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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.

Linux Mint, an Ubuntu-based distribution that prides itself on its good looks and ease-of-use, has just upped the ante with its Linux Mint 6 Felicia release candidate. The thing about Felicia is that it is the first KDE 4-based version released by Clement Lefebvre and his team over at Linux Mint.

Ahead of the first-ever Open Source Software (OSS) BarCamp event, which will take place on 28 March in Dublin, chief-organiser Laura Czajkowski has said that small-to-medium businesses have much to gain from open source, even if it is just to realise that there are alternatives out there.

Yesterday we broke the news that AMD will stop supporting the R300-500 GPUs in the Catalyst driver. There have been well over one hundred posts in the Phoronix Forums from ATI customers upset with this decision, but fortunately, there is first-rate open-source support available. AMD continues to release documentation and code while the X.Org development community has been hard at work on the xf86-video-ati and xf86-video-radeonhd drivers along with Mesa and Gallium3D components. The main problem though is the open-source stack -- at this time -- providing poor gaming performance, but power management can also be a problem. In yesterday's article we provided some R500 comparative 2D and OpenGL benchmarks, but in this article are some power management results comparing the Catalyst 9.2 driver to the xf86-video-ati driver.

I stumbled across Amber's blog by accident today – she's writing a series of posts that document her experience installing and using Linux distros and a variety of open source applications. I hope open source developers are following along as stay-at-home-mom Amber shares her adventures in Linux and open source. She eloquently points out usability issues that make it hard for your average mom to race out and embrace open source. Developers: Take note. For that matter, publishers should take note – I hope Amber gets a book deal out of her blog series.

When I came across a Future Montage video from Microsoft the other night, it got my wheels turning a bit and I started to think about the Microsoft Surface, the $10,000 table computer Microsoft released in 2007 and it hit me that maybe, just maybe that table could represent Microsoft's future vision of computing.

In this tutorial I will show you how to install GlusterFS in a scalable way to create a storage cluster, starting with 2 servers on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server. Files will be replicated and splitted accross all servers which is some sort of RAID 10 (raid 1 with < 4 servers). With 4 servers that have each 100GB hard drive, total storage will be 200GB and if one server fails, the data will still be intact and files on the failed server will be replicated on another working server. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86-64 server with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Intel and a group of leading automotive-industry manufacturers have formed a non-profit group to develop and promote an open-source reference platform for In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. When Intel announced earlier this week that it was developing a set of Atom processors specifically for the automotive market, it did not name specific car or parts manufacturers who had committed to using those chips. Today's announcement partially answers the questions this omission raised.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Thursday, March 5, 2009, with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 53. On today's newscast . . . Helios goes mano-a-mano for being a Linux guy, car companies looking to Linux, netbooks again (it's been a while), bad support, Microsoft spreading FUD, FOSS people spreading FUD, and a Scale wrap-up.

Posts like this are the reason we try to write everything in advance ;) This post (especially, stuck in the middle of this week) will serve as a reminder to all of us here that not writing stuff before-hand can make the lean times difficult. We're like a bunch of chipmunks with no winter stash ;) Freezing. Cold. Alone. Just waiting for death, which is inevitable since we're starving, it's freezing out and our stomach's won't let us sleep!

Robotics engineering has taken a giant leap forward with this bionic-powered prototype wireless vacuum cleaner invented by iRobot, threatening the growing trend toward embedded Linux in robotics.

Open source is an outsider, not part of the establishment. One price it pays for this is not being privy to all the decisions that are made in the field of governmental policy. Too often, established players are involved without any counterbalancing input from the free software side. Generally, we don't see all the machinations and deals that go on here behind closed doors. But thanks to the increasingly-indispensable Wikileaks, we have the opportunity to observe how an organisation close to Microsoft is attempting to re-write – and hijack – an important European Union open source strategy paper. Here's Wikileak's explanation of why this is an important document:

At first glance, Google Apps and Microsoft are the horses to beat in the online software suite race. But The VAR Guy remains preoccupied with a dark horse called Zoho, which just launched Writer 2.0 and continues to gain moment across multiple software as a service (SaaS) fronts. Here's the scoop.

Putting fuel in my truck was the last place I expected to get into a confrontation. Especially concerning Free Open Source Software. I mean, come on... It was one of "those vans". You know, the brightly colored ones that promises to propel a computer tech or two as it goes down the road? The one that pulls up in front of houses with people who have broken their computers? You know the ones...

"Open source" has come a long way and with the new administration adopting the open source content management system Drupal to power the recovery.gov Web site, open source's visibility will likely get another big boost. Speaking from the standpoint of a developer, the number of tools, utilities and programs available under open source licensing continues to be very exciting. But it is also true that confusions still persist about what it is and, in particular, about its costs. "Open source" and "free" are not synonymous -- though there is a relationship between the two terms.

Operating Systems Battle Draining Precious IT Budget and Resources. The evil eyes, destroyed relationships and recriminations associated with the long-raging battles over Mac, Windows, Unix and Linux operating systems are on their way to becoming distant memories thanks to Likewise Software’ solutions and their new t-shirts.

New research from AMI Partners reveals some promising trends in the business intelligence market. As BI sales heat up in certain regions, The VAR Guy wonders if open source BI companies stand to benefit. Here's the scoop.

This is the first article in a two-part series that looks at a hands-on approach to monitoring a data center using the open source tools Ganglia and Nagios. In Part 1, see how to install and configure Ganglia, the scalable, distributed monitoring system for high-performance clusters based on a hierarchical design. Also learn how to add more monitoring capability by writing Ganglia plug-ins and by enabling external-source spoofing.