Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Open-source company Red Hat will initially offer its hypervisor management tools for Windows systems only. Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, told ZDNet Asia's sister site, ZDNet UK at a press conference last week that the hypervisor management software for desktops and servers, which is due out before the end of the year, will be available only for systems running Microsoft's proprietary operating system.

Over the last year the KDE Community Forums have served as a premier platform for the KDE community to communicate with each other. With over 13,000 registered users generating more than 15,000 topics of discussion the site is growing by the minute. A little over a month ago, the forums introduced a new look while moving over to the phpBB forum software. These improvements have clearly caught the attention of many people as KDE's Community Forums were selected as the phpBBHacks.com Featured phpBB for the month of August 2009.

Gallium3D, the graphics driver architecture created by Tungsten Graphics designed to overhaul graphics drivers on Linux and other operating systems, has caused quite a stir lately. Gallium3D this year alone has picked up support for features like OpenGL ES, OpenCL, network debugging support, and many other prominent changes, albeit the GPU hardware drivers are still lacking. Anyhow, a developer for the HaikuOS (the project designed to resurrect the BeOS operating system), has submitted a patch that adds Haiku support to Gallium3D.

The Ubuntu project released Karmic Koala alpha 5 (Ubuntu 9.10), which adds Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud support, a new Ubuntu Cloud file-sharing service, and default switches to GCC 4.4, Ext4, and GRUB 2. Meanwhile, Canonical launched a Red Hat-esque Premium Service Engineer support program for large enterprises.

If Oracle ends up owning Sun Microsystems, it's got a one-off opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past when it comes to working with open source on Java. The database giant should relax Sun's tight control over the Java Community Process (JCP), the body responsible for stewarding Java. And as part of this, Oracle should solve the long-running and contentious issue of open-sourcing the test compatibility kits (TCKs) that test implementations of Java.

Every true Linux geek knows that Linus Torvalds is our fearless leader, the developer-in-chief, keeper of the stable tree and decider of what will be. But according to the Linux Foundation, what you see may not be what you get.

Yesterday Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 5 was released and besides shipping with a number of updated packages and the Ubuntu One client along with Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud images, the Ubiquity installer shipped with its new slide-show feature enabled. Now during the Ubuntu installation process from the desktop LiveCD, rather than just showing a status bar it also advertises various features of this Linux operating system.

Fedora 11 introduced a great new feature: delta RPM updates. This feature creates delta RPM packages (.drpm) that are binary “patches” to the existing RPM packages. Instead of downloading all files, regardless of whether they have changed or not, a delta RPM will only download the files that have changed compared to the previous RPM package. Once the delta RPM is downloaded by the Presto plugin for yum, it will try to reconstruct a full RPM based on the contents of the previous RPM, plus the newly changed files from the delta RPM. The newly-created RPM will then be installed by yum.

Open-source software company Red Hat has made a bid at cloud virtualization with the release of the latest version of its operating system, which includes a built-in hypervisor. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4, which was made available to subscribers on Wednesday, incorporates a kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor--software that allows multiple virtual operating systems to run on a host machine or system. The company first announced its move to KVM from its previous Xen-based hypervisor strategy in June 2008, with RHEL 5.4 promised as the first production OS so equipped in February 2009.

Do you want to try Windows 7 but don't want to shell out the upgrade price? Or do you long to give Mac OS X a test run but don't particularly want to buy a Mac? There's a way to do that (although the OS vendors won't love you for it): Use a "transformation pack." These software packages go beyond changing the graphical user interface to make it resemble that of a different OS. Most of the technically sophisticated transformation packs will tweak or patch the native operating system's code and add startup applications to more accurately simulate the functionality of another OS.

Canonical has announced a new type of support for enterprises running Ubuntu that need some extra hands-on help: the Premium Service Engineer (or PSE). A PSE Ubuntu expert would working as a single point of contact for Canonical's larger customers, becoming "virtual team members" with the company's IT staff. Canonical says PSEs will provide regular technical and service reviews, share best-practice wisdom, and help companies optimize Ubuntu environments. Apparently, PSEs will even serve as advocates for the company for future Ubuntu releases.

Oracle's pending acquisition of Sun has hit a snag. The European Commission is concerned that Oracle's will terminate the open source MySQL project, a move that would have a detrimental impact on competition in the database market. In light of the resilience inherent in open source software, it's unclear if such a maneuver would even be possible.

Red Hat's Deltacloud project is developing a open source standardised API for addressing different cloud architectures in a uniform way. Cloud service users can use the Deltacloud API to access Amazon's EC2 as well as private clouds that are based on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEL-V); drivers for private VMware ESX clouds and the cloud services offered by Rackspace are to follow.

The KDE community is proud to announce the location of next year's Akademy: Tampere, Finland. Akademy is the yearly world conference held by the KDE community to celebrate the Free Software desktop and work towards the future of KDE. After a successful Akademy 2009 on the Canary Islands, as part of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Akademy heads north to the birthplace of Linux where contributors will enjoy the midnight sun as they spend a week to present, plan and participate in the development of KDE software.

Paul Ferrill shows how adding a graphical user interface (GUI) component to any utility script can make it more user friendly, and introduces us to an excellent tool for doing this---Zenity.

ZaReason is an independent Linux OEM that sells a line of pre-installed Linux machines, from netbooks to desktops to servers. Founder Cathy Malmrose talks about the challenges of running a Linux shop in a Windows world.

The reduction of the support duration for openSUSE from 24 to 18 months has sparked a discussion among the openSUSE community about a free SUSE Linux version with long-term support. Several community members are of the opinion that reducing the openSUSE support has created a gap between the free openSUSE and the commercially supported SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES).

The Mozilla Project has updated its roadmap for the coming versions of Firefox. The next big release, Firefox 4.0 with Geko1.9.4 underneath, is scheduled for the end of 2010.

The LXDE team is working on a lite variant of Ubuntu that will run on PCs with less than 265 MB. First images are now ready to test.

f you poke around enough on the Laptop.org wiki, you find a few interesting corners. Linked from their work in creating a training and reference document for OLPCCorps, a link to an Excel spreadsheet to calculate OLPC-specific costs for a deployment, which has been created and maintained by OLPC's John Watlington