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Zimory's Linux-powered "cloud" services offers both great flexibility and frugality-- you pay only for what you use, and there are no long-term commitments or penalties. Paul Ferrill examines this vendor of "Cloud computing for the masses."

PC users who want to have an Ubuntu machine without eighty-sixing Windows completely often configure their systems to run both -- though a reboot is sometimes required. Not so with Portable Ubuntu. The app starts up an instance of Hardy Heron within Windows on demand. Though its window frames and menu bars appear the same as those of the user's Windows setup, it's Ubuntu through and through.

South Africa's newest GNU/Linux distribution, Kongoni, yesterday released its first alpha release for the upcoming 1.12.2 release. Kongoni - the Shona word for Gnu - is a desktop-focused distribution with significant inspiration from BSD-Unix systems. Codenamed Sophocles, Kongoni 1.12.1 is based on Slackware 12.2 with the latest upstream patches and also features KDE 4.2.2 as well as the latest stable releases of most common desktop applications such as OpenOffice.org.

The first release candidate for Linux Mint 7 “Gloria” has been released along with a great selection of useful new features. I decided to download the highly anticipated Linux Mint 7 release candidate and put the much talked about features to the test. I was so impressed I decided to display some of the new Linux Mint 7 features in these 10 simple how to videos.

I thought I'd finally gotten the ol' Linux thing figured out. I liked having a desktop chock full of bells and whistles and visual effects and nautilus-integrated apps. Once I had a taste of that Openbox magic, though, I couldn't get away.

Compared to its predecessors, OpenOffice 3.1 offers a whole range of new features. Instant eye catchers are the improved anti-aliasing for graphics, better chart functionality, and the new text highlighting in Writer. However, inconspicuous new features like custom document property fields and the OpenOffice User Feedback Program are just as interesting. With half a million new lines of code, the OpenOffice developers have invested considerable time and effort in improving the office suite's anti-aliasing capabilities. Pixelated drawings, charts and characters are now a thing of the past: compared with previous versions, the latest edition sports noticeably smoother edges.

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on a Debian Lenny server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

At Phoronix we have tested out Ubuntu 9.04 quite extensively with a variety of different hardware and have delivered numerous benchmarks, but we had not looked closely at running the Jaunty Jackalope with older hardware. In this article though we have done just that and carried out a number of Ubuntu 9.04 tests using an older VIA-based PC.

For the second time this week, an open source company has been acquired. And for the second time this week, the deal involved a venture capitalist that seemed to be consolidating its portfolio companies. Are venture capitalists losing patience with their open source investments? Here's the scoop.

It looks like Microsoft just does not learn from previous mistakes: a leading security outfit reckons that a well known security flaw from current and past versions of the Microsoft OS has been ported straight into Windows 7.

This guide details how to install virtualbox under ubuntu jaunty (9.04). It includes how to install the open source version, or the proprietary version with usb support, and the necessary tweaks to get usb to work.

Reports start to appear in the press about the ODF support quality enabled by the Service Pack 2 inside Microsoft Office 2007. I could say that I’m not surprised, but I somewhat had also expected the contrary. Unfortunately it seems we have here a poor implementation of ODF. If further reports confirm it (and I have no serious doubt they will), we will have the case of a monopolistic vendor messing up its own implementation of an open standard and have no viable excuse for doing so.

I decided to start using Soft Updates on my FFS partitions in OpenBSD. I'm still running version 4.4 of the Unix-like OS (and am still waiting for my CDs to arrive and for time to figure out how to do the upgrade to 4.5). According to the OpenBSD FAQ, using soft updates on a Unix-style Fast File System improves disk performance.

Looks like Microsoft has adopted the underpants on head and pencils up nose 'Blackadder Marketing Strategy' for Windows 7. Only a true loon could think up giving the RC away free and then making it shut the PC down every two hours for three months...

Oracle Corp Chief Executive Larry Ellison shook up Silicon Valley last month when he made a surprise move to enter the hardware market by acquiring computer maker Sun Microsystems Inc. Some analysts speculated that Oracle, the world's largest database software maker, actually wants Sun's software assets and that it might eventually sell off the hardware business. Below are Ellison's comments on his rationale for buying Sun and strategy for turning around the struggling company. Ellison supplied his answers to Reuters questions via email.

The announcement a few weeks ago of the preliminary plans for GNOME 3.0 catapulted the GNOME Shell and GNOME Zeitgeist into the spotlight. Previously little-known, these programs are now identified as the basis of a new user experience in GNOME 3.0. Meanwhile, both are in their early stages, and few have tried them, with the result that they are surrounded by question marks. What exactly are these programs? What vision do they share in common? Most importantly of all, are they capable of bearing the expectations placed upon them? Any answers to these questions must be tentative, because both projects are in rapid development, and certain to change dramatically by the time GNOME 3.0 is released. All the same, those in search of preliminary answers can find them with a bit of quick compiling.

Settlers on a long-forgotten Sun-Microsystems middleware island are expected to turn to open-source in greater numbers rather than stick with new master Oracle. News of Oracle's potential acquisition has acted as a catalyst for early users of the Sun ONE application server to finally review their increasingly dated web and back-office systems and to move rather than risk a licensing hike. Red-Hat services firm Freedom OSS, which has already been migrating Sun ONE customers to JBoss, told The Reg it expects a four-fold increase in business as a result of such reviews. The company currently moves between 10 and 15 organizations a year off Sun ONE to JBoss.

AMD ended out last year by releasing basic R600/700 3D code that allowed the rendering of open-source triangles, but not much in the way of usable OpenGL acceleration for end-users. Just last month AMD had then pushed out new R600/700 code that plugged into the Mesa stack and is being used as the groundwork for the providing open-source OpenGL acceleration on the Linux desktop with newer ATI graphics processors. In between December and April, AMD had also released extensive documentation covering the 3D engines on the R600 and R700 graphics processors along with the R700 instruction set architecture. While the open-source 3D support is still emerging for the Radeon HD 2000, 3000, and 4000 series, AMD has released some more documentation. This time around they have a programming guide for those developers interested in understanding the latest ATI GPUs.

Cute but astute: the new minor version of OpenOffice can do more than ever, such as cast shadows, position chart axes and provide structured conversations through comments.

There seem to be more arguments over usability in Linux than efforts to improve usability. Mark Shuttleworth doesn't argue, but pushes ahead. Some critics think that Ubuntu's relentless forward pace is too unilateral, not cooperative enough, and essentially a fork of Gnome. Bruce Byfield takes a look at the controversy.