Showing all newswire headlines

The Fedora Project team today announced the release of Fedora 11 Alpha. The release includes a number of new features including the new Windows Cross Compiler and a development release of Gnome 2.26 as the default desktop.

Ubuntu should not be considered merely the desktop Linux distribution of choice anymore if a new survey conducted by Canonical and open-source analyst firm RedMonk is an indicator. The majority of nearly 7,000 businesses surveyed that are using Ubuntu Linux said they use it for a range of mission-critical workloads that are typically run on servers, such as proxy/caching, routing, mail security, clustering, virtualization, data backup and databases.

Novell employees should brace for more layoffs, beyond the 100 or so the company has officially discussed. Chief executive Ron Hovsepian has told the company's employees in Germany that more cuts are coming, sources close to the company have told The Register. "The day after Hovsepian said no more cuts beyond 100, he told German employees (as per German law) that there would be more cuts coming," the source said.

Following up on his "State of the Penguin" report, Helios' Ken Starks issued a new blog entry on the state of Linux in business, and it still isn't great. Until Linux and open source software can overcome the perceptions of CEOs who think that "you get what you pay for," Linux will remain a second-class citizen, he writes.

Dell goes Linux and Thin Clients. How cool is that? Very. Well, well, how about that Dell? In a landmark decision, Dell announced that it has penned a deal to use Novell's SUSE Linux in its data centers to power its new OptiPlex FX 160 thin client systems. Wow. Dell is doing this to save money and simplify its IT infrastructure and requirements.

Microsoft plans to ship four security bulletins next Tuesday with patches for a range of serious security vulnerabilities affecting millions of Windows users.

Nothing to do with Linux, except that if these were Linux vulnerabilities, they would already be released.

Myka, which recently began shipping an IPTV set-top box (STB), is offering a $100 discount to entice developers to roll up their sleeves and contribute to its device’s open-source, Linux-based software stack.

HyperVM is a multi-platform, multi-tiered, multi-server, multi-virtualization web based application that will allow you to create and manage different virtual machines each based on different technologies across machines and platforms. Currently it supports OpenVZ and Xen virtualization and is available for RHEL 4/5 as well as CentOS 4 and CentOS 5. This tutorial shows how to install it on a CentOS 5.2 server to control OpenVZ containers. I will also explain how to manage OpenVZ containers with HyperVM on a remote CentOS 5.2 server ("slave").

Hewlet Packard has released a custom interface for Ubuntu running on netbooks. DownloadSquad (DS) reports that the interface was designed for HP’s Mini 1000 Mi Edition netbook and is built on an Ubuntu 8.04 base.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) adoption is viewed as a key enabler for the 21st century enterprise due to increased opportunity for productivity and integration, and requires significant changes for both business and IT executives. The goal of the conference, now in its second year, is to raise the dialogue about SOA and its use in healthcare, with a focus on its role as a transformation agent to add organizational value.

"The cloud" is just a new buzzword for an old concept, hosted services. While a number of grumpy old geekbeards swear they will never embrace "the cloud" because they do not trust their data in other hands, it's already happening. Google Mail, for whatever reason, is cool in ways that Hotmail and Yahoo mail never were. Google Apps are also cool. Inexpensive hosting services have been a staple of the do-it-yourself geek since forever. So, does refusing "the cloud" mean that the hardcore refusenik is condemned to a life of isolation? No, because there is a third alternative, and that is the Peer Cloud.

MySQL creator Michael “Monty” Widenius has finally left Sun Microsystems following a long-drawn-out disagreement over what he saw as the firm’s “premature” release of MySQL 5.1. As we reported in September, the MySQL daddy was understood to have quit the company, less than seven months after Sun paid $1bn for the free database outfit. And it turns out the rumours were – sort of – true.

Flying the South African open source flag at this year's IndiaSoft 2009 show as well as at Germany's CeBIT show will be Durban-based OSS company Thusa. Thusa managing director Warwick Chapman will be speaking to the Indian software development community at IndiaSoft about the opportunities available to them on the continent of Africa and in South Africa especially.

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on JBoss. Written by Ramanujam Rao, JBoss Portal Server Development teaches developers how to build portal applications such as B2B and B2C web sites or corporate intranets, and how to develop a professional portal system using the JBoss portal server.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Monday, February 2, 2009 (Groundhog Day), with your host, Marcel Gagné. This is episode 49. On today's newscast . . . nature's own weather forecaster tells it like it might be and bites it. Did Linus jump ship too soon? Dept of defense thinks FOSS is cool. Mototala axes Windows, sort of. Going RMS on semantics.

Monty Widenius, the main author of the original MySQL database and a founder of the MySQL AB company, has finally left Sun Microsystems following a falling out with Sun over the status of MySQL 5.1. We reported last year that Widenius was unhappy with the release of MySQL and had told Sun that he was planning to leave the company. Now he has finally announced on his blog that he has done that and has established a new business, called Monty Program Ab.

We've never seen it before. Hopefully we'll never see it again. :) We're going back to the Solaris 10 Unix well, reaching back a little (as opposed to the 14 month reach-back we did yesterday ;) and adding a little something to our posts on adding NFS management to an existing VCS cluster as well as the follow up on how to do the exact same thing without taking your VCS cluster offline.

Mark G. Sobell's freshly revised reference work on Ubuntu Linux may be the most impressive computer book I've seen in the last 10 years. If you are currently stranded with a pile of abandoned computers on a desert isle, I'm telling you, this is the book.

Back at the 2003 OSCON, r0ml Lefkowitz gave a talk called "Six Missing Open Source Projects".The next year he gave a talk titled "More Missing Open Source Projects". At the top of his first list was CRM, or Customer Relationship Management, systems.

Surprisingly, the answer could well be yes. At least if a bunch of computer science researchers at Durham University have anything to do with it. The group have taken the 3D game engine that powers the immersive Half Life 2 game and used it to develop a realistic virtual simulation of the university computer science department. More to the point, they have created a realistic fire drill simulator which might just help save a life or two.

[It is nice to see continued evidence of computer games being used to help people rather than the same old stories being rolled out by the mainstream media trying to convince us that all game developers are evil. - Jen]