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Six-year-old BlueStar Energy Services Inc. doesn't have the kind of systems-baggage that saddles many older organizations. Still, the Chicago-based company found itself hindered by the rigidity of its core systems, which constrained its efforts to expand its customer base and offer new services. Those barriers to growth led the company to embark on a bold effort to replace the bulk of its IT infrastructure -- including voice, e-mail and financial systems -- with open-source software. The initiative has been so successful that CEO Guy Morgan attributes much of the company's recent growth to it.

What's the crowd up to these days? Solving the world's problems -- and saving corporations a lot of money in the process. A few individuals are managing to eke out some personal gain in return for their contributions, but for the most part, the crowd is beginning to look like an incredibly large, wise, cheap labor pool. Fortunately, it's also unwieldy, which may be the crowd's saving grace.

The TangoCMS project has released version 2.2.0 of its web page content management system. Central to the release is resolving some security issues.

The largest trend in Solaris deployment these days is to wait for end-of-life and then replace the server with Linux, where possible. But now that OpenSolaris exists, should this trend continue? Perhaps we should look at OpenSolaris instead of Linux? Last week I took the stance that OpenSolaris could in fact replace Linux. In theory—in the future, if Sun plays its cards properly—this is possible. Asking if I’d deploy OpenSolaris at work, however, is a very different question.

This whole charade is geared towards one single goal: To sell more Microsoft Office based on some label that says “ODF” and helps the Microsoft lobbyists/boosters pressure governments against/away from Free software

If you have wanted to get your hands on an Intel Atom system but aren't interested in the netbooks that are out there, it's now relatively easy to find compatible motherboards out there to build your own Intel Atom system. Some of these motherboards even come with an Atom CPU already installed. In this article we have our hands on the Jetway NC92-230-LF, which is a mini ITX motherboard that is pre-installed with an Intel Atom N230 and offers one PCI slot, one DDR2 slot, Gigabit Ethernet, and 6-channel audio.

Free Linux distro Debian has been working steadily on its next version 5.0 of the OS, known as Lenny. Now developers have been called in for a vote to determine the course of its general release.

How to set up host interface networking for VirtualBox on Ubuntu. To start, NAT is by far the easiest way to get your guests connected to the interweb, but you may want to use the guests as servers. For this you need Host Networking.To configure Host Networking you need to configure network bridging, you basically go through four steps on the host machine

A tool that lets you look up any word on a Web page in Web dictionaries and references can come in handy for most Firefox users.

For many years Spamhaus has been top dog in the anti-spam world of DNSBL (Domain Name System Block List; also known as Realtime Blackhole Lists or RBLs). But Spamhaus is no longer a 100% free service. Even small nonprofits are now expected to pay at least $250 per year for a subscription to the Spamhaus DNSBL Datafeed Service. Now a new, free alternative to Spamhaus has arrived: the Barracuda Reputation Block List (BRBL), provided by well-known, open source-based Barracuda Networks. And Barracuda CEO Dean Drako says the company has no plans to charge for the service in the future. He says that BRBL (pronounced "barbell") "does cost us a little bit of money to run, but we think that the goodwill, the reputation and the understanding that Barracuda is providing the service will do us well in the long run."

Howto set up a Wireless Bridge in Debian. A wireless router is great when toting a computer with a wireless interface around, but moving a wired computer to another room or floor often means stringing an unsightly Ethernet cable through the house. The alternative is buying a wireless adapter, hoping that a Linux driver is available for it (there often isn’t). Even a wireless interface is no good when used out of range of the wireless router.

What role does the Internet Explorer Web browser play in your life? In recent days, new vulnerabilities in the flagship Windows browser have come to light. Alas, the fix is in, but pundits continue to suggest that running IE is just asking for trouble. I'm not ready to say IE is such a security risk that instead browsing the Web with Firefox, Google's new Chrome, the super-quick Opera or even Apple's cross-platform Safari is enough to save your digital bacon. Nope, it's all about what you do, where you go and what computing platform you choose to do it with. The fast is that i386-based Windows PCs continue to be the most vulnerable platforms out there because of both their ubiquity and relative lack of built-in security when compared to Macintosh OS X and the vast number of Unix-like OSes out there (including Linux, the BSDs and Sun's offerings). If you make a habit of downloading executable files (they're easy to spot in Windows because they end in .exe) without being absolutely sure they're totally legitimate and then double-clicking on them, bad things may very well happen.

The sysrq key sits quietly at the top of your keyboard, usually sharing space with PrntScrn. sysrq is a direct hotline to the kernel and gets you out of trouble when your system is getting tangled up in itself; Juliet Kemp shows how.

Low-level optimization of performance-critical code can be a challenging task. At this point, one assumes, the potential for algorithmic improvements in the targeted code has been realized; what is left is trying to locate and address problems like cache misses, mis-predicted branches, and so on. Such problems can be impossible to find by just looking at the code; one needs support from the hardware. The good news is that contemporary hardware provides that support; most processors can collect a wide range of performance data for analysis. The bad news is that, despite the fact that processors have been able to collect that data for many years, there has never been support for this kind of performance monitoring in the mainline kernel. That situation may be about to change, but, first, the development community will have to make a choice between a venerable out-of-tree implementation and an unexpected competitor.

Novell Inc.'s openSUSE project is becoming more open, as a new release due out Thursday includes licensing changes that make it easier to redistribute the Linux operating system, as well as a build service that will encourage more contributions from open-source developers. OpenSUSE previously used a standard user license agreement and contained some proprietary software -- namely Adobe Acrobat and Sun Java -- that made it difficult to redistribute the open-source software, says Joe Brockmeier, Novell's openSUSE community manager. OpenSUSE 11.1, the release that will be announced Thursday, modifies the license to eliminate some of the legal headaches and removes the proprietary software, which now must be downloaded separately.

eRacks Open Source Systems has introduced a new desktop model that uses the recently-released Intel (News - Alert) Core i7 processor. The Core i7 processor from Intel is the first member of a new family of Nehalem processor designs and is equipped with new technologies that boost performance on demand and maximize data throughput. The Core i7 processor speeds video editing, immersive games and other popular Internet and computer activities by up to 40 percent without increasing power consumption.

Debian developer Josselin Mouette has had his privileges of posting to the announcement mailing list for developers withdrawn, following an offensive post to the list in November. Debian Project Leader Steve McIntyre told iTWire that after Mouette's "abuse of the ability to post to the d-d-a mailing list, I asked our mailing list administrators to remove that privilege for in future." Following the post on November 23, at least two Debian women developers indicated they were reconsidering their participation in GNU/Linux project.

[Looks like it finally got the attention of the brass at Debian. - Scott]

We are pleased to announce you the launch, by January ‘09, of a world wide Mandriva Community Steering Committee whose main targets will be to: Unify and leverage the Mandriva Community and Ecosystem, thus aligning joint efforts towards clear goals. Provide a better visibility on products releases. And last but not least, establishing a key milestone on the road to success.

This week's feature article shows keen Linux users how to make the most of their computer by performing a custom install for a leaner and faster system - in this case we build a custom Ubuntu 8.10. In the news section, openSUSE prepares for the imminent release of version 11.1, Debian announces the upcoming second and final release candidate of the Debian installer, the Unofficial Fedora FAQ updates its HOWTOs for the recently released Fedora 10, the University of Glasgow settles on Slackware Linux for its log-in server, Spain's Trisquel is added to GNU's free distribution list, and Chile's Educalibre gets Tuquito Linux running on Intel Classmate netbooks. We also have links to two interesting interviews - one with Timothy Cramer from OpenSolaris and the other with Warren Woodford of MEPIS Linux. Finally, if you are still searching for that elusive minimalist Linux system that would run smoothly on any old computer, take a look at Tiny Core Linux - a desktop distro in 11 MB.

If you haven't yet tried Puppy Linux, here are five reasons why this little gem deserves a closer look.