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One of the main community-driven projects that prompted Red Hat to open source its Satellite code today was the Linux boot server, Cobbler. Cobbler is a nifty piece of code that assembles all the usual setup bits needed for a large network installation like TFTP, DNS, PXE, installation trees etc. and automates the process. It can even generate DHCP configurations to assign specific IPs to MAC addresses.

Businesses are not philanthropists. They are not, intentionally, educators or evangelists for ideologies. However, from time to time their business models just happen to coincide with their more idealistic customers own interests. Asus is one such company. When they launched the little EeePC they could scarcely have imagined the extraordinary reaction it would cause. They say that any publicity is good publicity but the reaction to the two pound wonder was almost universally favourable. It was hot. I mean nuclear hot. And it was GNU/Linux.

NFS version 4, published in April 2003, introduced stateful client-server interaction and "file delegation," which allows a client to gain temporary exclusive access to a file on a server. NFSv4 brings security improvements such as RPCSEC_GSS, the ability to send multiple operations to the server at once, new file attributes, replication, client side caching, and improved file locking. Although there are a number of improvements in NFSv4 over previous versions, this article investigates just one of them -- performance.

One of the interesting aspects of Microsoft's long-running pursuit of Yahoo has been the potential knock-on effects for open source. Although the company doesn't make much of the fact, it uses a lot of free software, and has helped open source projects by employing some of the top hackers.

Dominic Sartorio began his career as a "traditional" software developer, but his career path has been indelibly marked by two things: a solid appreciation for the open source method, and a desire to understand the big picture of open collaboration and how that can ultimately create long-term benefits for the industry and for customers.

MontaVista announced that its Mobilinux 5.0 Linux distribution for mobile devices has been optimized for the Freescale i.MX31 system-on-chip (SoC). The optimization brings the total number of Freescale processors supported by MontaVista distributions to ten, says the company.

Finally, the so called 'stable' version of Wine, 1.0, has been released on June 17, 2008. The last Wine review I made was to 1.0RC2 (release candidate 2), in which I already tested World of WarCraft, mIRC and DC++. I had no issues with World of WarCraft (tested using a trial account) which performs very well, without any visible problems, DC++ has minor stability problems and the mIRC scripts editor crashes, but otherwise, mIRC behaves good enough.

The Intel Atom powered Asus Eee PC 901 arrives before the month is out, with price drops for the existing 900 and 701 models. But when will Australia see the Eee 1000H model with real hard disk and larger keyboard? The Asus Eee PC revolution kicks into higher gear with the impending release of the Eee 901, an enhanced version of the recently released 900 series, replacing the Celeron 900MHz processor with the new Intel Atom processor running at 1.6Ghz – or in a turbo charged 1.9Ghz mode.

I was a little surprised to hear Nokia vice president of software Ari Jaaski's comments last week. Not long ago, Nokia got off to a great start by embracing open source for its mobile device business. But now, according to Jaaski, it's the open source developer community that needs to adapt to the ways of commercial software vendors, not the other way around.

Organic open source. Non-organic open source. Genetically modified free software. None of these are phrases that are in common usage but exploring what they mean is an interesting exercise. MySQL's Brian Aker used the first two terms when responding to a post by Linux kernel guru Ted T'so about what Sun was trying to do with its OpenSolaris project. I made up the third one myself! And whatever follows is my take on these terms.

DSL 4.4 was just released on June 9th, so this past weekend I installed it on my Compaq Deskpro Pentium III 800 Mhz machine. It only has 256 megs of RAM, so a lightweight distribution like DSL is a good choice for it. Their site claims you can run DSL 486 DX with 16 megs of RAM, so even this old Compaq should fly with what it’s got.

Most anyone in the free and open source Verio brings something extra to Linux: reliability. Click to learn about free test. Latest News about open source software realm can tell you not only that Linux is better than Windows, but also that it is an optimal alternative to the closed-source and proprietary operating system from Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Free Trial. Security Software As A Service From Webroot. Latest News about Microsoft. Anyone at a Linux-oriented event or group can assure you that you have no need or even legitimate reason to continue using commercial operating systems nowadays.

Free Software development is often a fun task for developers, and it is its low barrier to entry (on average) that makes it possible to have so much available software for so many different tasks. This low barrier to entry, though, is also probably the cause of the widely varying quality of the code of these projects. Most of the time, the quality issues one can find are not related to developers' lack of skill, but rather to lack of knowledge of how the tools work, in particular, the compiler. For non-interpreted languages, the compiler is probably the most complex tool developers have to deal with. Because a lot of Free Software is written in C, GCC is often the compiler of choice.

Asus will bring the Eee Box desktop to the UK in August, the company announced today. However, it confirmed to Register Hardware that machine will initially only ship with Windows XP Home Edition. The compact desktop contains not Intel's desktop-oriented Atom 230 processor, as anticipated, but the less power-hungry notebook version, the N270, Asus revealed. Both CPUs are clocked at 1.6GHz and contain 512KB of L2 cache. But the N270 consumes 2.5W of power, while the 230 has a 4.5W TDP.

The makers of Wine claim that version 1.0 is the first such "stable" release and have said that although compatibility is not perfect, thousands of applications are reported to "work very well." Member and former president of Linux Australia Jonathon Oxer told ZDNet.com.au that the Wine project is "an attempt to make Windows irrelevant." "Essentially, it's an effort to supplant the underlying operating system layer and allow Windows software to run on a Linux platform without requiring Windows to be installed," he said.

Since the dawn of time -- or, at least, the dawn of personal computers -- the holy wars over desktop operating systems have raged, with each faction proclaiming the unrivaled superiority of its chosen OS and the vile loathsomeness of all others.

Today Novell makes a play for Linux users new and old with the release of its openSUSE 11 distribution. Version 11 introduces an installer, improved package management and updated key open source packages. The new distribution is Novell's attempt to put its best stuff out on the field as it ramps up the competition against Red Hat's Fedora and Ubuntu Linux in the growing Linux community.

Linux specialist Red Hat has announced it is developing an embedded hypervisor product that it claims will complement, rather than compete with, its existing virtualisation strategy. Launched on the first day of the company's annual user conference in Boston, the Embedded Linux Hypervisor is currently in beta, and no commitment has been made as to when the product will eventually ship or how it will be distributed to customers, Red Hat said.

Linux Mint is a heavily customized community-driven derivative built on top of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. According to the creators, its purpose is "to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." The latest release, Linux Mint 5.0 "Elyssa", released this month, retains most of Ubuntu's stability and features, but distinguish itself with unique features and tweaks. Although Mint is a great desktop, a few problems keep it from perfection. Mint is available in two editions: a main edition, which includes proprietary codecs, and a light edition, which doesn't. Since I was unable to find a 64-bit version of Elyssa, I downloaded and installed the 32-bit main edition on my test machine, with an Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor, 2GB of memory, two Nvidia GeForce 8600GT video cards on a Scalable Link Interface (SLI), and a 160GB SATA hard drive.

ZFS is an advanced filesystem created by Sun Microsystems but not supported in the Linux kernel. The ZFS_on_FUSE project allows you to use ZFS through the Linux kernel as a FUSE filesystem. This means that a ZFS filesystem will be accessible just like any other filesystem the Linux kernel lets you use. Apart from any technical or funding issues, a major reason that ZFS support has not been integrated into the Linux kernel is that Sun has released it under its Common Development and Distribution License, which is incompatible with the GPL used by the kernel. There are also patent issues with ZFS. However, the source code for ZFS is available, and running ZFS through FUSE does not violate any licenses, because you are not linking CDDL and GPL code together. You're on your own as far as patents go.