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Sun Microsystems is putting the "L" back into LAMP with plans to support customers running the open-source Apache, MySQL and Perl or PHP (AMP) stack on Linux. The company said it plans paid, enterprise-level support for AMP on Linux in the fourth-quarter of 2008, in addition to supporting AMP on its preferred platform, of course, Solaris. Support of AMP on Solaris servers is due this quarter.

For lo these many years here on ServerWatch's Tip of the Trade, we have toiled to bring you useful tips and tricks to make your job a little easier, and to help you keep up with new applications and useful products. This week, in celebration of summer and the holiday week in United States, we decided to take a minibreak from the serious and bring you some Linux Easter Egg fun.

A Silicon Valley startup called CherryPal announced a two-Watt, $250 ultra-mini PC that runs Debian Linux. Based on a 400MHz PowerPC-based system-on-chip (SoC) from Freescale, the solid-state CherryPal C100 Desktop offers managed "cloud" computing paid for by advertising rather than a monthly fee.

A year after creating an online open-source software development community to take on SourceForge.net and other rivals, the development team at Ubuntu Linux will be the first to admit that it still has a long way to go to achieve the popularity of its competitors. Ubuntu's beta community, called Launchpad, was unveiled last July and has seen a huge increase in the number of open-source projects under development, from 1,500 projects at the start to about 7,000 today.

If you've ever used Microsoft Access or Excel, you have likely used a product that Mike Gunderloy had a hand in developing. The irony is that Gunderloy himself doesn't use those products anymore. He's given up Microsoft for open source -- and he's not going back. Gunderloy, an Evansville, Ind.-based freelance developer for the past quarter century, goes way back with Microsoft. "I was never a full-time employee, but have several times been a contractor with a badge and [Redmond] campus access," he says.

Sun Microsystems Inc. is announcing on Wednesday availability of Sun Web Stack, which puts the company's own twist on the popular open-source LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/Python or PHP) stack. The company is unveiling the stack at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore. Also at the conference Wednesday, Sun will ship Sun OpenSSO Express, which is a version of Sun's OpenSSO (single sign-on) software featuring enterprise support and indemnification. At OSCON, Sun and Joyent Inc. will announce a social application program featuring free Web hosting.

Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth urged development of a Linux desktop to rival what Apple Inc. has done and aired a vision of software changing the world. Shuttleworth, speaking at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) in Portland, Ore., yesterday, also urged development of a new revenue model to fund free software and set his sights on a services-based mechanism. He also stressed the importance of interoperability with Windows.

Fedora has released its Asterisk-based Fedora Talk VoIP application for connecting Fedora contributors. Other news posted on a recent Fedora blog includes notes on a new automated test case management system, a SIG for ISVs, and new OpenID provider status for the Fedora Account System. Much of the news mentioned in the Fedora blog was revealed at the recent FUDCon Fedora user conference. FUDCon celebrated the new Fedora 9 version of the free and redistributable Red Hat-based Linux distribution, and looked forward toward Fedora 10.

Intel's project to put a Linux and open source stack on mobile devices is getting overhauled to attract developer support, having failed to generate much interest. A year after launching Moblin, Intel plans a second version of its open source stack in the next three weeks, sporting a new operating system, middleware, tools and graphical user interface (GUI).

I'm tired of waiting- I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn't exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let's design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

In the beginning, what was your guess: did you guess Word 2007 will be faster or slower? Well, here are all the tests rolled up together. Word 2003 burned 7.05 seconds to run the gamut after a cold start and 6.17 seconds after a warm start. Word 2007 consumed 16.12 and 12.13 seconds (respectively).

Along with 2.6.27 development ramping up, there is a variety of other Linux kernel news. Shortly after the release of Linux 2.6.26, someone on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) asked what sort of changes – either potentially or already in the works – might give rise to a 2.7 development series. Torvalds did not even wait 20 minutes to respond, "Nothing. I'm not going back to the old model. The new model is so much better that it's not even worth entertaining as a theory to go back."

Network Security Toolkit is one of many live CD Linux distributions focusing on network monitoring, analysis, and security. NST was designed to give network security administrators easy access to a comprehensive set of open source network applications, many of which are among the top 100 security tools recommended by insecure.org.

Dell said it spent months in development and testing to deliver more peripheral support for features, including ATI video graphics, wireless networking and fingerprint readers.

Open source business intelligence firm JasperSoft on Wednesday announced its next-generation community platform at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. The new platform features tools to enhance community project developers as well as business users.

In the two previous articles my focus was on the catching an error where it was impossible to generate any valid menu, even the many of the meta tags in the head(er) section were unknown. The next possible error of significance to be examined here is the case where the menu should exist, but the file that contains the appropriate listing and links is absent. Again it is impossible to generate the menu, but for a differing underlying reason. Moreover, the severity is no less than the first set, it is just found later in the process.

In this context, a one-liner is a set of commands normally joined through a pipe (|). When joined by a pipe, the command on the left passes its output to the command on the right. Simple or complex, you can get useful results from a single line at the bash command prompt.

A recent thread on the lkml discussed a blog entry stating that minimal ZFS support for GRUB was available under the GPL license, "we could now use that code to implement support for ZFS in the Linux kernel." Alan Cox explained, "no we can't. The GPL ZFS bits don't include the various methods that would violate the patent so there is no grant. I've several times asked Sun to simply give permission and they don't even answer. I can only read the Sun motivation one way - they want to look open but know that ZFS is about the only thing that might save Solaris as a product in the data centre so are not truly prepared to let Linus use it." H. Peter Anvin added, "from what I can see, it is an absolutely-minimal read only implementation."

When you buy a new PC today, unless you hunt down a Linux system or you buy a Mac, you’re pretty much stuck with Vista. Sad, but true. So, when I had to get a new PC in a hurry, after one of my PCs went to the big bit-ranch in the sky with a fried motherboard, the one I bought, a Dell Inspiron 530S from my local Best Buy came pre-infected with Vista Home Premium. Big deal. It took me less than an hour to install Linux Mint 5 Elyssa R1 on it.

Canonical has been in talks with Sun Microsystems and SpringSource to support one of their open source Java application server stacks in the Ubuntu core, to increase Ubuntu's enterprise adoption. Canonical told The Reg that it is in the process of selecting which open source Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) framework to make available in the main part of its popular Linux distro. Sun's streamlined GlassFish 3.0 and the modular Application Platform are contenders.