Showing headlines posted by dave

When using Linux in a business environment, it's important to monitor resource utilization. System monitoring helps with capacity planning, alerts you to performance problems, and generally makes managers happy. So, in this month's "Tech Support," let's install Cacti, a resource monitoring application that utilizes RRDtool as a back-end.

Let me introduce you to my friend Steven Shaw, or "Fat Guy," as he likes to be called. Fat Guy lives in New York City, is a lawyer, and over the last three or four years, has cultivated a second career as a professional food writer -- and a damn good one, too. At 32, Fat Guy was one of the youngest men to win the James Beard Award for Food Journalism.

Software patents -- more than copyright laws, commercial software companies, and uninformed legislators -- are the biggest threat to the future of free software. While software patents have only been issued regularly in the United States since about 1982 (after Diamond v. Diehr), and guidelines for granting software patents weren't established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) until 1996, software patents are now granted by the USPTO at the rate of nearly 30,000 per year, or over 15 percent of all patents issued.

Every so often, something truly magical appears and changes the universe forever. Recent marvels like wireless and digital content are just two examples that come to mind. Each changed our expectations of what's possible.

Six years ago, Oracle announced support for Linux, perhaps singlehandedly sparking the widespread adoption of Linux in the enterprise. Today, Oracle's Linux market share is growing by leaps and bounds, backed by the elegance, scalability, and low cost of Linux application clusters. In this hands-on guide, discover how easy it is to get Oracle up and running on virtually any Linux distro.

From caller ID to long distance, anything your phone can do, Asterisk can do better - and cheaper. Asterisk, an open source telephony project, greatly reduces the cost of traditional telecommunication technology and operation, and moves Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) into the mainstream. If you own a telephone, heed the call to Asterisk.

Contrary to popular perception, many open source vendors are making money, even growing in size, revenue, installed base, and influence. Their secret? The dual license, a business model that allows software makers to provide commercial software licenses for a fee, while simultaneously providing free software to a broader community. Industry analyst and longtime Linux watcher Stacey Quandt explains how it works.

One of your primary responsibilities as system administrator is communicating with the system users. You need to make announcements, such as when the system will be down for maintenance, when a class on some new software will be held, and how users can access the new system printer. You can even start to fill the role of a small local newspaper, letting users know about new employees, RIFs, births, the company picnic, and so on.

While it may not produce as bloody a match as the once-epic struggle between Microsoft and Sun did, JBoss Inc. and Gluecode Software Inc. are squaring off for a tussle over which of their open-source alternatives is more superior to proprietary J2EE-based middleware from IBM, BEA Systems Inc. and other vendors.

Analysts from the Yankee Group said that corporations using Linux in their IT environment should review the terms and conditions of each of their individual licensing contracts with legal counsel to determine if they have adequate indemnification coverage. In the absence of indemnification or specific indemnification provisions, corporations could be the target of an intellectual property lawsuit - forcing them to use their own money and resources for their defense.

Last week, Part 1 covered the basic configuration for a Debian FAI (Fully Automatic Installation) server. Today we'll configure the client installations--network server settings, what software is going to be installed, and the client boot methods. FAI supports network booting, which is fast and easy when it works. FAI also supports booting the clients from FAI boot diskettes.

Novell is lighting a fire under its desktop plans to face off against Microsoft's next generation of Windows in 2006. According to documents viewed by CRN, Novell plans to ship version 10 of its Novell Linux Desktop during the first half of 2006. The company plans another upgrade in 2007.

Technical errors and already out-of-date advice mar the usefulness of this guide to wireless protocols.

Setting up an electronic greeting card site for your own purposes is easier than you think. There are at least two respectable well-maintained open-source-licensed applications that can help you get your holiday e-cards to friends, family, co-workers, or customers this season. Sendcard and Penguin Greetings can give you the bragging rights to say you run your own e-card service.

Perhaps I was over-zealous in my praise of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in Part One of this article, “Free as in Freedom: GNU/Linux.” That would be unfair to many major corporations and the state of the world they’ve created. Lots of people, especially “successful” Americans, like the world just the way it is. Oh well. It was a history of “GNU beginnings,” the start of a movement that, unlike anything we’ve thus far seen, said “No!” to the corporate-defined order and created an alternative to corporate rule by “copyright,” and an operating system that challenged the way certain corporate monopolies have defined our desktops and how we use them (or go directly to jail).

Three versions of open source Solaris 10 are in the works, as Sun Microsystems Inc prepares to convert its entire middleware portfolio to a pay-per-use, open source stack.

For the past couple of weeks in the "NetWare Tips" newsletter, I've been talking about the soon-to-be-available (or maybe not) NetWare client for Linux. This is something that fans of NetWare and Linux have been kvetching about for at least the past half-dozen years.

MySQL announced the general availability of a set of graphical query and administration tools for its popular MySQL open source database. MySQL Query Browser, a toolset for creating and debugging MySQL database queries in a graphical environment, gives users an easy way to access and analyze information stored within MySQL database servers.

Sun Microsystems says there is growing interest among governments around the world in deploying open source software, particularly in Europe where the European Union has legislated that file formats must be open and interoperable.

If you ask Scot Melland, it's a good time to be a Linux professional. IT jobs across the board are picking up, but Melland, the CEO of Internet career site Dice, says Linux knowledge is a particularly hot commodity. Job postings on Dice for Linux professionals are multiplying at a much faster rate than any other skill set.