LXer Weekly Roundup for 27-Jul-2008

LXer Feature: 27-Jul-2008 In this week's Roundup we have a Linux vs. Windows RAM test, Apple and Mark Shuttleworth make a plash at OSCON, SCO's future is all dried up, the Washington Post asks for help in building a web tablet, 10 tricks for lazy Admins and our own Hans Kwint has a bad experience with LVM.

In this week's Roundup we have a Linux vs. Windows RAM test, Apple and Mark Shuttleworth make a plash at OSCON, SCO's future is all dried up, the Washington Post asks for help in building a web tablet, 10 tricks for lazy Admins and our own Hans Kwint has a bad experience with LVM.

CherryPal Mini PC Makes Firefox the OS: PC users seeking an environmentally friendly desktop system can add the new CherryPal C100 desktop to the list of contenders. The machine, announced Monday, was designed by green computer maker CherryPal and contains no moving parts. With 80 percent fewer components, the minimalist system uses a scant 2 watts of power.

Face off: Windows vs Linux real world RAM and disk tests: Forget fear, uncertainty and doubt. How do Windows Vista and Linux really compare against each other? It's one thing to talk about the familiar applications available to Windows users contrasted with the rich suite of free open source apps for Linux, but something totally different to actually compare the loads of the two operating systems as they perform functionally identical tasks.

IBM, Oracle, SAP Sued Over Server Software Patents: Implicit Networks Inc., based in Seattle, claims the three companies and Adobe Systems Inc. are violating two patents for computer-server software that performs faster security functions. The patents were issued from 1998 and 2001 applications. The complaint, filed July 15 in federal court in Seattle, targets IBM's Websphere Application Server, Oracle's Application Server and BEA WebLogic Server, SAP's NetWeaver and Adobe's JRun and ColdFusion products.

OSCON 2008: Microsoft Attends, But Apple Steals the Show: How's this for ironic: Microsoft is actually spending some sponsorship dollars here at OSCON (Open Source Conference) 2008, but Apple is stealing the show without spending a dime. Here's how, according to The VAR Guy.

SCO Group: Its future is all used up: The SCO Group got bad news in court last week. Not an unusual event for this company, but I wish the need for such events would finally go away for good. I've now been writing about SCO for five years -- how time does fly when you have someone to despise. In my first column about SCO's decision go into the lawsuit business rather than having to do all the hard work of making a product that someone might want to buy, I thought that someone would just buy the slime off. I was wrong -- I guess there is some truth to the punch line of the old joke that "there are just some things a lawyer won't do." I guess IBM's lawyers could not stomach the idea of rewarding such repulsive behavior.

Lazy Linux: 10 Essential Tricks for Admins: In this article, learn how to be a more productive Linux systems administrator. These 10 essential tricks will lead you on your way to being one powerful Linux systems administrator. Learn about SSH tunnels, VNC, password recovery, console spying, and more. Examples accompany each trick, so you can duplicate them on your own systems.

Linux is easier to install than XP: When you buy a new PC today, unless you hunt down a Linux system or you buy a Mac, you're pretty much stuck with Vista. Sad, but true. So, when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it.

We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For$200. Help Us Build It.: I'm tired of waiting- I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let's design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

Tutorial: Tip of the Trade: Linux Easter Egg Fun: For lo these many years here on ServerWatch's Tip of the Trade, we have toiled to bring you useful tips and tricks to make your job a little easier, and to help you keep up with new applications and useful products. This week, in celebration of summer and the holiday week in United States, we decided to take a minibreak from the serious and bring you some Linux Easter Egg fun.

San Francisco's mayor gets back keys to the network: San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom met with jailed IT administrator Terry Childs Monday, convincing him to hand over the administrative passwords to the city's multimillion dollar wide area network.

The Mess That is Linux Volume Management: The GNU/Linux operating system is blessed to have sound partition management tools like GParted which are very easy to use. However, when it comes to the management of 'virtual partitions' known as volumes, things are quite different. There is Linx Volume Management, or LVM for short, however it can only really be used from the command line. Also, it doesn't integrate software RAID - except for striping. I was quite optimistic when I started using volume management some four years ago, but not anymore. Let me explain why I'm disappointed.

Shuttleworth: Microsoft Does Not Want War: Mark Shuttleworth said he doubts Microsoft would file suit against a free software developer unless the software giant wants "war." At the end of a session at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, where Shuttleworth discussed the emerging practice of mixing agile development methods in with community development efforts, Shuttleworth responded to a question about the possibility of Microsoft making patent claims against open source code by saying: "I don't believe Microsoft will file suit against free software developers. It would be tantamount to declaring nuclear war... And I can afford it."

60 percent skipping Vista, so Ballmer looks to Apple: A new survey by KACE, a systems management appliance company, suggests that 60 percent of those surveyed have no plans to deploy Microsoft Windows Vista, a 10 percent rise over a similar survey administered by KACE in November 2007. A full 42 percent of these are actively exploring Vista alternatives, with 11 percent having made the leap to alternative platforms like Mac OS X or Linux.

Cloud Computing: When Computers Really Do Rule: In the nightmare scenario of Luddites everywhere, The Computers have been entrusted with mankind's accumulated knowledge. All is well until that fateful day when the machines band together, creating a mammoth, all-powerful, living network that thinks, grows and takes over the Earth. Think"The Terminator" or"Colossus: The Forbin Project."

Foxconn deliberately sabotaging their BIOS to destroy Linux ACPI: I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here,I'll tell you what I did find. They have several different tables, a group for Windws XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX.