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At some point, nearly everyone who uses Linux has someone ask them “what’s that?” This question almost invariably leads to “why is it better than (other operating system)?” What do you say when someone asks you this?

While my OpenBSD laptop slowly compiles Java (or not ...), I had to pull out the Ubuntu 8.04 laptop (both have identical hardware, Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) and quickly slam out a couple hours' work late last night (yes, on the night shift, which I finished at home ... at 1 a.m. through the magic of Wi-Fi and caffeine).

Save time and effort by launching batches of self-configuring virtual machines quickly. Sometimes you need to create an configure a bundle of virtual machines at the same time, but manually cloning and configuring the lot promises to be an unhappy task. In this article, see how to develop an automatic VM deployment solution so you can launch and activate batches of self-configuring VMs quickly. And as a bonus, you'll discover an approach that lets you run customized applications separately for each deployed virtual machine after system start.

It's a swampy bureaucratic wasteland full of legal minefields, and creepy little wild-eyed paranoid people scuttling around clutching secrets to their chests and croaking "Mine! Mine!"

What's more mature HP's Unix or Linux? According to HP, it's UNIX. For the past 25 years, HP has been rolling out its HP-UX Unix operating system on a regular basis to support mission-critical operations. That's going to continue with the company's upcoming update to HP-UX. The release, codenamed "Vigilance" and officially referred to as HP-UX 11i v3 Update 4, will offer improved virtualization capabilities and performance, InternetNews.com has learned.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In the olden days we had real modems with bauds and everything. A lot of years have passed, and Linux has acquired a lot of new communication protocols and devices. But here we are back to modems (EV-DO and HSDPA) being the latest and greatest. Paul Ferrill shows us what and how.

Free screenshot manager Shutter provides a really handy upgrade from the built-in GNOME screen grabber, sending your images to editors, auto-thumbnailing, sending to FTP or hosting sites, and doing much more. Shutter is actually the 0.7 version of what was once known as GScrot—and, boy, did that name need changing. The free app is a serious boon to bloggers, technical writers, or anyone else who needs to show off part or all of their Linux desktop.

I was with a big customer of ours last year, and reading through my account briefing before the meeting, I knew we were doing well. An analysis of their download activity showed they were heavy users of Solaris and OpenSolaris, and they had a large internal community of MySQL users, as well. In the meeting, their CIO said "we love where Solaris is headed." I then asked if we could help with MySQL, and he said... "I banned it."

Stephan Kulow, the OpenSUSE project manager, has proposed a roadmap for the future versions of OpenSUSE. While Ubuntu and Fedora distributions currently aspire to provide a new release every six months, which is loosely pinned to the GNOME development schedule, previously OpenSUSE did not have a have a fixed release schedule. OpenSUSE will now try to ship a new version every eight months as part of their new release cycle.

Jason Perlow of ZDnet's TechBroiler blog and I will discuss Netbooks and Virtualization.

If you want Java in OpenBSD, it's not easy to get it. Not impossible, but definitely not easy. First of all, it's a port, not a package, and due to Sun's licensing restrictions for Java, when you run the build on the port, you are instructed to, on your own, fetch nine files (some source, some binary) from a variety of locations and place those files in /usr/ports/distfiles.

Back in November we saw the launch of the S3 Graphics Chrome 530 GT and with that they talked up a new magical Linux driver that would provide HD video acceleration support along with OpenGL 3.0 capabilities. But no driver was released, however, a day later it was confirmed by S3 Graphics that they were working on a new Linux driver. Their PR representative said the driver was to be released in December, but that didn't happen. In February they continued to talk up their Linux support but months later there still was no driver. However, that changed in late February when S3 Graphics did in fact roll out a new Linux display driver.

The DEFCON organizers made the audio, video, and slides available for DEFCON 16 via RSS feeds.

It seems to be a big sticking point for windows users that they can't run their windows programs on Linux. They say they would use Linux if only they could run such and such windows program. Sounds to me like they wish to have their cake and eat it too. My point of view in this matter is quite simple. If you wish to run windows programs then use windows. If you wish to run Linux and windows programs then either use an emulator, wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) or a virtual machine. If none of those solutions are suitable then stop thinking about using Linux. Stop complaining that you will use Linux if only it could run this program. Either use the operating system the program was designed for or use an alternative program designed for the operating system you wish to use.

As the central element of Linux, the kernel is equally central to open source software in general. Because the community has such a stake in its design and success, the kernel has proven to be the hub around which much discussion revolves. The kernel's creator, Linus Torvalds, also has a stake in its success, and he takes part in the discussion.

As a security consultant gets four years in prison for helping to build a botnet which infected a quarter million computers, his IT company boss says he will give him a job when he is released.

[I guess if you want "the best" you have to wait for them right? ;-) - Scott]

Acquia's new CEO isn't the only major development for Drupal this week. Acquia also rolled out a new search service for Drupal Web sites, cloud-based hosting, and new Drupal application stacks. The plan is that new releases will give Acquia a greater competitive edge against commercial competitors while providing additional support for its open source code base. "Up until now, much of the focus around Acquia has been on serving the existing, large Drupal community," Erickson told InternetNews.com. "We believe ... we can now make the community larger and do more outreach to people that are non-Drupal users today. "

At CeBIT Open Source 2009 Martin Michlmayr, past Debian project lead, presented his current projects FOSSology and FOSSBazaar, and spoke about the role his employer Hewlett-Packard is giving him in the governance project and how the FOSSBazaar work group is organized within the Linux Foundation. Britta Wülfing of Linux Magazine Online interviewed Michlmayr after his talk to find out more about his work at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the European Union Public License (EUPL). Here are the results of that conversation.

fluid Operations, a provider of management software for complex fully virtualised environments, has developed an open source implementation of the VMFS cluster filing system that uses VMware ESX to store virtual machines and disks. This is a userspace driver written in Java that has been tested under Windows and Linux, but according to the project's site it "should work on any platform that supports Java". It only supports VMFS3, not versions 1 or 2, and was developed by analysing the on-disk format of VMFS.

It probably won't be "Facebook for Linux" but a Web site launching Tuesday is intended to create an online community specifically for Linux programmers who focus on embedded applications such as mobile devices, set-top boxes, industrial controls and everything apart from servers and PCs. The Web site, dubbed Meld, is organized and supported by MontaVista Software, which markets a Linux software stack, services, support and tools for the embedded market.