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Recently my local LUG (LILUG) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial. According to him the GPL and other viral licenses are no longer needed as they do more harm than good to the community. I don't want to put words into his mouth so I've transcribed what he said during the talk. You can view the ESR Q/A talk in its entirety, this specific excerpt is about 45 minutes into the video.

Here I created another Python script using Pywbem to get the Storage Pools from ESX. In this script you can get the disk utilisation statistics from each datastore or from a particular datastore. Examples below...

All computer displays show images in bitmap mode. What this means is that every image is really a bunch of tiny little squares that make up the image. What this essentially means is that computers can't display really smooth curves.

Next month should see the first steps from the Canonical camp that will let you run an Amazon-style cloud behind the firewall on Ubuntu. The Jaunty Jackalope edition of Ubuntu, version 9.04, due in April, will let you take existing Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) from Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and run them on your own Ubuntu servers.

A new botnet, “psyb0t” is the first known to be capable of directly infecting home routers and cable/DSL modems.

Novell on Tuesday released Suse Linux Enterprise 11, which includes for the first time a full runtime environment for Microsoft .NET applications. The open-source company said the new version of the data center operating system shows improvements over its predecessors in terms of interoperability, mission-critical computing and virtualisation. One of the key enhancements in Suse Linux Enterprise 11 is its Mono Extension. Mono is an open-source project that aims to create a .NET-compatible set of programming tools, including elements such as a C# compiler. According to Novell's product director for the EMEA region, Holger Dyroff, the addition of commercial support for Mono means Suse Linux Enterprise 11 users can migrate their existing .NET applications across to the Linux platform.

You're not really supposed to love an operating system. It's like your car's hydraulic system, your digestive system or the global financial system. It's supposed to do its job -- and not get in your way while you're doing yours. But like your car, your guts and the economy, computers are more complicated than they seem. And so are our feelings about them. As the tech community gears up to celebrate Unix's 40th birthday this summer, one thing is clear: People do love operating systems. They rely on them, get exasperated by them and live with their little foibles. If that's not the basis of a lasting love, I don't know what is.

When Canonical this May launches an online training course for Ubuntu Server Edition, the virtual classroom will include a special guest speaker: CEO Mark Shuttleworth. Here’s the scoop, and how to attend if you’re interested.

Today, I finally found some time to make a little headway on this project (which should be a lot simpler than it is). Basically, what I'm looking to do is create a way to track specific process's idle times at any given point in time on any given Linux or Unix system.

This article describes in depth how you can get your microphone working in todays linux distributions. As a extra benefit it's also describing how you can get your microphone working in skype without any pulseaudio hacks/tweaks.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced the winners of the annual free software awards during the GNU/Linux conference LibrePlanet, held on March 21-22 at Harvard Science Center in Cambridge, MA. Creative Commons was honored with the Award for Projects of Social Benefit, and Wietse Venema was honored with the Award for the Advancement of Free Software. Presenting the awards was FSF founder and president Richard Stallman.

It was a short presentation that focused dryly on "opportunities" for open source in something he called the "service-driven data center." But when he turned to the need for Linux to inter-operate with Windows in this service-driven data center, Novell's chief executive Ron Hovsepian delivered an apology - of sorts - for his company's controversial marriage to Microsoft in 2006.

Just because Microsoft Windows itself is a proprietary, closed-source operating system doesn't mean that the software giant isn't open to open source. "We're seeing open source applications adopted on the Windows platform," Ramji told InternetNews.com. "The rationale is that you can use the existing hardware and software investments that you've made to deploy workloads."

Lordy, lordy, look who's 40! Happy birthday, Unix -- you're looking great for your age. You certainly weren't the first operating system on any platform, but you managed to stride from the minicomputer era into the microcomputer era and the personal computer era, winning fans wherever you went. How many other operating systems can make the same boast? With your birth as our starting point, then, let's look at the biggest desktop OS milestones of the past 40 years.

Syntext has released a free version of Serna - a cross-platform WYSIWYG XML editor. The free version is intended for use by open-source project developers, students, and other non-commercials. It is written in C++ and Python, employs XSLT+XSL-FO for document rendering, and has a C++ and Python API`s.

A project that has no goals — no bugs to fix, no features to implement — has only stagnation to look forward to. The best prevention for this kind of stagnation is an active community of users who are quick to share what they want with the developers — even if there is the occasional users vs. devs feature stalemate. The KDE Project has no shortage of community-contributed ideas, and to keep the concepts flowing freely, the powers-that-be have implemented a new feature of their own: A designated section of the KDE Community Forums christened The "Brainstorm" Forum.

Linuxleak has launched version 2 with more sources and an intuitive layout redesign. Get the latest Linux news, photos, video and information on Open Source, covering popular Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, RedHat, Fedora, Slackware, CentOS, and SuSE.

Kernel 2.6.29 has arrived and brings with it a string of new features. New to 2.6.29 (codenamed "Tuz") is kernel graphic mode setting, which gives users an immediate screen view.

Flash cookies are the secret nasties of using the Flash player on any platform, and most computer users don't even know they exist. Like HTTP cookies, it is rather naive to assume that they are always used for our benefit. In this two-part series, Carla Schroder shows the Adobe way and then the Linux way of managing Flash cookies.

Life's certainties include death and taxes but also the advancement of the GNU/Linux® operating system, and the last two kernel releases did not disappoint. The 2.6.28 and 2.6.29 releases contain an amazing amount of new functionality, such as a cutting-edge enterprise storage protocol, two new file systems, WiMAX broadband networking support, and storage integrity checking. Discover why it's time to upgrade.