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"For the past few weeks, I've been publishing an ongoing interview with Keith Curtis, an ex-Microsoft employee who walked away from a several-year gig at the software giant with a surprising conclusion: Microsoft's proprietary software development model is doomed, he says, and destined to be replaced by community-created open software."

Three years ago, Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece called "Adapt or die--the choice facing the open source movement". It concluded: "I'll say it again: In one fell swoop Oracle drew a square around the open source movement and unless it can prove that it can remain independent--it is a dead movement." Needless to say, I wasn't too convinced by the argument. At that time, this was a purely theoretical discussion, but with the acquisition of Sun and hence MySQL by Oracle, those points suddenly gain a new pertinence.

In my previous guide about how to set up Enomalism2 on Ubuntu 8.10 I concentrated on just one KVM host. This tutorial is an extension to that article in that it shows how to add further Ubuntu 8.10 KVM hosts to the setup that can then be managed from one single control panel.

It's April 23rd and exactly on time Canonical has released Ubuntu 9.04 a. k.a. Jaunty Jackalope for download. Ubuntu 9.04 comes in three flavours: the Desktop edition, the Server edition and the Netbook Remix a.k.a. UNR. According to the press release: "Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop Edition delivers a range of feature enhancements to improve the user experience. Shorter boot speeds, some as short as 25 seconds, ensure faster access to a full computing environment on most desktop, laptop and netbook models. Enhanced suspend-and-resume features also give users more time between charges along with immediate access after hibernation. Intelligent switching between Wi-Fi and 3G environments has been broadened to support more wireless devices and 3G cards, resulting in a smoother experience for most users."

Gnome 3 will introduce a new vision of usability and rapid change, rather than continuing with the incremental growth and gradual changes of Gnome 2. Gnome 3 may be just as ambitious and disruptive as KDE4. Will it work? Will users accept it? Bruce Byfield gazes into his tea leaves and tries to figure out how it will all work out.

In association with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Red Hat has carried out an open source index study and published it in the form of a world map.

If you’ve read anything about Windows 7 Starter Edition, your first reaction was probably the same as mine: Is Microsoft nuts? This ultra-cheap edition is intended for use on netbooks, but its biggest restriction sounds like a complete deal-breaker: it only runs three applications at once.

[It's like they're giving the market to Linux — Steven R.]

Florian Effenberger is co-lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project. Our sister publication Linux-Community asked him how the deal between Sun and Oracle would affect OpenOffice.

ZFS may be locked into the Solaris operating system but “Butter FS” is on the horizon and it’s boasting more features and better performance.

As I alluded to earlier, I am out of the office this week. With me to Italy I took a Samsung NC10 that is loaded with an Intel Atom processor, Intel integrated graphics, an OCZ solid-state drive, and 2GB of DDR2 RAM. Prior to leaving I loaded it up with a clean install of the Ubuntu 9.04 release candidate, but what a mistake that was. As was pointed out in the days prior to that, there are a number of regressions present within the Intel Linux graphics stack due to the switch to the Graphics Execution Manager, DRI2, and other work. While the benchmarks showed there is indeed a drop (a large drop in some), this performance drop nearly renders the system useless.

One of the newest features of Ubuntu 9.04 is the Postfix Mail Server/Dovecot enhancements to make it easier to set up a mail server. This article is a review of those improvements and a tutorial on how to fix several problems that were experienced.

IBM is licensing technology from an open-source database company it's invested in, hoping to convince Oracle customers they should switch to its next DB2. The giant has licensed capabilities in five-year-old EnterpriseDB's Postgres Plus Advanced Server, which EnterpriseDB claims will cut by 90 per cent the cost of moving off Oracle. The technology is expected to appear in the next version of DB2, version 9.7, to be announced today.

China-based Skytone is the first manufacturer who offers a Netbook with the Android Operating System, the Alpha 680.

Mac users, the card-carrying NRA members of the computing world, would rather use Linux than Windows.

EDE (Equinox Desktop Environment) is small and very portable desktop environment designed to be very lightweight in memory and resource usage.

LinuxFest Northwest 2009 is celebrating it's 10th Anniversary! April 25 & April 26 — Bellingham, WA 9:30AM — 5:00PM / 9:30AM — 4:00PM

Earlier this month PC-BSD 7.1 was released, which is based upon the FreeBSD 7.1 stable release, but of course with the extra packages and changes that make PC-BSD an easier to use BSD-based desktop operating system . PC-BSD 7.1 ships with X.Org 7.4 and KDE 4.2.2 installed along with many other packages when using the x86 or x64 DVD installations. Though with the Phoronix Test Suite now having enhanced support for PC-BSD, we decided to see how well PC-BSD 7.1 performs against Kubuntu 9.04.

"Overall, Fedora does have a good reputation for being an early adopter of many useful features. I’ve seen people mention in a few places that a lot of software has improved and stabilized a lot after being included in Fedora." ... "I think that Fedora definitely gets credit for that. If you look on a lot of news sites, you’ll see that a lot of people are fairly aware of how and where things have come from. Of course, there are plenty of places where people are off the mark, but that’s to be expected, too."

In this article, I conclude my status report on the development of some of the most active notation software projects for Linux.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 8.10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.