Showing all newswire headlines

How to remove existing local zone file systems on Solaris 10. Today's post is a follow-up to our very recent posts on modifying existing local zone filesystems and creating new file systems in a local zone on Solaris 10. Today, we're moving to completion with this simple how-to on removing filesystems on local zones. We'll follow up with another simple post on how to create and destroy (all in one) local zones on Solaris 10.

Google officially opened its Android Market Wednesday and promised that beginning next year, programmers will get the lion's share of revenue from applications sold on the download site for the company's mobile phone operating system. The first incarnation of the Android Market has more than 50 applications available for download, but they're all free. Google said the site will be able to distribute paid applications early in the first quarter of 2009.

Have you got some loose change in your pocket, and dreams of building a better operating system? It would take about 25 years, nearly 60,000 developer-years, and $10.8B to re-create a distribution like Fedora 9, according to a new report from the Linux Foundation. One implication of the study seems to be that companies wishing to economize, in these tough economic times, would do well to leverage all of the value in free and open source software. That value, the Linux Foundation report discloses, is considerable. For example, the Linux kernel alone would take $1.4B to build, and an estimated 16 years to complete. No wonder the Free Software Foundation never got anywhere with Hurd.

In a recent report of the European Union's IDABC agency, numerous software tenders in Europe run against regulations in that they favor proprietary software. If it were up to the IDABC, the tendering organizations would be liable for these practices.

After loitering around for so long, I finally got my lazy bum off the bed and installed Hardy Heron (8.04.1) onto my aging laptop. I’ve never been a sucker for eye-candy stuff, prefering to have more resources available for real work, instead of ooh-aahing over nice looking things all around my desktop. Well, but then I fell prey

“What's in a name?” some bloke in the sixteenth century once asked. As Microsoft knows, quite a lot. What you call something can have a major influence on how you think about it. So how Microsoft talks about free software is important – not least for the clues that it gives about its latest tactical move to defang the open source threat.

Today, the Linux Foundation is releasing a report that shows just how valuable FOSS can be. The authors find that recreating Fedora 9.1 (the free distribution upon which Red Hat's current Linux release is based) using traditional proprietary methods would cost $10.8 billion. They also find that the cost of creating the Linux kernel alone would be $1.4 billion.

Mozilla released the first workable alpha version of its new Fennec mobile browser last week, showcasing a new interface optimized for small-screen devices. Despite the slimmed-down look, however, Fennec makes use of the same Mozilla technologies under the hood that are well-known in Firefox. In my testing on my own handheld device, I found Fennec an enticing browser with a well-thought-out interface.

After many years of being an Amarok fan, I was introduced to Banshee. Banshee fast became my media player of choice, due to its ability to handle video and audio files, as well as stream internet radio and podcasts.

While listening to the Transforming Education Panel at the Microsoft ICT for Development Conference, I was struck by how much this conference is a direct result of the hype around One Laptop Per Child. If it wasn't for Nicholas Negroponte's vision for a whole new technology application, low-cost laptops for education, I doubt that Microsoft would be courting the development community so intensely or expanded its Unlimited Potential program. It sure would not have extended Windows XP's working lifespan.

When Ben Rousch joined Van Dam Iron Works close to a decade ago, it didn't take him long to move off a proprietary network operating system and start experimenting with a Linux server. He changed horses again, to a Windows server, but today Van Dam is back in the Linux fold -- lesson learned. Rousch, manger of information systems at the metals and structural steel fabricator in West Michigan, says that the company's IT network largely consisted of a Novell server and Windows 98 clients when he arrived back in 2000.

Earlier this week the ASUS Eee PC celebrated its first birthday (with a full birthday party and cake at LAPTOP Magazine). It was one year ago that the Taiwanese company began selling its first sub-notebook (which would form a new category known as netbooks). The little Eee PC 701 not only would spur on a whole Eee brand for the company and line of different sized Eee PCs, but it would push the competing notebook manufacturers into the netbook market as well.

"We're seeing organizations still willing to work on new systems," Miller claimed. "We're seeing people leaving financial institutions like Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns and starting new organization that need new installs. We're seeing a lot of opportunity in all this doom and gloom."

Asus CEO Jerry Shen has denied claims that consumers are sending back more Linux netbooks than they're returning Windows-based models. Speaking in an interview with Laptop Magazine, Shen said return rates were the same for both operating systems. "I believe the Linux and Windows have similar return rates," he said, adding that the Linux option was particularly popular in Europe.

Making good on a promise it made at the very beginning, Google has today announced that the source code underpinning its Android platform for mobile devices is available for free to anyone who wants a crack at it. The code is being provided through the newly-announced Android Open Source Project, which will give the public at large the opportunity to make contributions to the platform's all-important core -- a first for a mobile operating system with true mass-market appeal. Theoretically, the move should position Android to benefit from a fairly democratic, speedy evolution, and it'll also give anyone with a few spare chips lying around the chance to build a smartphone of their own without shelling out a dime in licensing fees.

After the glut of netbooks on the market, Imovio, an offshoot of U.S. company Comsciences, presents the iKit Multimedia Messenger, a palm-sized netbook with Linux. The device is equipped with Bluetooth and WLAN and is perfect for chats and email, although it brings along other applications.

Last year we started a new campaign tradition — the Commoner Letter series. As I’ve said before, and will definitely say again, the campaign is about building support — rallying our community members around the importance of supporting Creative Commons and the openness our tools help enable. Over the next three months, five prominent members of the CC community will share with the world why they support CC. If you’re interested in CC and issues of openness and access, this list is for you.

In an announcement on his blog, the UK's OpenOffice Marketing Manager, John McCreesh, states that in the first week of its release, OpenOffice.org 3.0 registered over 3 million downloads. Yet the project only records downloads from the so-called Bouncer website.

This is so funny. Yet another "history" of Linux. I'm deep into writing an article on the Apple-Psystar litigation, to rebut some of the absolute nonsense I see being written about it, but I have to take a brief detour to share something with you, so you can laugh too. I put in News Picks a couple of days ago the farewell letter of ex-hedge fund manager, Andrew Lahde, who is one of the few who predicted the current Wall Street meltdown, and one of the things he suggested was that great minds get together and come up with a new "system of government that truly represents the common man’s interest....This forum could be similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly."

In this installment of the classic Networking 101 series, Charlie Schluting walks us through the whys and wherefores of the OSPF, the popular and robust interior gateway protocol.