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Even as the global server market contracts by 14 percent, and Linux server sales decline 7 percent (Windows dropped 17.8 percent), according to IDC, Red Hat's Linux server business is swimming against the current. A February 11 Piper Jaffray report ("Red Hat Inc.: Buy. Survey Shows Red Hat Will Be a Top Share Gainer") says its "survey of 89 domestic Oracle applications customers indicates that Red Hat is gaining IT budget share."

In the "Linux Rescues Windows From Itself In Yet Another Creative Way" category we have all these newfangled Linux-powered instant-on environments. Hit the on switch, and in a few seconds you're connected and Web-surfing. Phoenix Technologies HyperSpace stands apart from the herd; follow along as your faithful correspondent torture-tests it.

Due to the tough economic conditions around the world, Novell last month began slashing some of their workforce. With that reduction, a good percentage of the paid OpenSuSE developers were laid off. As a major blow to the development of the open-source ATI graphics stack, one of the key RadeonHD driver developers has been lost. The key xf86-video-radeonhd developers from the start of this driver have been Luc Verhaegen, Matthias Hopf, and Egbert Eich. Well, there are now just two key Novell developers left working on the RadeonHD project.

LXer Feature: 02-Mar-2009

In this week's LXer Weekly Roundup DeviceGuru talks about how Lenny brightened up an old laptop, Linux has a marketing problem, how RMS may be looking at the internet the wrong way, Microsoft sues TomTom and all the rest of the previous week's big stories.

If you believe the results of the first annual Fiasco Awards then the answer would appear to be an unequivocal yes considering that Vista got a rather staggering 86 percent of the vote for the worst performing IT product of the year.

Microsoft got things seriously wrong when it released Vista and the company knows it. In the past, the absolute market dominance of Windows on the desktop has allowed Redmond to get away with such mistakes. That may no longer be the case now that Google has entered the operating system market with its Linux-based Android platform.

This program converts line endings of text files between MS-DOS and **IX formats. It detects binary files in a nearly foolproof way and leaves them alone unless you override this. It will also leave files alone that are already in the right format and preserves file timestamps. User interrupts are handled gracefully and no garbage or corrupted files left behind. ‘flip’ does not convert files to a different character set, and it can not handle Apple Macintosh line endings (CR only). For that (and more), you can use the ‘recode’ program

Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastructure for the implementation of cloud computing on computer clusters. Its name is an acronym for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". The current interface is compatible with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing interface. Tom Callway speaks to Rich Wolski, the project's director, about how Eucalyptus can be leveraged by enterprises and where it sits along side proprietary alternatives like Windows Azure.

Pricing for open source software products remains a hotly debated topic of interest. Dave Rosenberg argues in a recent post on Negative Approach that there is consensus that the price of open source software should be 10 to 20 percent of the price of equivalent proprietary software. He does not attribute that to anyone, and in our echo chamber of technology bloggers and tweeters, such a statement will quickly come to be seen as a long-established fact. Initially, my intuition told me that Rosenberg's thesis was wrong, but I didn't want to dismiss it without doing my own research. I looked into it a bit more and uncovered some interesting facts that argue both for and against the 10-to-20 percent range put forward by Rosenberg.

Usually, there are topics of discussion galore to choose from in the open source blogosphere, but once Microsoft filed suit against TomTom, it seems you couldn't read about anything else. TomTom faces a patent challenge over its use of the FAT file system in its Linux-based GPS units. Some see the suit as an attack on Linux itself.

Linux shop Xandros is launching the Presto "instant-on" platform for PCs and laptops at the Demo 09 conference. When I saw my first PC with an alternate, quick-boot Linux operating system (DeviceVM), I was impressed. But I no longer think this is a viable market. I do not believe consumers want to run two operating systems on their computers--one fast to boot but limited, and one slow but capable. They want what they know, and for most of them, that means Windows. That's why Windows XP has become the popular operating system for low-spec Netbooks. And with computers on the whole getting more powerful, and Windows 7 getting such great reviews even on midrange PCs now (which will be low-end in months), I just don't see much of a market for two-OS computers.

The recent release of DRBD 8.3 now includes The Third Node feature as a freely available component. This document will cover the basics of setting up a third node on a standard Debian Etch installation. At the end of this tutorial you will have a DRBD device that can be utilized as a SAN, an iSCSI target, a file server, or a database server.

I spoke to Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, who is openSUSE Community Manager, about FOSS license FUD. Brockmeier explains in detail what you need to understand when using open source software, and that it's really no more complex than the commercial stuff (and usually less so).

My brain is mushier than usual after putting in hours day and night all weekend. Enjoy the pictures :)

Have you ever needed to wirelessly network a Windows PC’s directly to a Ubuntu machine? In other words, you lack a router, switch, or other networking mechanism, each PC has a wireless device and you need to trade a file or play a network game? Read on. Ubuntu’s NetworkManager 0.7.0 contains the necessary features for creating an Ubuntu adhoc network host.

Last week saw the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.0, a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution designed for both personal and business purposes. We take the live CD for a spin to see what it has to offer. In the news this past week, openSUSE develops Debian-like distribution upgrade functionality to their package manager, Red Hat looks set for a comeback to the desktop arena as it announces virtualisation plans that will centre around KVM technology, and Novell signs a virtualisation agreement with VMware over support for their products. Also in the news, the Linux Starter Kit from Linux Format magazine has been released for free and we link to interviews with lead developers of Linux Mint and Kongoni. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com February 2009 donation goes to Wolvix GNU/Linux, a Slackware-based desktop distribution and live CD.

The absolute ultimate Linux beginners guide I stumbled upon an article at the BBC website. This is not a site I regularly visit, so I'm probably the latest person in the world to notice this article. I guess it's been noticed and many people already had their say on this. To bad there was no comment section with the article. But still I think there couldn't be enough people who have a say about this. I could start ranting here about how wrong he is with his conclusions, and how such articles are harmful by scaring people away from Linux. Which is true, but that's not my intention.

To get the next billion people online, netbooks must continue to become less expensive and thus more accessible. An interesting way to achieve this is to separate out the display and smarts into two pluggable units, one which can be shared by many, or replaced functionally with a smartphone, PC, or server.

Once again, time for the weekly distribution roundup. This week we have a rather large list of releases, so let’s get to it.

Mounting an LVM may seem a bit intimidating, it's not. In reality, despite the length of this entry, you will only be running a handful of commands, and most of those just to get the needed information. Do not despair, this will be as painless as possible.