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Software company Red Hat continued its recession-defying performance by posting an 11 percent increase in quarterly revenue that outpaced analysts' expectations. Profits for the fiscal first quarter that ended May 31 totaled $28.7 million after excluding certain expenses, up from $26 million a year earlier, the Raleigh company reported late Wednesday. Earnings per share totaled 15 cents, ahead of the 14 cents forecast by analysts.

Ever wonder why bad Microsoft news and good Linux news tend to not get much attention? One reason is because organized groups make sure those stories get as little attention as possible on social networks. But, it's not just technology news. It happens to all news and opinion stories.

On behalf of the KDevelop team I am happy to announce the Beta 4 release of KDevelop 4. This release includes some major new features, such as working sets (only available when building with KDE 4.3), integration of the quickopen functionality into the toolbar and a new perspective switcher (see the upper right corner of the mainwindow).

When Germany's third largest city gives Microsoft the brush-off, it excites comment in the USA. Munich got itself into the American newspapers a few years ago when the city council decided to initiate project LiMux, aimed at gradually banishing Microsoft programs from the town hall computers. While talk about the software revolution has now died down, the changeover is being enthusiastically pursued. Other local authorities have now followed suit. Microsoft, however, won't leave the field without a fight. "We are able to learn", said Andreas Hartl, Director Platform Strategy of Microsoft Deutschland.

The Drupal content management system is one of the most popular engines for dynamic websites — indeed, it powers the site you're visiting right now. All this powering doesn't happen by itself, though, and the developer community that does the dirty work behind the scenes is in need of a bit of Linux labor. The Testing and Quality Assurance team at Drupal are "the plumbers who keep the community plumbing from leaking." While they once spent their time reviewing patches one-by-one to assure stability, they now employ a testing bot to automatically apply patches to test installations, freeing up tester time to tackle greater things.

The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename "lenny"). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems. Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to- date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

FreedomHEC (Freedom Hardware Engineer's Conference) Taipei was held June 10 and 11 in, unsurprisingly, Taipei, Taiwan. The event, sponsored by the governmental Institute for Information Industry, followed the huge Computex conference in the hope of attracting hardware developers who are interested in supporting Linux. Your editor, who had the honor of being invited to speak at FreedomHEC Taipei, would assert that the goal was achieved; over 200 developers showed up for two days of technical talk about the Linux kernel and the best ways to contribute to it.

OpenVZ project leader Kir Kolyshkin clarified at LinuxTag 2009 that the software also lends itself to Linux resource management. The facts are clear, Koyshkin said at the outset: every computer has but finite resources such as CPU time, memory, hard disk size and I/O, and network I/O. Administrators are interested in protecting these resources from DoS attacks so that they can continue providing QoS or simple processing.

Google has openly questioned Microsoft's entire approach to online infrastructure, while taking some wonderfully sly shots at the company's new search engine. The undeniable highlight of Thursday's cloud-happy Structure 09 conference was Vijay Gill, Google senior manager of engineering and architecture. As he described how Google's famously distributed infrastructure shames the Redmond competition, he would occasionally point his audience to relevant online materials using a deadpan line that put Microsoft's incurable Mountain View envy is sharp relief. "If you Bing for it," he would say, "you can find it."

Almost two years after its initial announcement, the Linux Solution Group (LiSoG) has now presented specificationsPDF for its OSDtBench (Open Source based Desktop Benchmark) desktop benchmark suite and demonstrated a prototype at LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin. According to LiSoG, public bodies in particular are placing increasing emphasis on benchmark results for comparing the performance of different computers.

In his keynote at the LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich spoke about the future of user interfaces on mobile devices. In the process he presented QML, the newest development from his employer Qt Software.

In order to avoid this common mistake I often have my shell scripts prompt me for a yes or no answer before they proceed. The function described here is for doing that: asking a question and validating the answer.

Android developers can now slip native code into apps written for Android-based devices using Google's new native development kit (NDK). The Android 1.5 NDK, which was announced Thursday on the Android developers blog, doesn't actually allow developers to run completely native code on devices. Instead, it supports adding native code into apps written to run in Dalvik virtual machine (DVM) instances.

The middle of June, Yahoo! introduced a small change to its user login protocol that practically barred access from all Linux clients. IM services Pidgin and Kopete were hit and responded quickly. To protect its users from phishing scams, Yahoo! changed its login authentication protocol, as they announced June 16. The new protocol expected a specific authentication method version on the client end and refused access if it didn't match. IM services Pidgin and Kopete were recently affected by this.

In our 3rd post of our series on the efforts of OLPC, Santa Barbara, we will discuss the ways that the XO's have been used as learning tools our local 3rd grade classroom. Lets jump right into it...

Details of how Intel and Nokia will actually work together to create their brand-new category of not-a-smartphone, not-a-netbook mobile devices remain sketchy, but the first results will be open source software rather than any hardware platform.

Interested in Linux programming? Akkana Peck provides a handy guide to the best free software languages to get you started.

It's doubtful that very many users enjoy reboots. Although system uptime is often worn like a badge of honor — as though power-cycling were some form of humiliating defeat — the majority of us can probably agree that having to restart is a pain, if only for the lost time involved. It almost seems as though the annoyance grows exponentially the more frequent they come.

As a consultant, I am often faced with an unfamiliar Linux system (usually RHEL). I always find it useful to understand which files that shipped with rpm packages have been modified, since it's usually a good indicator of what customizations have been performed on the system.

Power and space saving computers are in, and Shuttle has a winner with the XS29F. This little gem really skimps on the power consumption to the tune of around 20-25 watts on average. That's less than half of that 60-watt light bulb shining down on you right now. For the Do It Yourselfer (DIYer) on a budget this box makes a lot of sense. The size is right, too, as the unit measures a skimpy three inches tall and a little over seven inches wide. Two doors on the front reveal the DVD drive, two USB ports and the typical audio in / out jacks. A power brick similar to one you would use with a notebook computer helps offload some of the electronics and heat generation outside of the box.