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Business continuity planning and disaster recovery is an essential business risk management technique which is great on paper but often doesn't deliver when it needs to. Business continuity planning is also expensive and has always been something only large corporates, with large budgets, could afford. But now, with cloud computing, even small businesses can put a plan in place to ensure they are able to continue their business in the face of a radical environment changes.

Besides the efforts to make MonoDevelop play nice in MacOS X, we've also been doing progress in the Windows side.

This guide explains how you can do a live migration of an OpenVZ container from one OpenVZ host to the other. Both OpenVZ hosts are running on Debian Lenny in this article, but the live migration does not differ on other distributions.

Merger activity in the tech sector has dropped precipitously from a year earlier, but the landscape is quickly changing as confidence returns. M&A activity in the first three months of the year plunged 85% from a year earlier, with only 625 deals worth $8 billion completed, according to tech research firm 451 Group. The first quarter of 2008 saw 835 deals worth $55.2 billion inked.

Here it is, the moment many of you have been waiting for: the U.S. Trustee's office, through its counsel Joseph J. McMahon, Jr., has filed a motion in the SCO bankruptcy proceeding to convert the SCO's Chapter 11 to Chapter 7. And I think this will be your favorite sentence: "Additionally, not only is there no reasonable chance of "rehabilitation" in these cases, the Debtors have tried — and failed — to liquidate their business in chapter 11." So what's left? Dismissal or, more logically, Chapter 7.

We've been making good progress towards CrossOver 8.0. In fact, we are feeling confident enough about our progress that we put out a public release of the first beta. Additionally, I'm happy to say that we've leveraged Francois Gouget's hard work, along with a lot of work from the broader community, and have put out unsupported builds for FreeBSD and OpenSolaris.

Open source project Nagios is being forked into the Icinga project. The Netways firm, which specializes in open source IT management services and particularly the monitoring solution Nagios, will be managing the fork.

A PC desktop market share analysis of questionable reliability is being eagerly swallowed by Redmond's tame battalions of "tech journalists." Folks, if you're getting paid to be gasbags who are not required to publish anything of substance you're doing fine. If you're being paid to be real journalists, you're not succeeding. It's like you all have Alzheimer's and have forgotten the previous stories that you dutifully parroted stating completely different figures, like "Linux desktop market share to reach 6% in 2007."

Recently I wrote an article about the creation of a new free (AGPL) web service called Libre.fm, aimed at replacing Last.fm and even going beyond that to develop an identity of it's own. Things have progressed very quickly since, so I thought I'd better follow up with more information...

The VAR Guy is enjoying some healthy industry debate. By now, you likely know that SpringSource acquired Hyperic, an open source systems management company. But the real fun started when a rival CEO offered his opinion on the deal. Here's the scoop.

Code has been released for the open-source version of Silverlight that closes the gap on the as-yet-unfinished next version of Microsoft's browser-based media player. Moonlight 2.0 has been delivered for preview featuring APIs from Microsoft's Silverlight 3.0 that the project's organizers said it made sense to add. Moonlight puts Microsoft's Silverlight on Linux and Unix. Moonlight 2.0 is modeled on Silverlight 2.0 but since work began on the second version of Moonlight, Microsoft released a beta for the third edition of Silverlight with final code expected later this year.

Question: Hyper-V, VMware, Citrix — do any of them have it right? Answer: Only if you could combine all three into a single product.

I've written (and before that observed/suffered) about the Xfce flavor of Ubuntu — Xubuntu — not offering much of a speed advantage over plain ol' GNOME-based Ubuntu and certainly not comparing well to the default Xfce setups of Debian and Slackware. The speed of Xubuntu was covered in last week's Distrowatch, which I also blogged about. In the latest Distrowatch, we learn how to strip down the distro and run "minimal" Xubuntu.

Steve Ballmer not only chose the day that Windows 7 RC hit the public download stream to announce swathing jobs cuts at Microsoft, but also admitted that more may be to come.

The trap statement in bash causes your script to execute one or more commands when a signal is received. One of the useful things you can use this for is to clean up temporary files when your script exits.

Photo gallery: This CNet CWD-854 USB Wi-Fi adapter cost only $22.40 at Amazon.com, and is automatically detected in both the Ubuntu 8.04 Linux and OpenBSD 4.4 operating systems — no small feat for those looking for compatible Wi-Fi adapters for FOSS OSes.

François Vogelweith is the author of zgegblog, a site that maintains a collection of great GNOME themes. Balanzan (translated: Balance) is one of its most popular creations, a very comprehensive theme based on Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope, which contains a wallpaper, logon theme, Emerald theme, controls and icons.

I am pleased to announce that the Phoronix Test Suite has just incorporated its 100th test profile. With now having 100 different tests and over 50 test suites, there are plenty of tests to suit your needs whether you are interested in graphics / video, server, CPU, memory, disk, or system benchmarking. This also raises the count for the number of compatible tests in our GPLv3-licensed automated testing software that is compatible with Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, and *BSD operating systems.

Six months ago I noted that the European Patent Office had embarked upon a fairly abstruse process:

a referral of a “point of law” concerning software patents by the President of the European Patent Office (EPO) to the EPO “Enlarged Board of Appeal”, something that seems to happen quite rarely. Now, you do not have to be a genius to see the problem with this; essentially, the EPO is asking itself whether it wants to widen its own jurisdiction, increase its power and boost its income by allowing software patents. Unless the Enlarged Board of Appeal consists entirely of self-denying, altruistic masochists, I think we can all guess what the answer will be.

A vulnerability in udev, the user-space tool that manages the Linux /dev tree, has left unpatched systems vulnerable to a local root privilege escalation. Exploits are already circulating on the full-disclosure mailing list, so it is rather important for users and administrators to update their systems. The problem was caused by the way udev processes the messages it receives—certain kinds of messages, which could be generated by user processes, were not considered. That oversight led to the vulnerability.