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Not long ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who works at VMware, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based irtualization software giant. Many people, even very technology-savvy folks, don't realize how big and powerful VMware really is. This is a software company with a market capitalization of nearly $23 billion, and its market cap was larger than that not long ago. The company's CEO is Paul Maritz, who was a powerful executive at Microsoft for many years. Lately, though, VMware's future has been widely questioned because virtualization features are showing up free in operating systems and there are numerous free and open source virtualization options. My friend at VMware, though, made clear that the company is far from dead.

Virtualization technology has long found a home in Red Hat's Fedora community Linux distribution. Ever since Fedora 4 emerged in 2005, virtualization technologies have continued to advance in the distro and that remains the case with the upcoming Fedora 13 release set for later this month. Unlike Fedora's early virtualization features, which all leveraged the Xen open source technology, more recent Fedora releases have relied on KVM. New KVM performance and scalability features for virtualization will debut in Fedora 13 that will help to push the envelope for large-scale virtualization deployments.

The first major update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in more than three years hit last month, and judging by the traffic that took down Red Hat's download servers, it's long over due. RHEL 5 came out in March 2007 with the Linux 2.6.18 kernel and while incremental updates have added kernel updates and new features, it's showing its age. Of course, the whole point of running an enterprise distro like RHEL is that it isn't Ubuntu or Fedora, and it doesn't completely change all the rules every six months.

Most of you might have already installed the brand new Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. I did too. But here is something I would really like to know from you guys. I tried upgrading the whole distro 2 times before and failed miserably. It took a heck lot of time and post installation issues were simply overwhelming.

Two law professors from UC Berkeley have come up with a novel idea to protect open source developers from patent bullies. They call it the Defensive Patent License. They hope the DPL can address the objections FOSS developers have with patents the way the GPL addressed them for copyright.

The Wine development release 1.1.44 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

I researched and played with many different devices before deciding on my Asus T91MT. It amazes me how many people do not even know they exist when they released almost a year ago! The iPad on the other hand got more press than you can shake a stick at and everyone under the sun knows what it is after just a few weeks.

You've heard all of the advantages that HTML5 brings to your web experience, but how far away are we from enjoying the benefits of HTML5? With several browsers already supporting HTML5 video, I selected Google Chromium, which was available for my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop, and gave it a try.

Motorola is acquiring LiMo-linked middleware and Web 2.0 app software company Azingo, according to several reports. Several hundred India-based software engineers would be focused on lessening Motorola's dependence on Google, suggests The Register, while GigaOM speculates that Motorola is building its own OS and SFGate sees a China connection.

Sometimes, it's difficult to be the guy who complains when all around seem satisfied. However, criticism, when well-founded, has its place. It's an idealogical equivalent of an attack, and you sometimes make things stronger by attacking them. For example, in nature, only the hardiest and most efficient creatures win the evolution game when competition exists. The more pressure a species is placed under, the stronger it becomes. It has to.

This is the full text of the essay I wrote for the O'Reilly Open Government book, in which I discuss what open file formats and other digital standards really mean for us, why they are often even more important than Free Software and why Government must lead the way when it comes to their adoption.

Yesterday I had a look at the response of the Joomla! community to the news that Microsoft had signed the Joomla! Contributor Agreement and was contributing code to the content management project. You probably won’t be surprised to find that some people don’t like the idea. The speed and vehemence of their rejection of Microsoft’s involvement in the project is entirely predictable, but none the less depressing for that.

Here's the Bilda board at work, this is a hardware controller controlled by Linux via usb. It's extremely fast and allows for projection of all kinds of great shows. 360 degrees rotating laser projection, thanks to Linux control:

rTorrent is a popular command line based bittorrent client. It provides very powerful features yet it is very light on the system - contrary to other bittorrent clients like Vuze. There are a couple of webinterfaces for it but they are not truly need. SSH access combined with the "screen" program provide you all the tools you need. This howto works for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx and for Debian 5 Lenny. The difference is that commands that contain sudo must be executed as root.

Ryzom, a popular massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG), is being entirely open-sourced and even the artwork is going to be provided freely too. The Ryzom game is being put out under the GNU Affero GPL and the artwork is going under the Creative Commons.

Other than the default Ubuntu that we all know of, there are also the Kubuntu (KDE), Xubuntu (XFCE), Edubuntu, Mythbuntu etc that run different desktop environment and serve different purpose. And yes, there is a new buntu addition to the family. Let’s welcome: Lubuntu. Lubuntu is a Ubuntu variant built using the LXDE desktop, which is in turn based on Openbox. It’s designed to be a lightweight and easy-to-use desktop desktop environment.

The mobile application for Android got updated today with the ability to snap a picture of some words and instantly translate them into the language of the owner. Google's Goggles mobile application has always been a fun tool. The idea is that if you snap a picture and upload it to Google (as well as your location/time), Google could present more about that object, and by extension, your surroundings. It isn't always terribly accurate in identifying what is in the picture, but the results are sometimes helpful, if not amusing.

For those that haven't been paying attention to our recent coverage of Valve's Steam Client / Source Engine coming to Linux, last month we discovered Linux references in the Steam Mac OS X client and other Linux support references, which that combined with word from sources yielded no doubt that Steam/Source is coming to Linux. We ended up even finding the Steam client binaries that are actively being worked on.

Recently, I came into the possession of an Acer Aspire One (AOA150, ZG5). It's a modest netbook with a 160GB IDE, two card readers, 3 USB ports, 1GB of RAM, an Intel Atom N270 CPU, and a really awful touchpad layout. The system came to me with Windows XP Home Edition installed on it, which wasn't really to my liking. This started some massive Linux distribution hopping and operating system hopping. I was trying to find one OS that would be responsive, stable, energy conservative...

The AMD and Intel graphics drivers now support a wider range of chips and make better use of power saving features on the older chips. A major revamp of the recently introduced KMS driver for NVIDIA graphics hardware means that the Nouveau driver for X.org will in future make use of kernel-based mode setting.