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Ever since Oracle announced the acquisition of Sun Microsystems along with MySQL, all hell broke loose in the open source community. With EU questioning the deal, there is a war (of words) erupting inside the community with one side asking EU to block the deal or, at the very least, change the license to another open source license from GPL and the other side urging EU to allow the transaction to go through. Even though I have no love for Oracle, I think it is time to let the deal go through at least for the sake of Sun employees who are sitting there with their future unknown. At the same time, I am not unduly worried about the future of MySQL because I have complete confidence in the open source license of MySQL. Let me try to explain my position here in this post.

This article is part of the on-going 15 example series where 15 examples will be provided for a specific command or functionality. In this series, earlier we discussed about find command, crontab examples, grep command, history command, ping command, and wget examples. In this article, let us review 15 examples for Linux top command that will be helpful for both newbies and experts.

The Oregon State University Open Source Lab's data center hosts some of the Linux community's heaviest hitting projects including the Linux Master Kernel and the Linux Foundation. It is also the primary location for the Apache Software Foundation and Drupal, open source content management software. The lab, aka OSUOSL, also hosted the core infrastructure for Mozilla's Firefox project, and currently host's six of Google's servers. Despite housing such high-profile open source projects, the lab's systems administrators are actually OSU computer science students. In the following Q&A, Lance Albertson, an OSUOSL systems administrator and architect, talks about his job -- managing a data center with a staff of 18- to-21-year-olds. SearchDataCenter.com recently visited the OSUOSL data center on OSU's Corvallis, Oregon, campus and talked with Albertson about the rewards and challenges of his job.

Small business owners may have more of a need than most to be able to access their chosen suite of productivity tools from more than one computer or platform. As a business or startup owner you may have occasion to bring your work home with you, or require frequent access to your to-do lists, notes and documents on the go. Choosing primarily online tools for your productivity workflow is a great way to address the issue of source agnostic accessibility. It's also a convenient method to ensure you have a backup of your important day-to-day items and files in case a particular computer or device fails. One other not insignificant factor in selecting cloud-based tools to keep you and your business on track is cost: the online equivalents of once desktop-bound applications are often much cheaper in both raw cost and maintenance cost, as tool upgrades usually happen behind the scenes and don't require an in-house IT staff to keep up and running.

There are not a lot of free software options for mastering DVDs. One of the more complete solutions is QDVDAuthor, although it still has a number of rough spots. It’s a front-end to a collection of command-line free software tools that do each of the individual steps involved in going from a collection of digital video files, audio files, and images to a DVD with menus. As such, it’s quite complicated, and not as stable as some software. Still, it is a rewarding experience if you stick with it. Here I’m going to walk through creating a DVD for a collection of animated videos by my new favorite free-culture artist, Nina Paley (partly because the CC By-SA 3.0 license eliminates any questions about copying the material here, and partly because they’re pretty cool in themselves). Read the full tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

If you use Samba you certainly want to create shares which provide users with private shares. This tutorial will show you how to create a share that is accessible to one user to store their information.

Besides the quick search and filtering tools at the bottom of the main window, digiKam offers more advanced search features accessible via the left sidebar. Here, you’ll find a variety of search options, including the Calendar, Tags, Timeline, Searches, Fuzzy Searches, and Map Searches.

Perhaps you know how mount ISO image by commend line. However, If you are lazy - like me - to use Konsole, Silicon is a good choice for this task. I tried Furius ISO before, but I don't like it because it lacks KDE4's integration. Silicon is an auto image manager and mounter (Iso, Squashfs and ... files) that work under GNU/Linux. It is released under GPL License.

The significant thing about Chrome is that it sets a new way of thinking. It does not mean Chrome will dominate the world. Open standards mean that other companies could provide similar services. It’s the 80% scenario. 80% of what we do could be web based and probably will be in the future. It is near 100% for 80% of the population. It does not then make much sense to have everyone running a desktop OS just in case they might happen to want a specialist application that is dependent on that technology. Some people will still need this, but not the majority. Read the full article at Free Software Magazine.

Software auditors risk becoming "revenue-generating" traffic cops as the recession put pressure on vendors to collect every penny of revenue. Organisations are being put under increasing pressure from software licence audits, with some vendors exploiting technicalities and loopholes in order to meet revenue targets, according to a report by research firm Forrester.

What makes someone a Linux guru? Is there a set of distinct criteria to earn that moniker? I've compiled a list of 10 that I think makes someone qualify.

The libvirt library is a Linux API over the virtualization capabilities of Linux that supports a variety of hypervisors, including Xen and KVM, as well as QEMU and some virtualization products for other operating systems. This article explores libvirt, its use, and its architecture.

In case you missed some of the Linux and Open Source content in the 10 Things blog in 2009, I thought I would do a round-up of some of the best posts that appeared, many authored by our own Jack Wallen. If you’re new to Linux yourself (or want to introduce others to the world of open source), these concise lists provide a good jumping-off point on a number of topics.

Not to be left off of the app store bandwagon, Intel has launched a beta version of its software application (app) store -- the Intel AppUp center. Initially targeting apps for netbook computers, the first apps are available for free download or purchase. At the same time, Intel industry partners Acer, Asus, Dell and Samsung also announced store collaboration and plans.

Not content with the roadblocks Apple had erected for users who wanted to connect to their digital devices (that they had paid for, natch), Apple decided to up the ante with its iPod Touch and iPhone series. This meant that a whole new round of reverse engineering was necessary just so that, and this bears repeating a thousand times, users could connect to a device that they paid for and actually access content they legally possess. Does that make sense to you? Me neither. Welcome to the 21st century.

The goal of the new Mozilla Drumbeat effort is to go beyond open source code to encourage and nurture projects that help to expand understanding and participation in the open Web. While Drumbeat is today only in its early stages of development, Mozilla is budgeting more than $1 million in funding for the effort -- a project that it thinks could help to direct the very future of the Internet. "Mozilla has been successful at shaping where the Internet is going in a positive way and in getting people to participate," Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, told InternetNews.com. "At the same time, we feel that if we take a 50- or 100-year view on our mission, which is to guard the open nature of the Internet, it's not just going to be technologists that participate and it's not just technology questions that will shape what the Internet is in 10 or 50 or 100 years."

Richard Stallman has clarified his earlier letter regarding MySQL. I had brought to his attention the claims Monty Widenius is making, implying that Stallman supports his petition campaign to "Save MySQL":

After weeks of research, and pondering, and gazing sadly into my shriveled bank account, I finally took the plunge and bought a hotrod triple-core AMD Phenom CPU, and a beautiful Antec Solo quiet computer case.

Back in early October a tweet by someone I follow alerted me to the fact that the deadline for submissions to the 26th Chaos Communication Congress (26C3) was less than 48 hours away. In a lunch break I whipped up a quick proposal for a lecture called "After the Hype - The current state of One Laptop per Child and Sugar Labs". A couple of weeks later I learned that my submission had been accepted.

Linux 2.6.33 will have new and improved drivers for Wi-Fi chips by Intel, Ralink and Realtek. Several drivers for old Wi-Fi hardware have been moved to the staging area and will probably soon be discarded. New additions include various LAN chip drivers and several improvements to the network stack.