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When GroundWork Open Source launched its 5.3 product release earlier this month, the network management software maker was shocked to discover Ubuntu as the platform of choice for nearly one-third of initial customer deployments. Here's the scoop from WorksWithU, the independent guide to Ubuntu.

Tracey Pilone's recent blog at O'Reilly.com, The Intersection of Algebra and Technology got me thinking about one of my "soapbox" issues; the use of computing in education. One of the biggest proponents of computers in schools is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has provided millions of dollars in technology to education, from Elementary schools to Universities over the years. But is this all a good idea?

A couple of weeks ago Alfresco CTO John Newton posted a question on Twitter asking if SaaS and cloud computing were interchangeable terms. I had been using the terms interchangeably up until that point, but it got me thinking and I decided to do some research and find out.

LXer Feature: 13-Feb-2009

In the weekend of 7 and 8 February, the 9th Free & Open Source Developers' Europe Meeting (FOSDEM) took place at the Université Libre Bruxelles (ULB) in Brussels. Your editors Sander Marechal and Hans Kwint attended this meeting to find out for you what's hot, new in the area of the Linux environment and might be coming to you in the near future. This is our report of the second day covering the talks about Thunderbird 3, Debian release management, Ext4, Syslinux, CalDAV and more. Coverage of the first day can be found in our previous article.

Dell’s Inspiron Mini 9 Netbooks running Windows XP and Ubuntu are on sale. But US newspaper advertisements from Dell and Best Buy show Dell’s Windows XP netbooks to be a far better bargain than Dell netbooks with Ubuntu Linux. Here are the details.

There is a disturbing lack of resistance to Microsoft's market hegemony among anarchists and activists today. It is counter-revolutionary to design revolutionary fliers on a computer running Windows XP, displaying protest pictures on a computer running Windows XP is not a statement of protest, and using Microsoft software to coordinate anti-capitalist action is not anti-capitalist. To many, however, it seems that there is no other choice.

The venerable Debian Linux distribution has experienced a significant new release with its latest update, dubbed Lenny. While Debian is still not the easiest Linux distro to install and use, Lenny makes significant leaps forward and remains one of the most powerful Linux options. Many Linux newcomers stick with popular distros like Ubuntu or Fedora and feel intimidated by the likes of Debian. As Linux evangelist Mark Pilgrim once quipped, Ubuntu "is an ancient African word meaning 'can't install Debian'".

Red Hat and Microsoft are partnering on server virtualization -- a potential win for customers. But equally important to Red Hat, the relationship provides a counter-balance to Novell's ongoing work with Microsoft. Here's the scoop from The VAR Guy.

When announcing Ubuntu 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope, Mark Shuttleworth had hoped to make this next Ubuntu Linux release perform better and to boot "blindingly quick", in particular with Ubuntu beginning to appear on more mobile devices. Well, with Alpha 4 have been released earlier this month, are Canonical developers and the community in the right direction with making Ubuntu 9.04 boot quickly? We have boot-time benchmarks of the latest Ubuntu 9.04 work along with Linux desktop benchmarks comparing it to its predecessor, Ubuntu 8.10.

You don't have to be in Silicon Valley to write code - just ask Linus. But Bolivia may not be the obvious place to look for a thriving free software community. Here's an interview with Brian Reale, founder and CEO of the open source company Colosa, based in La Paz.

LXer Feature: 16-Feb-2009

We start off this week's Roundup with a blast from the past with an article that compared the best Linux distributions of 2000. Its amazing just how far we have come since then. Amazon has unveiled a new slimmer Kindle reader that has more storage and quicker page turns. Priced at a somewhat steep $359, it will keep many who would want to buy it from being able too.

Nils Magnus of Linux Magazine Online pulled together the heads of three Linux distros for an interview and put them in a video: openSUSE's Joe Brockmeier, Debian's Steve McIntyre and Red Hat's Max Spevack.

In my day-job all our Linux boxes (bar 3) are Xen VMs. I wanted a way to take a backup of these with out the risk of the files changing underneath. For performance reasons I am running all of them on Logical Volumes. Within these VMs the DomU OS is once again using LVM for various reasons. This does create some headaches for taking the backup.

After more than 8 months, Inquisitor team presented first public alpha release on brand new Inquisitor v3.1 Live CD - a Live CD dedicated to doing hardware stress tests and benchmarking in a clean, controlled environment. This is experimental build made with Debian package base.

Adobe and Nokia are offering developers a Google-size pile of cash as incentive to write applications for Flash Player and AIR running across different types of devices. The companies today unveil a $10m fund to assist development and marketing of applications that further the Open Screen Project. They are making the announcement at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Novell invades China to pen a new deal for their Linux OS. What does China have to gain?

No scripts or Tech Tips today. Just some prep for an experimental post coming up later this week. Today's post is going to be somewhat of a departure from the material you usually read on this blog, although it will fit perfectly when it gets book-ended in the middle of the week by its follow-up.

In what we hope to become a weekly ritual, we bring you an overview of the distributions released in the last 7 days with a little help from DistroWatch.

The free Linux operating system doesn't reveal its charms easily, but charms it has. You just have to know how to make the software work for you. That will become easier next weekend for those in the Los Angeles area, which plays host to the annual Southern California Linux Expo at the LAX Westin hotel.

There are many fantastic Open Source projects out there. But just how do they get the funding they need to continue and expand development? Earlier this week I posted: Why 100% Free Software Destroys Linux. That post, in a nutshell, says : Open Source projects need a way to be funded. Commercial/Proprietary software is the way it has been done so far, and is the way it is likely to be done for the foreseeable future.