Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Ohio LinuxFest Free and Open Source Software Conference and Expo in Columbus, Ohio October 10th and 11th 2008 list of speakers.

Speakers include:

Paul Ferris - Managing your Free Software career

Jon"maddog" Hall - Sustainable Computing

Peter Salus - Where Next? - Ohio LinuxFest

In my job as a systems engineer, I have handled various storage implementations for our enterprise clients. These may be in the form of direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), storage area network (SAN), or Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) systems. In these implementations, clients generally use proprietary storage products from vendors such as EMC, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and EqualLogic. Many of these devices work just like ordinary servers with multiple hard disks and an operating system. Some use Unix and Linux as base operating systems, so I began to explore the possibility of using that kind of operating system on ordinary servers to turn them into storage boxes.

A new high-tech soap opera kicked off last week in Silicon Valley as Google, long a supporter of the Mozilla Foundation and its open source browser Firefox, jumped into Mozilla's turf with its own browser, Chrome. Will the sexy new Chrome catch the eye of those early adopters who helped Firefox get started and eventually grab nearly 20 percent of the browser market once dominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer?

Well, well, well! We seem to be going on a crusade here at iTWire - the old W vs L battle. The Windows is better than Linux creed - which I think is another way of proffering reasons why marketing is better than technology. Ten reasons to run Vista? There are far more reasons than that to run GNU/Linux. And it doesn't take as long to enumerate them because the reasons are simple and you do not need ten paragraphs to outline each argument. When it comes to GNU/Linux, the KISS principle applies.

Desktop Linux reported that Lenovo seems to have quietly exited the desktop Linux business. Unfortunately for desktop Linux users, that news has turned out to be correct. Lenovo, in a note to Practical Technology, confirmed that it was exiting the pre-installed desktop Linux business.

In my ongoing quest to take over the world with Linux as my OS of choice, I've noticed that simply handing someone an install CD doesn't really do the trick. I've also noticed that formatting their Windows 95 install with a fresh version of Linux tends to make angry faces as well. The more tech savvy the user is, the more resistant to change they tend to be. As with most worthwhile endeavors, it takes time and patience for a person to learn to love Linux. The problem is that hating Windows isn't enough. Most people hate Windows, but feel trapped into using it. That's where my 3 step approach comes in.

Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that the next major version number of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 9.04) will be codenamed "Jaunty Jackalope." In a posting to the Ubuntu Developer's list today, Shuttleworth outlined a number of parallels between the mythical beast and the release's goals.

The iTWire Vista Vs. Linux battle has been great fun to watch unfold, however it does seem to have missed the point that Apple Mac OS X is better than them both...Forget 10 reasons why Vista is better than Linux, or 20 reasons why Linux is better than Vista. All you really need to know is that there is one single reason why Apple Mac OS X is better than them both.

Reading WorldChanging's "editorial retrospective" by Ethan Zuckerman on the article on the OLPC XO he posted in June, 2006 really made me wish that the project had, well, worked out better. Articles like Ethan's remind me of the good work and ideals that have gone into the OLPC XO, which both refreshes me and frustrates me further. This post begins a four-part series on the One Laptop Per Child project, some of the key problems it has faced, and the amazing promise that it still holds for international development and global education.

The Servico Federal de Processamento de Dados (SERPRO), (a US$ 1 billion annual revenue Brazilian government owned IT enterprise), announced during the Debian Day Brasil 2008 Porto Alegre that it has selected Debian GNU/Linux as the preferred distribution for its hundreds of GNU/Linux development and production servers. Future SERPRO tenders and public hearings will include clauses requiring Debian GNU/Linux compatibility. Recent SERPRO tenders have already encouraged participation by small FLOSS regional companies, as well as Debian support services.

Jeff Elkner teaches high school students in Arlington, Va., about Linux and other Free Software. He's serious about helping budding computer scientists understand what FOSS is and what it can do for them, and he's one of those guys who always seems to be sharing his knowledge with others. One of Elkner's latest efforts, the Open Book Project, is a good illustration of his philosophy about sharing ideas and knowledge, which he says is similar to that of one of his heroes, Free Software advocate Richard Stallman.

Browser developer Opera Software has signed up with the Symbian Foundation, a Nokia-led consortium that was set up in June to turn the Symbian mobile operating system into an open source platform.

Citadel is 100% GPL, and doesn't play games with making either binary or source downloads easily available. If I had to describe Citadel in a word, it would be "simplicity". It is a complex application with a lot of power and flexibility, but it's easy to install and administer.

Live CDs let you boot an operating system without installing any software on a hard drive. There are plenty of Linux live CDs and lots of tools to customize them. The Ubuntu Customization Kit, tastefully called UCK, lets you add your favorite applications into the distro. If you're not happy with the factory-installed Ubuntu apps, here's your chance to spin up your very own Ubuntu live CD without too much effort. Installing UCK is a no-brainer -- grab the latest .deb package and use GDebi to install it. UCK requires tools such as fakeroot and mkisofs, which you can install using Synaptic. In addition to UCK, you need about 5GB of free disk space under your home directory, as well as the ISO of the Ubuntu version you want to customize.

This week's feature story is a review of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 "Lenny" on the ASUS Eee PC. With Debian being the first Linux distribution to have an open communication channel with the Taiwan-based hardware manufacturer, our expectations were high, but is Lenny really a good choice for the popular ultra-portable? Read on to find out. In the news section, Google restarts the browser war with Chrome, Dell unveils the long-awaited Inspiron Mini 9, Mandriva Linux 2009 enters the release candidate stage, and Fedora calls on beta testers to help with testing the promising ext4 file system...

Challenged by my iTWire colleague and Linux lover Sam Varghese to come up with 40 reasons to lose Linux and vote Vista, I’ve done just that. It all started quietly enough with iTWire colleague David M Williams writing an article entitled “5 reasons to upgrade from Windows Vista to Linux”, with David being a strong and well respected proponent of Linux.

The Fedora Project holds a “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” (FUDCon) several times each year, in various locations around the world. The latest installment was September 5-7, in Brno, Czech Republic. Max Spevack, Red Hat’s manager of Community Architecture, shared his trip report with us.

The Linux kernel is flexible, and you can even modify the way it works on the fly by dynamically changing some of its parameters, thanks to the sysctl command. Sysctl provides an interface that allows you to examine and change several hundred kernel parameters in Linux or BSD. Changes take effect immediately, and there's even a way to make them persist after a reboot. By using sysctl judiciously, you can optimize your box without having to recompile your kernel, and get the results immediately.

So what really happened? I doubt we'll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and... Well, let me just make the following points about TradElec. First, TradElec runs on more than a 100 HP ProLiant servers in several locations in London. These servers are running Windows Server 2003. On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times. In short, it's meant to be a real-time system.

While the current beta edition of Chrome currently runs on Windows only, open source developers -- including some from Mozilla -- are now working on getting Google's new browser to operate on Linux and Mac, too. The developers' site for Chromium, an open source project rolled out by Google at the time of its launch of the Chrome browser, also contains build instructions for Windows, Linux, and Mac. There, in addition to making the source code for Chrome available under a BSD license, Google explains how to submit patches and submit bug reports. The source code for Chrome's high-performance V8 JavaScript engine is also downloadable.