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The PlayStation 3 Sony launched has very little in common with the system you can buy now. The PS3 launched when rumble was a last-generation feature, backwards compatibility was a core part of the hardware strategy, and the ability to install Linux on the hardware was attractive for those who liked to tinker with their hardware. So what happened?

LXer Feature: 29-Mar-2010

The Linux/Free Software/Open Source world is cram-full of first-class security applications. Best of all, they're not just for Linux, but protect Mac and Windows too. Cynthia Harvey collects 75 to share with us.

You often may need to compare one version of a file to an earlier one or check one file against a reference file. Linux provides several tools for doing this, depending on how deep a comparison you need to make.

Ubuntu is set to release their next Long Term Support version at the end of April, and we now have a beta version to look at and see what we can expect. There are some pretty big changes coming in Lucid Lynx, many of which are partly or fully implemented in the current beta. There are the surprising changes, the controversial changes, and the just plain cool. Though the full release is still a month away, Ubuntu 10.04 is clearly shaping up to be an impressive release.

One of the driving mantras for us is “less is more”. I want us to “clean up, simplify, streamline, focus” the user experience work that we lead. The idea is to recognize the cost of every bit of chrome, every gradient or animation or line or detail or option or gconf setting. It turns out that all of those extras add some value, but they also add clutter. There’s a real cost to them – in attention, in space, in code, in QA. So we’re looking for things to strip out, as much (or more) as things to put in.

Dell has announced that it will be adding Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) to its infrastructure solutions. The company plans to offer "blueprints" for optimising deployments of UEC of Dell hardware such as the PowerEdge C-Series. UEC joins the ranks of the proprietary solutions from VMWare and Microsoft, for which Dell already offers blueprints for deployment.

IBM, Canonical and Simmtronics today announced they will market a low-cost, Intel Atom-based Simmtronics netbook in emerging markets. The Simmbook will be preloaded with the IBM Client for Smart Work Linux distro, based on Ubuntu Netbook Remix, and will first be made available in Africa for just $190, says IBM.

Although Ubuntu is generally regarded as a desktop Linux distribution, the sever variant is becoming increasingly popular in the cloud. It is silently infiltrating server rooms and gaining traction in enterprise environments. A recent survey published by Canonical provides some insight into adoption trends of Ubuntu on production servers.

Most of us have experienced the need to disinfect a virus-laden system — though a near-total immunity is one of the many benefits of being a Linux user. If public health officials in northern England are to be believed, though, the term "computer virus" may be in for a new meaning. Social networking can do many things for users: help them kill vast amounts of time, expose career-ending after-hours antics, and sometimes even connect them to new and interesting people. According to the Teesside (UK) Director of Public Health Prof. Peter Kelly, they can also help users catch VD.

Red Hat announced fourth-quarter financial results showing a 15 percent increase in revenues year-over-year. In other news, the company announced new JBOSS and SOA tools, tipped a collaboration with IBM on cloud technology, and revealed customer wins with the Symbian Foundation and the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

If you're paying for offsite data storage by the byte, you naturally want to keep costs down by making sure you're not storing several copies of the same data. Deduplicating your data is an effective way to save transit time, disk space, and maybe even money. Open source software, SDFS, helps you get the job done.

You’ve heard that Linux is a very secure operating system. You’ve heard it’s practically immune to viruses (practically being the key word). You’ve heard it’s tough to crack. These are all true…and with good reason. Linux is such a strong operating system for two primary reasons – by design and with the help of security systems like AppArmor and SELinux.

Booting. Sometimes it seems like it takes forever. What's the computer doing all that time? How do you find out? The Linux boot sequence is surprisingly simple, and the best part is that almost all of it is controlled by shell scripts you can read -- and even edit yourself.

When using multiple systems the indispensable tool is, as we all know, ssh. Using ssh you can login to other (remote) systems and work with them as if you were sitting in front of them. Even if some of your systems exist behind firewalls you can still get to them with ssh, but getting there can end up requiring a number of command line options and the more systems you have the more difficult it gets to remember them. However, you don't have to remember them, at least not more than once: you can just enter them into ssh's config file and be done with it.

..The most important part is that Microsoft has shot the .NET ecosystem in the foot because of the constant thread of patent infringement that they have cast on the ecosystem. Unlike the Java world that is blossoming with dozens of vibrant Java virtual machine implementations, the .NET world has suffered by this meme spread by Ballmer that they would come after people that do not license patents from them.

Package installation for Linux distributions has traditionally separated libraries and application binaries into different packages, so that only one version of a library would be installed and it would be shared by applications that use it. Other operating systems (e.g. Windows, MacOS X) often bundle a particular version of a library with each application, which can lead to many copies and versions of the same library co-existing on the system. While each model has its advocates, the Linux method is seen by many as superior because a security fix in a particular commonly-used library doesn't require updating multiple different applications—not to mention the space savings. But, it would seem that both Mozilla and Google may be causing distributions to switch to library-bundling mode in order to support the Firefox and Chromium web browsers.

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat is reaching towards its goal of hitting $1bn in sales. In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2010, the company had double digit revenue growth and posted record billings for the services backing its Enterprise Linux and related products, and it finished off the year with overall sales up 14.7 per cent, to $748.2m, and net earnings up 10.8 per cent, to $87.3m. Not too shabby considering the global economy was melting down during the first half of Red Hat's fiscal year and is only now showing some signs of stability.

The surprise to most people isn’t that I do not believe that software should be patentable. Given my long term interest in and coverage of free and open source software, I’m supposed to be at least mildly anti-establishment. It is also statistically unlikely that I would be in favor of patents, because industry sentiment is overwhelmingly against them at the present time.

Execs from "the combined Sun and Oracle" tag-teamed at this year's EclipseCon to talk about the future of Java in a turn that was full of team spirit, but few details on Oracle's plans. Longtime Oracle face Steve Harris, senior vice president of the giant's application server group, was joined by the ex-vice president of Sun Microsystems client software turned vice president of Oracle's client software development group, for some geeky banter, some traditional tech-show T-shirt lobbing, and what amounted to hints about how "the power of the Java community will be strengthened" under the stewardship of Big O.