Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

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.

Oracle has announced an updated version of its embedded open-source database for Google's Android, during a three-way wrestling match for the affections of Eclipse developers. On Tuesday, the database giant used the annual EclipseCon in Santa Clara, California to unveil Berkeley DB 11g Release 2, which introduces support for Android. Oracle is a member of Eclipse, and Berkley DB 11g Release 2 is due on March 31.

Recently, Nagios, an open source application for network, server and application monitoring, has been the subject of a dispute. The operators of the French Nagios site nagios-fr.org claimed that Nagios Enterprises was forcing them to give up the domain because of postings about ICINGA, a fork of Nagios. At the centre of the dispute is Ethan Galstad, creator of Nagios and CEO of Nagios Enterprises. The H talked to him about what had happened and asked how he plans to take the Nagios community forward.

Linux vendor Red Hat will report its fiscal 2010 numbers today. Virtualization, cloud services, middleware, a big win on the Tokyo Stock Exchange-- is Red Hat's future as rosy as it appears?

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards at a ceremony on Saturday March 20, held during the LibrePlanet conference at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. The award for the Advancement of Free Software was won by John Gilmore. The award for Project of Social Benefit was won by the Internet Archive. The awards were presented by FSF president and founder Richard M. Stallman.

Web-based applications are fantastic, except for that whole "running in the browser" thing. Looking to free your browser-based apps from your Web browsing? Take a look at Mozilla Prism.

KDE document reader Okular doesn't just read multiple document formats; it also allows you to add annotations to files as you read them. Note that to get this functionality, you need version 0.8, which is in Ubuntu Karmic, or Debian Squeeze (see my howto if you want to install this on a Lenny box). To bring up the reviews toolbar, go to Tools->Review. You'll see various highlighters, drawing, and note options down the left-hand side of the document window. Be warned that the inline text annotation option will hide anything underneath its box. Right-click an annotation for a context menu that allows you to delete it or add a pop-up note. You can view all annotations by clicking on the 'Reviews' tab on the far left of the Okular window.

I hate having to change. I do not know a lot of people that really enjoy it, but there are just certain aspects to change that bug me. And when it comes to changing technologies, it is even more of a headache, both in the short term and in the long term.

Earlier this month AMD rolled out a new workstation graphics card driver, which is effectively the same Catalyst driver used by the consumer-oriented Radeon graphics cards but with greater testing and certification for the ATI workstation offerings. The press release announcing this new driver was titled "Application Performance Increases By Up To 20 Percent with Latest ATI FirePro Graphics Driver," so we decided to see if this proprietary driver really lives up to its claims under Linux.

The Ubuntu project released its first beta of Ubuntu 10.04 ("Lucid Lynx"), offering two new themes, social-networking tools, cloud-related enhancements, faster boot-times, and an updated Firefox browser with Yahoo search as default. Meanwhile, an oddball icon placement in one theme has Ubuntu users up in arms.

Did Windows crash beyond repair? If so, you probably want to get your files off of the drive before you erase everything and reinstall Windows. This tutorial will help you do exactly that. We're going to use Ubuntu's LiveCD mode. Ubuntu is a popular Linux distribution that's a free and open source alternative to Windows. The LiveCD mode lets you boot into and use the operating system (OS) without installing anything on the computer. You should be able to view your files and copy them to another drive, backup to discs, or transfer via a network. Now let's get started!

LXer Feature: 23-Mar-2010

Sorry for the late posting of the LXWR. This past week we had several different Ubuntu related items including Mark Shuttleworth stating "This is not a democracy", a list of Linux applications you might not know of and our Hans Kwint shows us that there are real alternatives to the iPad. Enjoy!