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Freescale Semiconductor announced a Home Energy Gateway (HEG) "smart grid" reference platform that can be based on three existing ARM processors or a yet-to-be-announced mystery SoC (system-on-chip). Supported with Linux and Windows BSPs by Adeneo Embedded, the HEG offers features for collecting power consumption data over ZigBee networks from Home Area Network (HAN) appliances, controlling power activation, and communicating with utility networks.

This howto describes one way to build a scalable, secure, full-featured mail platform. It offers virtual hosting of mailboxes in maildir format with support for quotas and server-side filtering, domain aliasing, address aliasing, address forwarding, catchall addresses. Relaying is secured with STARTTLS and SMTP-AUTH. Incoming mails are checked for viruses, spam, and checked against SPF policy and DNSBL.

Before we get started, I wanted to mention my recent review of the new Appro Tetra GPU server which is part of the Fermi wave hitting the market. The Appro box is rather unique in that they managed to cram four Fermi cards (M2050) into a 1U box. Speaking of Fermi, yesterday I was at the HPC Financial Markets conference in New York city. As I perused the vendor tables, I noticed a vendor touting 2.01 TeraFLOPS using four M2050 cards in a big tower case. Having just spent a lot of time getting intimate with this hardware, I asked them how they managed to get such a mind-boggling number. They said it was actually the sum of the theoretical FLOPS for all four cards. Sigh. As politely as I could, I suggested that they not advertise such BS (Bovine Solids) because it creates impossible expectations for the market.

Oracle is making some lofty claims about its Linux strategy, but entrenched rival Red Hat continues to gain momentum with its three-pronged open source strategy: Linux, virtualization and middleware. Here’s the update, which includes Red Hat’s first $1 million-plus private cloud deal. Here are details.

With three laptops representing different generations of mobile hardware, we loaded up the past four stable releases of Fedora Linux plus the most recent Fedora 14 Alpha release and then carried out an arsenal of tests looking at how the battery power consumption rate has changed since 2008. If you are concerned at all about running Linux on your battery-powered mobile devices, this article is worth reading.

LinuxCertified, Inc. announced its next two day, hands-on course that provides attendees with experience in creating Linux kernel source code within various subsystems of the Linux kernel. This course teaches attendees to acquaints developers with the fundamental subsystems, data structures, and API of the Linux kernel

Are hundreds of different Linux versions a good or a bad thing for open source? Every so often every Linux advocate is subjected, yet again, to the question: "Are there too many Linux distributions?"

Ooo2gd is an OpenOffice addon which you can use to keep your documents synchronized with Google Docs, Zoho and WebDAV servers. You can either manually select to upload a file to Google Docs / Zoho when you're done editing it or you can select to automatically synchronize it.

Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring software application. It watches hosts and services, alerting users when things go wrong and again when they get better. In this post we show you how to install Nagios3.2.2 from source in Opensuse11.3

With the event less than three weeks away, organizers of the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) remind potential attendees that the Early Bird registration will end on Sept. 25. UTOSC attendees who register before Saturday can save 30 percent on the price of admission to the three-day event. Regular admission to UTOSC is $70 for a full-access pass, $25 for an expo pass with entrance to try-it lab workshops and $15 for an expo pass.

A mobile phone "feature" that is touted as a way to remove data from stolen phones is also being used in far less reasonable ways. It is, or could be seen as, an anti-feature added for the benefit of companies, but without taking users' needs into consideration. The "remote wipe" available for (at least) Android, iOS, and Palm's webOS allows Exchange administrators to remotely reset logged-in mobile phones—removing all personal data and resetting them to factory defaults.

Mindfire Solutions announced its participation in the OSI Days 2010 Conference, Asia’s largest Open Source Conference, held in Chennai. Mindfire sponsored its Open Source Team to be a part of this mega event and utilized the opportunity to learn latest developments in the open source technologies and interact with peers and great brains in the industry from all over the country.

I got a very good conditioned asus eeepc 701 and the first distro of choice after chatting on freenode channel #eeepc was ubuntu netbook edition or une for short (10.04 Lucid). I took the advice and installed away via the instructions from the webpage but there was a glitch.. I ended up having to mount the usb and having to rename the file isolinux.cfg inside of the isolinux directory to syslinux.cfg as well as renaming the folder isolinux to syslinux.

According to a Reuters report the acquisition of Novell is being delayed over difficulties in selling the non-Linux portions of the business. Citing anonymous sources, the report says that Novell is attempting to sell the company as a single entity, rather than parting with the SUSE Linux division, which would leave the company with what was described as "a shell of legacy assets". The report says Novell has many rivals prepared to pay for the SUSE Linux division alone. According to a report last week Novell was to be split and sold as two parts with a "strategic buyer" lined up for the SUSE Linux business.

Red Hat is still a strong presence in the Linux distribution market as its latest financial results prove, declares a senior company executive who noted that the company's success comes despite targeted maneuvers by its competitors, specifically, Oracle. Alex Pinchev, executive vice president and president of global sales, services and field marketing for Red Hat, told ZDNet Asia in an interview Thursday that the software company has increased its share of the Linux distribution market from 80 percent four years ago to 87 percent today. This growth comes despite of competition from companies such as Oracle and Novell, he said.

The inspiration behind PcLinuxOS, also known as PCLOS, is Bill Reynolds, who is known to fans of PCLinuxOS as Texstar. PCLinuxOS began as an offshoot of Mandrake/Mandriva, to which Texstar had been a long time contributor of third-party packages. The objective was to build a fast, reliable distribution of Linux, that was both a Live distribution on the model of Knoppix and a fully installable and flexible Linux desktop, driven by Reynolds' passion to make the perfect software package. "I love to package," he explained. "It is like a puzzle where all the pieces have to fit together or the code doesn't work. That is my favourite part of doing PCLOS."

Bids are due to SCO by October 5th at 5 PM and I suspect there will also be a few hedge/investment type groups that may express a lowball offer interest as well. Then again, the SCO Unix business could have such little value that no one in their right mind will offer anything for it and it will finally die the death it should have had years ago and simply fade away.

A few months back Glyn Moody, noted open-source journalist, asked the question, "Why No Billion-Dollar Open Source Companies?" Jim Whitehurst, Red Hat's CEO answered, "Red Hat could get to $5 billion in due course, but that this entailed 'replacing $50 billion of revenue' currently enjoyed by other computer companies. Guess what? Red Hat is on its way.

"Because of Linux we're able to develop a programming interface to the product GUI's that allows for a lot less time to be spent by our partners, for training on how to configure a device," Mark Monday, vice-president and general manager of Cisco's small business technology group told InternetNews.com. "What we find in this market is that partners value quickness and simplicity. It is an enabler for us to simplify the product for our customer and our partners."

See the difference? A few days ago, Mark Shuttleworth took some time to address critics who scoff at Canonical's contributions to GNOME and the Linux kernel itself by sharing his thoughts on the subject in his personal blog. The post, titled "Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption", reflecting on Canonical and Ubuntu's contributions to the world of free and open source software. There are a couple of interesting stories, some obvious rationalization, some genuine insights, and more than a few nods to the various forces that come together to create a Linux distribution.