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Good Afternoon guys, here I created another Python Script. This script will check your DataStores aka VMFS. I built this script so that it can be used with Nagios and or Zenoss. The purpose of this script is so that you can monitor thresholds on a per DataStore/VMFS. You will need to download and install Pywbem in order to use this script

Altera, the world’s second-best-known FPGA company, has struck a deal with Wind River Systems, the world’s second-best-known embedded-software company, to port Linux to Altera’s NIOS II processor. And since NIOS is free, you’ve got yourself a free 32-bit microprocessor capable of running a genuine full-on multitasking Linux operating system. Naturally, there’s a catch. In fact, there are two. First off, NIOS is free only if you’re already using Altera’s FPGA chips (more on this later). Second, the Linux itself isn’t free; Wind River charges a significant amount of money for access to the software, and even more money for annual support. That’s right – the microprocessor is free but the open-source software costs money. One wonders how such a paradox came to be.

Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today.

A recent slashdot article outlined some of the DRM that can be found in the new Microsoft stab at relevancy - Windows 7. Unfortunately, Peter Bright, the author of the ars technica piece doesn't see a thing wrong with it. Peter goes on to excoriate the slashdot piece just like any good Redmond apologist would but it was the last paragraph of the article that snatched me by the nether regions:

Linux distributions (the Linux kernel plus a desktop and applications) come in many flavours. Here's an overview of just a few of the recent releases. While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

With apologies for returning to the theme of patents, I'd like to direct your attention to a long and interesting piece that has appeared on the Digital Majority site asking a very important question: “Did Red Hat lobby for, or against software patents in Europe?”

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 1.0.x (1.0.8 at the time of this writing) on a Debian Lenny desktop system. This is for those who prefer VMware Server 1.0.x over VMware Server 2.

I asked Sam Ramji senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft about TomTom the other day and he claimed that patent issues aren't causing any chilling effect on his part of Microsoft's open source plans.... That said, last year at OSCON, Ramji was quite literally mobbed by the audience after his presentation by attendees that were 'curious' about Microsoft's patent stance.

Moblin V2 alpha 2 has been released, this tiny Linux edition is suitable for various mobile devices like Netbooks.

Recently my local LUG (LILUG) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial. According to him the GPL and other viral licenses are no longer needed as they do more harm than good to the community. I don't want to put words into his mouth so I've transcribed what he said during the talk. You can view the ESR Q/A talk in its entirety, this specific excerpt is about 45 minutes into the video.

Here I created another Python script using Pywbem to get the Storage Pools from ESX. In this script you can get the disk utilisation statistics from each datastore or from a particular datastore. Examples below...

All computer displays show images in bitmap mode. What this means is that every image is really a bunch of tiny little squares that make up the image. What this essentially means is that computers can't display really smooth curves.

Next month should see the first steps from the Canonical camp that will let you run an Amazon-style cloud behind the firewall on Ubuntu. The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu, version 9.04, due in April, will let you take existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and run them on your own Ubuntu servers.

A new botnet, “psyb0t” is the first known to be capable of directly infecting home routers and cable/DSL modems.

Novell on Tuesday released Suse Linux Enterprise 11, which includes for the first time a full runtime environment for Microsoft .NET applications. The open-source company said the new version of the data center operating system shows improvements over its predecessors in terms of interoperability, mission-critical computing and virtualisation. One of the key enhancements in Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is its Mono Extension. Mono is an open-source project that aims to create a .NET-compatible set of programming tools, including elements such as a C# compiler. According to Novell's product director for the EMEA region, Holger Dyroff, the addition of commercial support for Mono means Suse Linux Enterprise 11 users can migrate their existing .NET applications across to the Linux platform.

You're not really supposed to love an operating system. It's like your car's hydraulic system, your digestive system or the global financial system. It's supposed to do its job -- and not get in your way while you're doing yours. But like your car, your guts and the economy, computers are more complicated than they seem. And so are our feelings about them. As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix's 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. If that's not the basis of a lasting love, I don't know what is.

When Canonical this May launches an online training course for Ubuntu Server Edition, the virtual classroom will include a special guest speaker: CEO Mark Shuttleworth. Here’s the scoop, and how to attend if you’re interested.

Today, I finally found some time to make a little headway on this project (which should be a lot simpler than it is). Basically, what I'm looking to do is create a way to track specific process's idle times at any given point in time on any given Linux or Unix system.

This article describes in depth how you can get your microphone working in todays linux distributions. As a extra benefit it's also describing how you can get your microphone working in skype without any pulseaudio hacks/tweaks.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.