Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Virtualization has evolved from a development tool running on the desktop to an essential component of IT infrastructure strategy. Companies use virtualization as a means to increase desktop, server and storage utilization, to consolidate data center operations and utility costs, and to reduce the data center's floor space.

Google's purchase of YouTube always seemed questionable to some observers: it looked as if Google were buying itself a whole new source of copyright lawsuits. One of the benefits of that purchase came through on July 2, when a U.S. District Court ordered Google to hand over its complete set of YouTube traffic logs, containing information about every video viewed on the service. See Groklaw for the full text of the order. If this order stands (and it appears that Google will not appeal it), millions of users worldwide will have their viewing data handed over to a litigious entertainment industry company. There's a couple of important implications to draw from this turn of events, so LWN will venture a little far afield and take a look.

The Postal project includes three programs aimed at benchmarking mail server performance. The main program, postal, sends email messages to a specified list of destination addresses at a specified rate. Postal can let you see how fast your system can process incoming email and thus can help you measure improvements to your mail server when you are making software and hardware changes. For example, you can use postal to tell you whether switching to a different IMAP server will allow you to deliver more messages per second on the same hardware.

In an effort to shine more light on the traditional"dark art" of software development, Borland Software on Monday announced Borland Management Solutions. The three-pronged product leverages Borland's Open Application Lifecycle Management framework, and is designed to enable users to better orchestrate, measure, predict and improve software delivery.

Computing is on the verge of a major paradigm shift with the modern rise in prominence of virtualisation. Fuelled by big corporates interested in the consolidation and energy saving potentials, improvements in virtualisation have hit the point where Linux could be a casualty.

In the first installment of this tutorial series we configured Ubuntu to share with Windows and set your Computer Name and Workgroup values. In Part II, we discovered the nitty gritty of the network connection details in Ubuntu. Finally, we'll figure out exactly how to share the files on your Ubuntu machine, both quick and easy, and with access controls.

There's no dearth of Linux distributions for desktop users or even for running high availability servers. But if you are a do-it-yourself computer user, your choice of Linux distros is fairly limited. You can build Linux from scratch with Linux from Scratch or compile your own set of packages with Gentoo. But if you want a distro that teaches you the basics of Linux as you set it up; is well documented, lightweight, and zippy; and has a dependency-resolving packaging system, you need Arch Linux.

It is recommended that a resizing procedure be tested before performing it on a filesystem that contains critical data. It is also strongly recommended that data backups are created and verified before resizing filesystems. To assist the reader in becoming familiar with the resizing procedure, the rest of this article describes a scenario in which un-partitioned disk space is used to test logical volume and ext3 filesystem resizing.

Miguel de Icaza has criticized plans for the next GNU Gnome cross-platform environment that risks damaging the Linux desktop ISV ecosystem by focusing on the Mac. De Icaza, leading the Mono and Moonlight cross-platform .NET projects at Novell, has warned a "new crop" of developers pushing plans for Gtk+ 3 risk "throwing away years of work" on Gtk+. They're also failing to recognize the value of having an ISV ecosystem working to put Gnome on Linux. Gtk+ is the tool set for building the Gnome graphical user interface, with version three the next planned major update.

A Datamation editorial by Matt Hartley argues that Linux purists should quit complaining about closed-source code and get on with their lives. Boycotts against vendors such as nVidia that refuse to disclose source code for their drivers will only make software companies think twice about supporting Linux, he maintains.

OpenDomain.org is an organization that offers to provide free use of certain domain names to worthwhile open source projects. Ric Johnson, the leader of OpenDomain.org and the owner of dozens of domain names, says he has spent thousands of dollars registering those domains in order to prevent "squatters and phishers" from snapping them up. He's keeping them safe so you can have a chance to use them. However, to some people, based on Johnson's past practices, it's not clear how OpenDomain.org differs from other organizations that buy up domain names in the hopes of future gains.

The reasons for the user revolt against KDE 4, which we reported on yesterday, are still being sorted out. They appear to be a complex mixture that includes the assumptions that KDE used in its planning, the rush by distributions to include a release that was not ready for general use, and sensationalism in free software blogs and journalism. One reason that has yet to be discussed is one of the potentially most significant -- the apparent shift in the FOSS user base. Judging from the quickness and thoroughness with which KDE 4 was rejected, the audience for free software seems to have shifted from a small group of knowledgeable users that treasures innovation to a larger one that values convention and familiarity and is actively suspicious of change.

Today, we are passing the last milestone on the way to KDE 4.1, a release that will be suitable for a larger audience than 4.0 has been. While it is not yet up to the features that people are used to from KDE 3.5, KDE 4.1 provides a significant amount of improvements over KDE 4.0, which some said was a bit of a bumpy ride. Sources and available packages are linked on the release info page. KDE 4.1-rc1 is the only release candidate for KDE 4.1, which will be released on July 29th.

The Ramlog project lets you keep your system logs in RAM while your machine is running and copies them to disk when you shut down. If you are running a laptop or mobile device with syslog enabled, Ramlog might help you increase your battery life or the life of the flash drive on your mobile device. As a side effect of using Ramlog, you will be less likely to be caught out by a daemon that suddenly starts sending a message to syslog every 30 seconds and saps your battery keeping the hard disk spinning.

A master carpenter would neither drive a finishing nail with a sledgehammer nor trim a tabletop with a chain saw. Such a craftsperson needs tools that are small, versatile and cheap. One such tool -- for writers and anybody who needs to kick out anything from a short memo or letter to a full-length report -- is AbiWord.

Part of the problem is the way carriers think they 'own' their customers. This can be seen in the way customers are forced into accepting specific bundles (eg, you can only have this much data unless you buy that much voice), nonstandard and crippled firmware (eg, no using MP3 files as ringtones), and more generous access to some sites than others (eg, search engines associated with the carrier). "The mobile operator-centric WAP-based ecosystem for applications has been challenged, unsuccessfully before," said In-Stat analyst Bill Hughes.

Like many others who are part of some camp or the other, people who are part of the free and open source software community often tend to fall into the mistake of circling the wagons and not admitting to essential truths, even when these become self-evident. If we do happen to ventilate - and I'm often "guilty" of that cardinal "sin" - then the rest of the righteous crowd shouts us down.

A new stable kernel is out. Three months in the making, Linux 2.6.26 boasts read-only bind mounts, "big-iron" KVM ports, USB webcam support, 802.11s mesh WiFi, built-in support for remote kernel debugging, and a host of embedded architecture improvements, among other enhancements.

I, as well as my 4 year old son, have always had an interest in Astronomy. My son puts planet puzzles together and looks at picture books. I'm proud to say that he can name all the planets in order, and astonished to realize that he knows that Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore. I've read books on Astronomy; I've been to planetariums and observatories.

New kernel editions are normally adopted as rapidly as possible into mainstream Linux operating system distributions, bringing the new features directly into use on production systems. The new kernel appears three months after version 2.6.25, a longer-than-usual release cycle, Linux creator Linus Torvalds said in an e-mail announcing the release.