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If you write software for the Mac, you must obey Apple's rules. Period. End of statement. If you write software for Windows, you have more leeway, but Microsoft pretty much calls the shots. If you write software for Linux though you can pretty much do whatever you want, except, of course, you shouldn't. Because if you do re-invent the wheel every time you write for Linux, we end up with software that doesn't work or play well with other Linux software. That's where the LSB (Linux Standard Base) comes in.

Although many Linux distributions can run on either a desktop or server platform, few provide by default a raft of applications aimed specifically at server usage. Server Optimized Linux is an exception -- a distribution aimed squarely at servers. That's an appealing prospect, but the reality is more underwhelming. SoL 25.00 installs a variety of server applications, including Nagios, Xen, Apache, Exim, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, cdrkit, OpenIPMI, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, and SQLite; a complete list is available on the distribution's software page. SoL is also optimized for virtualization as a virtual machine guest or host, and you may even deploy it in a cluster.

Microsoft is contemplating thinking about possibly implementing an 8 second boot feature in Windows 7. Maybe one of the developers has got a Linux netbook?

A number of leading authorities have been urging caution on the adoption of Web-based services as a new wave of vendors unveil cloud initiatives. Cloud computing involves computing resources hosted in an off-premise"cloud" rather than an in-house computer room.

Much is said about how open-source and Linux can be used to combat poverty, but few speak of the remaining issues, technical, educational, or perceptional, that still exist.

Prior to The Portland event, I made over 150 random phone calls using the Portland Oregon directory and took a sort of survey/opinion poll. This is no where in the ballpark of scientific so don't read into it what isn't there. After I qualified them as computer users, I wanted to know a few things. Identifying myself as a computer user's advocate, I asked them four questions.

The Global 2000 is nice. The Fortune 500 is very nice. But selling into the Fortune 50 — especially for a small open source company like Pentaho — is extra sweet. Here's where the business intelligence software provider is finding success, reports The VAR Guy.

If you have ever found yourself in the position of having to reboot quickly or several times, you know that it's not a very quick process, particularly if you have SCSI devices or other initialization-intensive system devices. A package called kexec can speed up your reboots -- if you understand the rules. Kexec was originally intended for use by kernel and system developers who had to reboot several times a day. Soon, system administrators for high-availability servers found use for it as well. As systems get more and more advanced, and boot times get longer, end users can now benefit from it.

This is a detailed description about how to set up a Mandriva 2009.0 Free server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of Mandriva 2009.0.

Nokia-owned Trolltech has been promoting a planned environment for building embedded applications on Mac, Linux, and Windows machines. The company has been demonstrating Greenhouse at a series of events for developers. Greenhouse combines an editor, debugger, compiler, and project window. The goal is to provide consistent tooling environment for developers working on different platforms, avoiding the need to switch between visual and command-line commands when moving between a Mac or Windows machine and Linux.

To build a set of books in five days takes a lot of preparation work that Adam Hyde, founder of FLOSS Manuals, described in a prior post. Christoph also encouraged me to talk about what it was like to participate as a writer in the Book Sprint. Over all, it was very similar to a footrace of the same name, hosting a group of writers in a room cranking out as much usable content as possible!

Since acquiring the Koders.com code search engine earlier this year, Black Duck Software has added more than 200 million lines of code to the Koders.com search repository. Black Duck says that an analysis of search requests reveals, "Ruby is now the fourth most requested language on Koders.com, after Java, C/C+ and C#." That's interesting information, to be sure, but what does it mean?

Claws Mail is a free opensource lightweight, user friendly and fast email client for Linux. Claws Mail is a quick response email client with easy configuration, intuitive operation and abundant features, extensibility, robustness and stability.

It’s well known that OpenSuse’s utility vm-install fails to perform RH PV guests install via NFS shares. Install from Internet repositories requires software download about 4GB of data for any CentOS 5.X of Fedora PV DomU. Corresponding ISO images have been copied to CentOS 5.2 box running Apache HTTP Server and located on same LAN. Then this images were loop mounted to corresponding folders under /var/www/html. This procedure provided an option for vm-install (via http) RH PV Guests at Xen 3.2.1 OpenSuse 11 Dom0 in pretty short time frame about 40-50 minutes for every DomU been installed.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and open source software, today announced that its Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) governance workgroup, called FOSSBazaar, has nearly doubled its membership since launching in January. The newest members include Ars Aperta, Black Duck, BT, Krugle, Palamida, and nexB, which contribute to 15 total members today. Like proprietary software, FOSS requires due diligence to ensure legal, financial and security compliance. FOSSBazaar is the Linux and open source community's approach to sustaining FOSS as a dependable choice for IT departments.

Solaris 10 zfs root filesystems in zones have gotten more robust and much more! Before anyone starts phoning in, I do realize this is not "brand new" :) It's just brand new to me and the place I work. Now that we're starting to pull in some of those Mx000 Series Boxes, we're finally up to date on Solaris 10! Plus, I'm sure it's patched to the gills ;)

The report concludes that open source is less of a business model than a business tactic. Within the post about the report, there is an executive summary (PDF) which points to some interesting trends for open source, outside the constraints of the question The 451 Group was trying to answer.

Last weekend I finished a home project I’ve been slowly working on for several months. I finally finished converting all the CD’s in my collection from physical media to digital files. It turns out that every CD I ever bought, which now comes to somewhere around 400, fits within 160 gigabytes of storage. It’s hard to buy a new disk that small these days, that’s how much storage capacity has increased.

Linux is firmly established in the embedded market, but migrating existing source code to the operating system is a considerable undertaking. Hans Juergen Rauscher explores the different steps necessary to migrate, the technical requirements and possible pitfalls, and the differences between buying an established Linux implementation and developing and maintaining one internally.

Recently, there was an interesting article in the New York Times. The article brought up some fascinating issues about our reliance on computers — particularly in the world of finance. I touched on this briefly before and I think the article raises some good points. Basically, the “Wall Street geeks” or “quants” (quantitative analysts) develop sophisticated algorithms (evolutionary or Genetic Algorithms, GA’s) that package up securities with all the right attributes to make them attractive to other buyers. The interesting thing is that these types of algorithms produce results (in a sense “optimizations”) that people don’t really understand. In the past, I recall reading about an antenna designed using a GA. The result worked great, the design however was weird and in a sense ugly.