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Sun Microsystems has released a new version of its OpenSSO Express identity management solution with support for Google Apps Premier. OpenSSO Express is targeted at companies and organisations that rely on Google's software-as-a-service solution (SaaS) as their central communications platform. With it individuals can use a cross-company single sign-on (SSO) to access the web, mail and other applications.

A salesperson walks into your office today and tells you that you have to buy a new, pre-built, expensive desk for every one of your employees. You have to buy a new desk today and replace it every three to five years. Additionally, there are no options for the desk and you may not alter it in any way — one desk is all we make and you have to buy it from us. You see, you don't really own the desk; you're simply purchasing a license to use the desk. Chairs are sold separately and we have the corner on the market for chairs that are 100 percent compatible with the desk. The chairs are also very expensive. Does that sound like a scenario in which you wish to participate? Preposterous, you say? Is it? Now, what if I told you that you do have a choice of desks?

Having some scripting skills opens up a whole new world of creativity and time-saving hacks. In Linux, UNIX, Free/Open/Net/BSD, and other UNIX-type operating systems the command shell and scripting tools are fundamental parts of the operating system. Learning how to write your own simple scripts isn't that hard, especially when you have a great teacher. Here is a handy reference of some of the excellent howtos by Akkana Peck and Juliet Kemp on LinuxPlanet.

According to this press release: "Washington, D.C. —Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV today introduced legislation that will facilitate nationwide adoption of electronic health records, particularly among small, rural providers. The Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009 will build upon the successful use of “open source” electronic health records by the Department of Veterans Affairs as well as the “open source exchange model,” which was recently expanded among federal agencies through the Nationwide Health Information Network-Connect initiative..."

Today is the big day you have been waiting for, the day where Ubuntu 9.04 is released. I hope you have successfully downloaded the LiveCD and installed it on your system. For those who have difficulties installing or migrating to Ubuntu, we thought this would be a good time to bring a nice little cheat sheet/installation guide for all MakeTechEasier readers.

There is a lot of untapped server utilization resulting from the inability to live-migrate VMs quickly. A technology I've been developing (MemoryMotion™) greatly accelerates migration time and lets server utilization rates be pushed up from 60 to 90%. This enables far greater ROI and improvements in power consumption.

Great collection of usual, and unusual, Linux logos.

Earlier this week I discussed some of the challenges that OLPC faces with regard to the announcement of the XO-1.5. However I believe that Sugar Labs will also have to deal with some interesting challenges as result of this announcement. For Sugar Labs the XO-1.5 will mainly be yet another device that they'll want to support given that it's likely to be one of the best choices when it comes to low-cost portable hardware for developing countries. However given the pitiful state of Sugar 0.84 on the XO-1 hardware (check mavrothal's forum comments for more information) - which won't be improved until Fedora 12 is released in autumn - I remain skeptical of just how well Sugar will run on the XO-1.5.

It's that time again, ladies and gents & mdash; time for the biannual release of a new Ubuntu version. This time it's the Jaunty Jackalope, officially Ubuntu 9.04, rolling off the line, and bringing with it a fresh new set of features users have been longing for. Prime among the features being touted by the Ubuntu camp are improvements in speed, perhaps rather fitting for a release named for the jackalope. Boot speed is reportedly greatly improved, as low as twenty-five seconds in some cases. Hibernation and suspend/resume have been enhanced, including immediate availability post-hibernation. Those we spoke to noted an impressive improvement in boot speed, significant even for virtual machines, as well as dramatic speed improvements in finding and connecting to wireless networks.

The annual Linux kernel summit may gain the most attention, but the size of the kernel community makes it hard to get deeply into subsystem-specific topics at that event. So, increasingly, kernel developers gather for more focused events where some real work can be done. One of those gatherings is the Linux Storage and Filesystem workshop; the 2009 workshop began on April 6. Here is your editor's summary of the discussions which took place on the first day.

The Internet Systems Consortium has announced that it has received enough support from sponsors to launch the BIND 10 project, to create a replacement name server for BIND 9. BIND 9 began its development in 1998 and is the most widely used DNS server software on the Internet. Among the sponsors are the UK's Nominet and Germany's DENIC.

Linux ordinarily uses Cron to automatically perform routine system maintenance, such as rotating log files and updating spam filtering rules. This works well for servers and other systems that are powered on 24/7. If, however, you want to save power by shutting off the computer when it's not in use, as is common for desktop and laptop systems, Cron can't run. Not running Cron routinely can result in monstrously large log files and other problems. The Anacron utility provides a solution, enabling the computer to run regular maintenance jobs whenever the computer is powered on, even if those times are unpredictable.

The VAR Guy double-checked this rumor and got confirmation: Diskeeper may leap beyond Windows to offer disk defragmentation software on Linux and Mac OS X. What’s motivating the potential Diskeeper moves? Here’s the scoop.

Finally we have a stable, official release of GCC 4.4. This major update to the GNU Compiler Collection brings forth Graphite, which is a framework for providing loop optimizations and eventually will be used to provide automatic parallelization support...

The Ubuntu development team this afternoon announced the final release of Ubuntu 9.04, the latest version of its desktop operating system. This latest release of Ubuntu includes a number of new features including improved graphics, a better notification system and new cloud computing capabilities.

Ulteo is an interesting company co-founded by the founder of Mandrake Linux Gael Duval. When I spoke with Duval last year about the initial 1.0 release, he told me that the plan was to expand to Windows in 2009 -- and here it is.

In parts one and two we learned the basics of writing our own custom Gimp plugins, and learned that it's simple and very useful. Today we'll put it all together in a more complex plugin for creating fancy 3D text effects, to make text look more rounded and three-dimensional.

This leads me to Easy Peasy v1.1, which is based on Ubuntu 8.10. Installing the XFCE respin of Fedora was not uneventful. I had to search the Internet on how to configure the wireless adapter, sound and installing all of the multimedia codecs for video and Internet.

As I've mentioned in a previous Linux Line post, I am not a programmer. Yet Linux is built on the philosophical principle of freely sharing source code. This is how those who create Linux frequently advocate it. But if I'm not a programmer, and source code therefore means little to me, why do I use Linux? Why do I spend much of my time suggesting others use it? Is it just because it's available for free? (Spoiler: No.) These are interesting questions that are not discussed very often.

The verdict in the Pirate Bay trial surprised many people, seeing as how many errors the entertainment industry's lawyers had made, and how little understanding they seemed to have of how BitTorrent works. The height of the sentence also surprised many; for aiding in sharing just 33 copyrighted items, the four founders were sentenced to one year in jail, and a massive fine of 3.6 million USD. Well, as it turns out, we now know why we were all relatively surprised: the judge in the case, Thomas Norstrom, is member of the same pro-copyright groups as many of the people representing the entertainment industry in the case. Sveriges Radio's P3 news programme has found out that judge Thomas Norström is a member of the Swedish Copyright Association. And who are also members of this group? Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, who all three represented the entertainment industry in the case against the Pirate Bay.