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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 was just released, but Red Hat engineers have already been working on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 and today a few details regarding this next major feature release were learned during the Red Hat Summit in Chicago. Details regarding RHEL 6.0 are scant, especially with Red Hat being a public company and all, but some new information was gained today and some signals of what's coming down the pipe can already be spotted in Fedora.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is hosting its annual summit in Chicago this week, and the star of the event was today's launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4, which sports the first commercially supported KVM hypervisor from the company. In this case, KVM is tucked up inside of RHEL 5.4, right alongside the integrated Xen hypervisor that customers have been able to deploy since RHEL 5.0 was launched in March 2007. When Red Hat caught the virtualization bug several years back, Xen was the horse to back, and Red Hat did, just like Novell, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and others did. But KVM is, according to Red Hat, a leaner and meaner hypervisor and is integrated into the Linux kernel already, so it has some benefits compared to Xen.

I recently helped a friend switch to Ubuntu and he wanted a list of Ubuntu-related links. I compiled the following list for him and thought it might be useful to others.

Opera hasn't shipped an update of its fast (but not open-source) Web browser from its repository for quite some time, but today Opera 10 has been moved from beta to the main release of the browser, and if you're using Opera's repository (as opposed to one maintained by your distro), you might have the same problem I did in Debian or Ubuntu (in my case the 8.04 LTS version).

Traditionally, storage devices have managed the blocks of data given to them without being concerned about how the system used those blocks. Increasingly, though, there is value in making more information available to storage devices; in particular, there can be advantages to telling the device when specific blocks no longer contain data of interest to the host system. The "discard" concept was added to the kernel one year ago to communicate this information to storage devices. One year later, it seems that the original discard idea will not survive contact with real hardware - especially solid-state storage devices.

jp joins the fray, responding to "The problem is really just that Windows is so immensly popular": "Once again, widespread does not equal popular. At one time polio was widespread but I doubt anyone thought that made it popular."

See what's new with Java and the Google Web Toolkit and build a desktop-like Web application. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) lets you use the Java language to implement rich client user interfaces that run in a browser. This article brings you up to speed on the latest version of GWT and shows you how to build desktop-like Web apps with the GWT and Java code.

I've been using Firefox for years and have collected what I feel are the best extensions for this wonderful browser.

Many benefits would accrue to society if there were greater operating system diversity in public libraries. The Gates Foundation has a role in making that happen.

When I got started with Linux, The one thing I couldn’t find was good download managers. but today we have plenty of them, in fact what we have on Linux is simply better than Adware/Shareware download managers on Windows. Downloading in Linux is not limited to using Wget, KDE KGet or Gwget or cURL now..

During Red Hat Summit in Chicago, CEO Jim Whitehurst and Executive VP Paul Cormier warned attendees not to get locked into virtualization and cloud initiatives involving Microsoft Windows Azure and VMware. Here’s a recap of the morning keynotes.

An operating systems most basic function is to act as a layer between the computer hardware and the user space programs. User space meaning the programs you use as a computer user, ie. office, email, internet and games programs. What an operating system provides to those user space programs is a standard interface to the computers hardware, no matter what type of hardware that is.

After two years deep into Linux, the Australian Con Kolivas has emerged with a new scheduler that above all should provide significantly better performance on dual and quad processors.

Red Hat have announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite and Proxy, the companies solution for on site systems management. The announcement was made at the Red Hat Summit currently taking place in Chicago. RHN Satellite 5.3 is the first version of Red Hat's system management platform to be based on the Spacewalk project, an open source (GPLv2) management platform for Linux systems which supports the updating of Red Hat and Red Hat derived distributions such as Fedora, CentOS and Scientific Linux.

Kismet is a 802.11b wireless network sniffer. It is capable of sniffing using almost any supported wireless card using the Airo, HostAP, Wlan-NG, and Orinoco (with a kernel patch) drivers.Kismet identifies networks by passively collecting packets and detecting standard named networks, detecting (and given time, decloaking) hidden networks, and infering the presence of nonbeaconing networks via data traffic.

Norway-based Opera Software has unveiled the final version of its browser Opera 10, with a new compression technology and a sleek interface. It comes in 43 languages and works on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

It has long been predicted that WPA (wireless encryption) would go the way of WEP and become ineffective. Japanese researchers demonstrate that WPA can be broken as quickly as WEP---in less than a minute.

One interesting remark I read in some comments is that Linux distributions are not successful because they don't look enough like Windows. Apparently if someone completely copied the interface of Windows and slapped that on top of Linux, Windows users would migrate in droves and Microsoft would be bankrupt. Well, not really. Let me explain...

Matt Hall at the game developers Larva Labs has complained in a blog entry of low sales in Google's Android application store. In August, the company generated an average revenue of $62.39 per day with two games. Hall says this makes it "Very difficult to buy the summer home at this rate." Hall also refers to the game Trism, which on the iPhone took around a quarter of a million dollars in it's first two months on the iPhone App Store. The same game on the Android store has, over the same length of time, sold five hundred copies; an equivalent income of $1,046 at most.

CodeWeavers, Inc., a leading developer of software products that turn Mac OS X and Linux into Windows-compatible operating systems, today announced the release of CrossOver Games 8.0 for both Mac and Linux, available immediately. CrossOver Games allows Windows games to be played on Mac and Linux PCs without the need for a Windows operating system license.