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How green is Linux? In my previous post 10 things to tell your kids when you ditched windows for linux One of the comments argued that Linux is no more energy efficient than Windows. So I did a little research. * First of all there's the tickless kernel

Trolling around the Linux blogosphere, one can't help but come across repeated references to this company in Redmond, Wash., that makes a similar operating system. They're putting this Windows thing in dual-boot laptops over at Dell, and Red Hat just signed an interoperability agreement with these Microsoft people.

Microsoft has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against TomTom alleging that the device maker's products, including some that are Linux-based, infringe on patents related to Microsoft's FAT32 filesystem. This marks the first time that Microsoft has enforced its FAT patents against the Linux platform, a move that some free software advocates have long feared could be disastrous.

Microsoft's top intellectual property lawyer said that the company's legal action against TomTom over Linux was specific to that company, but he declined to say whether other suits over the open source operating system might follow. "I wouldn't speculate at this point," Horacio Gutierrez told CNET News in an interview late Wednesday. Gutierrez did add that Microsoft's patent suit against TomTom, which includes three claims related to file management techniques used in the Linux kernel, was specific to that company.

The number of open source projects targeting mobile platforms is rising sharply, according to Black Duck Software, the leading global provider of products and services for accelerating software development through the managed use of open source software. Black Duck spiders the Internet collecting open source and other downloadable code into a repository it calls the Black Duck KnowledgeBase.

In 2007, Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, hit an all-time low. Users were leaving it behind in favor of Ubuntu and openSUSE. Well-known Linux evangelist Eric S. Raymond, after looking at the latest release, Fedora Core 6, dismissed Fedora as junk. Raymond wrote at the time, "Over the last five years, I've watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what a near-unassailable lead was at one time in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels."

Sometimes open source projects "fork." Disagreements over direction cause a splinter group to hive off and maintain their own separate code base. This is going to happen with well-known heavyweight FOSS staple, MySQL, after the original author quit Sun Microsystems earlier this month.

Red Hat's JBoss middleware team apparently has recruited veterans of Oracle/BEA Systems, IBM and Sun Microsystems. Is Red Hat turning mind share into middleware market share? You bet.

Not the longest post of the year, but building up to the longest title ;)

Linux runs on the first e-book reader released this year ... and on the second ... and the third. Just a few days ago, the first Kindle 2s started shipping from Amazon.com, making them the first e-book readers to be released to the public this year -- and you may be surprised to learn that what's inside isn't some proprietary software running on Windows CE, but rather the good old Linux kernel.

I first learned of Microsoft bringing suit against in-car navigation company TomTom NV when I got an email from a journalist asking for comment. Why all the buzz? Because apparently several of the patent claims relate to TomTom's implementation of the Linux kernel - and while Microsoft has made noises publicly and threats privately for years alleging that Linux infringes multiple Microsoft patents, it has never actually brought a suit against a Linux implementer specifically alleging infringement by the Linux portion of their product. The result is that across the industry, everyone is asking the same question: What Does it All Mean? For what it's worth, here's my take. (hint: Don't Panic)

How do you take a project with 40 million lines of code that's shipping on millions of devices around the world and make it open source? That's the Everest of a problem facing the Symbian Foundation as they start to deliver on the promises made when Nokia brought Symbian under its wing.

Initiated by the Conservative opposition party, the push towards Open Source Software will now be realized in a ten point Government Action Plan penned by the governing Labour Party.

Leaving XP behind won't be easy. Have you thought about your choices--Vista or Windows 7? Is a third choice possible just beyond those two in Ubuntu?

W3C eGovernment Stakeholder Meeting Welcomes IT and Policy Representatives from Government and Industry to Washington, DC March 12-13, 2009

Virtualization has been a buzz word for a few years now. Some people think it has been over-hyped but I'm not one of those people. The big competing products seem to be: VMware, Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, Parallels (including OpenVZ), and Hyper-V. Is there too much choice out there? Choice isn't bad, is it? Will there eventually be a market shake up with a thinning of product candidates as a result? Will someone try to proclaim that they are the virtualization "standard"? I don't really know. I certainly like competition and don't think having a number of competing products is bad. There are both proprietary products and FOSS products. As you can guess, I lean towards the later if at all possible.

Another promising piece of news from the open source IT channel: Opengear, which develops open source systems and network management sofware, is growing its partner network and expects to generate record results this quarter.

Microsoft (MSFT) has gone and done it, they've filed suit in U.S. District Court claiming Linux violates their patents. The case centers on portable GPS device maker Tomtom, which uses Linux in its device.

For simplicity's sake, I keep all of my general-purpose boxes running the same Linux distribution. That minimizes conflicts when sharing applications and data, but every substantial upgrade means downloading the same packages multiple times — taking a toll on bandwidth. I used to use apt-proxy to intelligently cache downloaded packages for all the machines to share, but there are alternatives: apt-cacher, apt-cacher-ng, and approx, as well as options available for RPM-based distributions. This article will take a look at some of these tools.

It's arriving about two months later than originally scheduled (and didn't arrive in 2008 like Intel wanted), but X Server 1.6 has been officially released this afternoon and it wasn't 212 days late like the infamous X Server 1.4.1 release.