example. But Seabird concept phone from Mozilla is in a league of its own. Seabird is a community driven mobile phone concept that debuted at Mozilla Labs 'Concepts'.

Fglrx was updated yesterday in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and what's special about this is that it finally supports Xorg 1.9 and 2.6.35 kernel. Up until now, ATI users who've tried to install Fglrx or upgraded from Ubuntu 10.04 would get a blank screen.

After ping, telnet and dig we continue to see other useful tools for network analysis done by the command line. Traceroute traceroute is a computer network tool used to show the route taken by packets across an Internet Protocol (IP) network. An IPv6 variant, traceroute6, is also widely available. The traceroute tool is available on practically all Unix-like operating systems. Variants with similar functionality are also available, such as tracepath on modern Linux installations and tracert on Microsoft Windows operating systems.

I've been working with Linux long enough to know that just because it works on Windows does not mean it is going to work on my operating system of choice as well. Unfortunitly this is currently the case with the nVidia optimus technology.

Back with Ubuntu 7.10 an option was added to Ubuntu's alternate CD installer to easily setup an encrypted LVM during the Ubuntu installation process. This would better protect your personal data in the case your laptop or mobile device was ever stolen or misplaced as the Ubuntu Linux installation cannot boot if the encrypted LVM cannot be mounted with the encryption pass-phrase. Of course, encrypting the entire root partition can cause a performance penalty as some of our earlier results have shown while introduced in Ubuntu 9.04 was support for home encryption where only your SWAP and home folder is encrypted and this is done using eCryptfs.

Pogoplugs are great little storage devices, but they can do more than they let on. Let's take a look at how you can hack a Pogoplug into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web server. This is a fun little project, but it does take some time and patience. Be sure to set aside a few hours this weekend to get it up and running.