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Linux vendor Red Hat is out today with its newest Real Time Linux platform, MRG 1.1 boasting new performance, messaging and grid computing (cloud) capabilities. The new MRG 1.1 platform marks the debut of Red Hat's commercially-supported grid technology, which helps users create their own enterprise clouds as well as leverage the power of Amazon's EC2 service. Red Hat is also claiming significant performance gains with a new Real Time Linux kernel and improved messaging speeds in a bid to appeal to unique sectors such as government, military and financial services.

Microsoft plans to launch six -- count 'em, six -- versions of Windows 7. Imagine if Red Hat, Novell or Canonical tried to market six versions of their desktop operating systems? The Linux market would stall. Yet, Windows marches forward -- at least for the folks who are sticking with Microsoft. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

The Linux Foundation is soliciting speakers for LinuxCon, a "brand new" annual North American technical conference. Planned for Sep. 21-25 in Portland, Ore., the inaugural event is expected to draw core developers, administrators, end users, community managers, and industry experts, the Foundation said.

Debate abounds between Linux lovers which distribution to choose on the desktop. But what about the server? Yes, all versions of Linux are equally capable of serving your mail and web site, but just what is it in those so-called "enterprise" editions that make them, well, enterprise-y?

I know that a great percentage of you may feel otherwise but coming from a data storage background, I must say, I was a bit disappointed with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Please do not misundertand me, I praise Canonical for all that they had accomplished. While my distro of choice may not be Ubuntu, my wife uses it with no troubles at all. As a desktop client, it is one of many excellent choices.

At long last it looks like the release of Debian 5 (aka Lenny) is very near - in fact it could be less than two weeks away! In a Sunday post to a Debian mailing list, Debian developer Adeodato Simo said that Lenny was now officially in 'deep freeze' meaning that the release is really being locked down.

Mark Graham's promotional products business had hit a ceiling – it couldn't push enough paper to keep up to speed with the nearly 100 suppliers it relied on for day-to-day business operations. Just a couple of years into launching Rightsleeve.com with no venture capital assistance, Graham knew he had to find ways to deal with more information, but for a low cost. The budding entrepreneur recognized the promotional products industry essentially used low-tech tools. It had been around for almost a century and the companies in this space were entrenched in some conventional habits.

The Linux Defenders organisation was Established in December 2008, with the aim of eliminating poor quality patents. Its Defensive Publications initiative is intended to improve the quality of patents and fight patent trolls through pre-emptive disclosure, publishing descriptions and artwork of a product, device or method, so that it enters the public domain and becomes prior art

The mobile market has a big problem. Despite endless hype, the iPhone, Android, Blackberry e-mail and all the rest, data still represents less than 5% of the market.

The Canadian Government has put out a "Request For Information" (RFI) - essentially, a formal invitation for feedback on the topic.

In a recent CNET interview with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Ballmer calls out two "primary forces" for Microsoft in the enterprise: Oracle and Linux. These are the things that keep Microsoft's Ballmer up at night. It's odd, then, that neither Red Hat nor Novell seem to be doing much to take Microsoft on directly, except in the Unix-to-Linux competition with Windows that either Red Hat or Microsoft is winning, depending on whom you ask.

On January 20, a new show opened in Washington D.C. After eight years under one administration, the curtain cascaded down on one set of policies, and a moment later rose to unveil a new administration, with new ideas, new priorities, and a new agenda. Included in that agenda is a commitment to embark on a five year quest to dramatically decrease the cost of healthcare — by investing as much as $50 billion dollars of public funds in the design and deployment of something called "electronic health records," or EHRs. Readers of this Blog, but not the public at large, will be immediately aware that the foundation for the EHR vision is standards.

Even though I specifically requested this book from No Starch for review, I never really expected it to be a...comic book. OK, that's not quite right, as purists will no doubt remind me. Manga isn't quite the same thing as an American comic book, but it's close enough from my point of view. I rather had expected the book to work along the lines of O'Reilly's Head First series, where technical topics are presented in text but with lots of "hyperactive" photos, graphics, arrows, and the like. The Databases book is presented as a straight manga publication and was originally published as part of a Manga Guide series in Japan in 2004. To clarify my perceptions, I actually emailed Bill Pollock at No Starch to get a clearer understanding of how this book and book series is supposed to work. Once Bill straightened me out, I was ready to proceed.

The old plan: Ring in the new year by switching over to Linux for a week, documenting each day of the transition. The new plan: Keep using Linux for the rest of the year, giving periodic updates on my experiences! February 3: Installation Recipes!

There are various reasons to set up quick "sandbox" instances of MySQL. You can use them to test different types of replication (such as master-master or various slave topologies), to test your code against different versions of MySQL, or to setup instances of MySQL on a per developer basis where each person has their own database running on a different port so they can breakdown/setup the DB easily or make schema changes without affecting other team members. A perfect tool to do all of these things easily is MySQL Sandbox.

This week Novell announced they've signed a deal that will see Dell using SUSE Linux Enterprise on their new OptiPlex FX160 thin clients. This move means corporate IT departments will be able to simplify IT at a lower cost than ever before.

With Linux traditionally coming in many, many flavours, a common call among some Linux fans - but mostly among people who actually do not use Linux - is to standardise all the various distributions, and work from a single "one-distribution-to-rule-them-all". In a recent interview, Linus Tovalds discarded the idea, stating that he thinks "it's something absolutely required!"

I had an interesting realization on Sunday, and it took me a bit to wrap my head around it. Imagine this conversation taking place in 1993:

With Microsoft readying itself for the release of a fast, streamlined operating system in Windows 7, the Linux community needs to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the hat if the free and open-source operating system is to stay relevant on desktop computers. Microsoft last month released a “beta” or test version of Windows 7, its newest operating system for desktop PCs. Unlike Vista, which was derided by consumers and the technology press for being bloated, slow and problematic for many users, Windows 7 is winning plaudits from those who have installed it.

Battered by a crash in its stock price, the replacement of its CEO last year and an aggressive virtualisation market, VMWare has done the only thing it could do: release an open source virtualisation client.