Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular? To try to answer these questions, we have looked at data from Google with the highly useful Insights for Search, which gave us a number of interesting and often surprising results. Aside from just looking at Linux itself, we have included eight common Linux distributions in this survey: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo.

Sabre Holdings Corp., the $3 billion online network best known for Travelocity, has adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the corporate standard for its global ticketing and airline services businesses and will implement RHEL 5 in all future acquisitions. Robert Wiseman, Sabre's chief technology officer, said the Southlake, Texas-based company began using Red Hat and other open source software about 2004. Red Hat now runs mission-critical online systems that collectively process as many as 32,000 transactions per second from three data centers in Tulsa, Okla., and one in Texas, he said.

When I first used Mono, shortly after its first appearance in 2004, one of my most important requirements was to get connected to a MySQL back end. This was quickly achieved at the time with the ByteFX data connector. Following the basic Mono tutorial quickly had me up and running, with access to MySQL databases. Last week I needed to reopen and modernize my application and found that there have been several important changes in Mono between 2004 and 2008. First, I found some "then and now" differences with the installation of the data connector. Second, I needed to make some modifications to my programming.

Sun Microsystems recently released the JavaFX Preview SDK. I decided to revisit what is Sun's last, best hope to recapture both the desktop and the browser in the face of stiff competition. The big question with Java FX is why anyone would want to adopt it when they've already got Adobe Systems' Flex and Microsoft's Silverlight, which is doing rather well in presenting the Beijing Olympics.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Jott, a Web service that translates speech via cell phones to text lists, e-mail and reminders (each translated message is called a "jott." Jott has done something rare amongst online start-ups … it has exited beta and announced it is in production!

f you've ever worked with and manipulated MySQL databases, chances are you've used phpMyAdmin to manage your databases from a Web interface. But phpMyAdmin can be a little complex; if you want a lightweight alternative, try phpMinAdmin. It's easier to install than its more robust cousin and has an easy-to-navigate graphical user interface for most important MySQL functions. Many Web hosting solutions bundle phpMyAdmin to let users create databases for their blogging software or content management systems. If yours doesn't, you'll find installing phpMinAdmin far easier than installing phpMyAdmin. phpMinAdmin is a single PHP script that requires no configuration.

A lot of effort in recent months has been expended toward something people are calling "data portability." Just about everywhere you look; you'll bump into people pontificating about it. In case you've been out of the loop (perhaps hiking in the Himalayas), you can run the term through your favorite search engine to pull back numerous articles and blog posts on the subject. You might even want to dip into the Twitter and FriendFeed streams to see the ebb and flow of the micro debate.

It's been a pretty incredible year for open source on the desktop. Dell has started selling some of its PCs with Ubuntu pre-installed, which means that even non-technical users can acquire a low-cost, powerful open source system without needing to worry about installation and handling drivers and suchlike.

I’m not sure why it bothers me: I use the word “Free” when I’m talking about “Free Software”, and “Open” when I mean “Open source”. I’m very particular about my words, that way. But that’s just me. I don’t expect another religion to follow the rules of my own, or vice-versa. So why do I expect others to use words in the same way that I do? And why do I feel so cross about “Open standards”, which come with proprietary documentation, a hefty price tag, and an NDA?

Yahoo! and Intel have announced a plan to bring computer-style widgets to TV screens. The idea behind the Widget Channel is to take familiar software technologies to an emerging platform. The two companies have teamed up because Intel's Media Processor CE 3100 is a system-on-a-chip (SoC) designed for use in consumer electronics products including Internet-connected set-top boxes and digital TVs, while Yahoo! already has the software that actually runs widgets, including the software libraries that support them.

Microsoft Wednesday said it would spend up to another $100 million to purchase certificates it will distribute to users who can cash them in for support on their Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Servers. The investment, which will come on Nov. 1, is on top of the $240 million Microsoft agreed in 2006 to spend on certificates as part of a five-year business and technology deal with Novell that also included intellectual property rights protection.

I know there is a great debate taking place about which operating system is better. Jack Wallen, host of the Linux and Open Source blog, started a lengthy discussion asking the question: Why would you choose Windows over Linux? I thought that was kind of funny, because recently I have been asking myself the opposite question: Who would choose to switch to Linux?

[Is it still FUD if he actually believes what he is saying? ;-) - Scott]

Following my piece on a proposed model for enterprise applications maintenance, two fresh posts, one from Matt Aslett at 451.com and another from Leigh Cauldwell offer alternative ideas around how the present conundrum might be solved.

As always, the 2008 Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas was full of cutting-edge computer security research, the latest in computer security vulnerabilities, and more than a little controversy. Since the beginning of the Black Hat conference 15 years ago, the show has always been a place for the elite of the computer security industry to release their latest work on what is known as "zero-day exploits." A zero day or "0-day" exploit is a previously unknown computer security vulnerability that is released before vendors like Microsoft have a chance to release a security fix. There were fewer zero-day exploit presentations this year than we have seen in the recent past, but the ones that were presented were big.

f you use Nagios to monitor your system and run openSUSE on a remote server the bash script presented here will check for online updates and is designed to be run by Nagios so that the result will appear on the Nagios service-detail page. The script is pretty unsophisticated as it just parses the output from the zypper command. A more sophsiticated solution might interact directly with libzypp, the library that provides zypper with its functionality. Of course, that's not possible using bash. Based on a quick scan of the libzypp documentation it appears the only current option for doing that is C++.

ominations are now open for the Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest. The winner could be someone you know, or someone whose work you admire, but don't mull over your recommendation too long -- entries must be submitted by September 30.

Finally, finally, finally!! I and a few folks have been living with a secret. And of course I wanted to share this as soon as possible. But some events at work (the famous DNS Bug) kept me massively busy. And since work is - well work - you earn a living from it - it got priority. However this nonetheless does not make the secret any less important nor interesting. So, what is it about? What's it about? Hm, let's think... the title says "sugarize it". Sugarize what? As you probably know, sugarlabs.org became independant from OLPC with Walter Bender starting a new organization to continue the dream of an open source user interface for OLPC and for other laptops.

Microsoft is bumping up its monetary investment in its controversial partnership with Novell. Styling the deal as a so-called incremental investment increase, Microsoft will buy up to $100 million in Suse Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. The certificates are sold and exchanged for IT support from Novell for its Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

In the current economic climate, businesses of every size are looking to reduce their spending wherever possible. Open source software, which has no upfront licensing fees, is one way of achieving significant savings. However, in order to protect their enormous revenue streams, large software corporations have invested millions in spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the security of open source software. In this post, I will examine and debunk five commonly held myths about open source security and why large corporations are promoting a “fear factor” mentality around open source software.

There are numerous documents, tutorials and guides detailing the workings and usage of cron, the de facto tool for scheduling jobs on Linux. While traditional cron jobs are executed at set times, inotify cron, or incron, is a cron clone that watches the filesystem for specified changes and executes the relevant commands. You can set incron to monitor a particular file or directory for changes and schedule jobs for when those changes occur. Fedora users can use yum to install incron with the yum install incron command. Once installed, you need to start the incron daemon before you can schedule jobs. The command, service incrond start, executed as root, will start the incron daemon on and the chkconfig incrond on command will configure it to be started at boot time.