Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that it's not easy for a Linux company to let go the reins of control over its community Linux distribution. Just ask Red Hat, which started to let go of Fedora and then decided to keep managing it. But, now Novell is loosening its apron strings on its community Linux openSUSE.

JBoss Operations Network (JON) recently became available as an open source solution through the Jopr project. (That’s pronounced “jopper.”) We interviewed Chris Morgan from Red Hat’s JON group to learn more.

LinuxPlanet Classics: "No," the technician explained, "Linux is probably causing this problem and it needs to come off the machine." Michael Hall's classic battle with Dell tech support was first published in July 2001. Has anything really changed?

About 30 years ago, we Earthlings sent a probe to check out Mercury, the tiny planet closest to the sun, and concluded that it was just a big hot rock. But after poking around on the moon and Mars for a few decades, we decided to take another look at Mercury.

Support for transparent decompression of files on optical media has been part of the Linux kernel since version 2.4.14. Here's how you can take advantage of this support when you burn your own optical media by using the mkzftree tool and the -z option to genisoimage. These commands compress files using zlib, which uses the same algorithm as gzip. Using the transparent compression Rock Ridge extension can allow you to fit much more data onto a DVD.

The Bash shell is famous for having more great features and shortcuts than we can ever learn. Juliet Kemp shares some shortcuts to speed up common tasks.

If you want to keep tabs on your deadlines, you don't need a fancy project management application -- often, a simple spreadsheet can do the job. To see how, let's create a spreadsheet that tracks task deadlines, shows the current status of each task, and highlights scheduling conflicts. In the process we'll learn a few useful Calc techniques.

News emerged recently that Qt Software (formerly Trolltech) were working on their first IDE for Qt, code named Project Greenhouse. Today saw the release of the first technical preview under the name Qt Creator. The initial release is binary only, and under the terms of the Qt preview license, but the final release will be released with source code under a GPL compatible license. The initial release is available for Linux, Mac OS X and MS Windows. Read on for a users review.

Sun Microsystems came in just under the wire with its Solaris 10 10/08 update, squeezing it out on the last day of the month. The company had intended to do the launch a few days ago, but pushed it out to the other side of its Q1 financial results. The 10/08 update is not a major release, something that Sun has not put into the field since Solaris 10 came out in January 2005. Now that the OpenSolaris development edition of Sun's Unix is out, after a few releases of this development code, Sun is expected to take an OpenSolaris snapshot and take it inside the corporate firewall and harden it and test the living daylights out of it to make what Sun calls "Solaris Next."

In 2002, when Ron Huber Jr. and Chris Fuller joined Achieve Internet, a fledgling startup Huber's father launched a few years earlier to build Web sites, the pair was confident their previous business experience would be an asset in understanding other firms' needs and goals.

In the early days of desktop virtualization, there were few low-priced alternatives to VMware Workstation that didn't involve a steep learning curve. Even the freely available VirtualBox didn't affect Workstation's market domination and instead faced competition from the newly rebranded VMware GSX server, which was offered for free as VMware Server. Despite being an entry-level server virtualization product, many people used VMware Server on the desktop. Taking that into consideration, you have to look at the recently released VMware Server 2, from two angles -- as an entry-level server virtualization platform and as an alternative to desktop virtualization products like VirtualBox. With its performance and other improvements, it does enough to keep existing customers happy, but probably not enough to get others to switch.

Earlier this week we published benchmarks of all Ubuntu releases from 7.04 to the release candidate and had found the performance degraded with time, at least with the test system we used. As part of our testing to explore this issue, we had repeated many of the same tests on Fedora with all of their releases going back to Fedora 7. Has Fedora's desktop performance degraded too?

Netbooks have been slowing down over the last year and for the most part, each one is about the same thing with a different logo on the lid. HP’s offerings seem refreshing and polished even though they sport the standard netbook specs of 1.6GHz Intel Atom CPU, 8.9-inch or 10.2-inch display, up to 2 GB of RAM, and either a 60GB HDD or 16GB SSD. The solid-state drive can be complimented by a standard USB thumb drive in a special slot for extra storage. The specs are only half the story as the OS is where it gets interesting.

The Metasploit Project develops a set of security tools to create and execute exploit code on remote computers. Some people say Metasploit makes the job easier for black hat hackers who attack networks looking for vulnerabilities to take advantage of; others says the tool helps network security administrators do a better job of finding and repairing weaknesses before the bad guys get to them. H.D. Moore, the 20-something creator of the Metasploit Project, says it all depends on your perspective.

The developers of the free panoramic photo editor Hugin released version 0.7 this month, culminating a two-year development cycle. The new release incorporates key new technical abilities and usability improvements to help demystify the panorama creation process for the average shooter. The 0.7 release is available from the Hugin project's Web site in the form of a universal binary for Mac OS X and a source tarball for Linux and Windows. Binaries for Windows are expected to arrive "soon." Hugin is also provided through the package management systems of most major Linux distributions, several of which have been supplying beta releases of 0.7 during the long run-up to the final release.

Microsoft is reaching out to open-source and adding a dash of RIA bling to its latest model-driven development crusade. The company has released M, its new programming language for building textual domain-specific languages (DSLs) and software models using Extensible Application Markup Language (XAML) under its Open Specification Promise (OSP). Specifically, Microsoft has released MSchema, MGrammar, and MGraph. OSP lets third parties implement a Microsoft specification without getting a nasty phone call from the company's lawyers.

A. Lizard takes us on a tour of secure remote graphical Linux administration over the Internet; through firewalls, routers, dynamic home IP addresses, Wake-on-LAN, and other perils. We will learn how to securely administer both Linux and Windows remotely. The journey begins with today's part 1 of three parts.

Open Source desktops are far cheaper to maintain than proprietary desktop configurations, says Rolf Schuster, a diplomat at the German Embassy in Madrid and the former head of IT at the Foreign Ministry. Schuster was one of the participants in a discussion on Open Standards and interoperability that took place last week Tuesday during the Open Source World conference in the city of Malaga, Spain.

Microsoft and Google both announce support for OpenID, except that Google's version has users and advocates up in arms. And Microsoft looks to have got it right.

Many people use SSH to log in to remote machines, copy files around, and perform general system administration. If you want to increase your productivity with SSH, you can try a tool that lets you run commands on more than one remote machine at the same time. Parallel ssh, Cluster SSH, and ClusterIt let you specify commands in a single terminal window and send them to a collection of remote machines where they can be executed.