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Eucalyptus is an Open Source project that allows users to create and manage 'Private Clouds', and is API-compatible with Amazon's EC2. The founding professor, Rich Wokski, recently launched a company, backed by $5.5M in venture capital. Here's why he did so.

University of California, Berkeley, officials said Friday that hackers infiltrated restricted computer databases, putting at risk health and other personal information on 160,000 students, alumni and others. The university said data include Social Security numbers, birth dates, health insurance information and some medical records dating back to 1999. Personal medical records — such as patient diagnoses, treatments and therapies — were not compromised, officials said. The databases also included personal information of parents, spouses and Mills College students who used or were eligible for Berkeley's health services.

Version 9.04 of the multi-platform XBMC Media Center is released. Codenamed Babylon, the software comes with massive and in part, impressive changes.

My choice has fallen on the Eclipse IDE, I know there are many good perl editors out there and I don't have any knowledge about which is the best choice for what job. I do know the choice of editor is very personal and there are even people who use vi as a Perl IDE. My main reason for using Eclipse is because I've read about it on a forum and many people seemed to like it (and it's free). It seems to be a bit of overkill to write my very simple pieces of code in a full fledged IDE and I know it has some downsides too.

"Using MinGW it may be possible to develop software in Linux that can also run on Windows and, as it might likely be cross-platform, receive more attention than a program that is purely Windows, thus be of higher quality and in the end possibly contribute to users switching away from Windows."

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.