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The battle in the virtualization market enters a new phase: Sun Microsystems released new versions of its virtualization software Sun xVM. And a few days ago Red Hat announced its takeover of Qumranet, makers of the virtualizer KVM. Meanwhile Microsoft and Novell are teaming up to counter with their own Microsoft Hyper-V and Suse Linux Enterprise Server offerings.

"When you put it all together, we're the optimized guest on Windows Server 2008 and we're going to be the best managed Linux that a system center customer can have," Dorfman said. "We really want to be the optimized Linux for the windows environment."

KDocker comes handy when you want to embed some graphical application in the system tray, given that the respective application does not come with its own feature to put it in the tray. Although not updated since 2005, the last version released on April 5, 2005, is good enough and, according to the official website, it works with all the window managers that respect the NET WM standard. To mention a few: KDE, GNOME, Xfce, Blackbox or Fluxbox. I only used it in KDE 3.5.9, but I'm sure it works well in the other desktop environments too, given that you don't want to use a native docking application, like ALLTray for GNOME.

Virtual worlds come in all shapes and sizes, says Michael Cai, director of broadband and gaming for Dallas-based research firm Parks Associates. Virtual worlds can be categorized by graphics type (2D, 2.5D, 3D), applications (enterprise worlds, social worlds, entertainment worlds, gaming worlds), and by demographics (adult worlds, teen worlds).

Mandriva releases a new version in every six months and this time is no exception. The team released 2009 RC1 which is scheduled for a final release on 9th October. The notable improvements from the previous 2008 Spring release are...

If you've ever looked in your /etc/fstab file, you have may have seen an entry that looks like UUID=62fa5eac-3df4-448d-a576-916dd5b432f2 instead of a more familiar disk drive designation, such as /dev/hda1. Such entries are called universally unique identifiers (UUID). You can use these 128-bit numbers to make hard disk management easier.

Linux serves as a marvelous example of market processes in action: human beings with harmonious goals helping each other reach them. It has been developed through decentralized collaboration by programmers from around the world.

This guide explains how to install memcached and the PHP5 memcache module on a Debian Etch system with Apache2. memcached is a daemon that can store objects in the system's memory (e.g. results of database queries) which can speed up your web site tremendously. You can use memcached over a network (i.e., install your web application on one server and memcached on another server), but usually you install both on one server to avoid the networking overhead.

When we left off, Fedora was taking quite a long time to install over the network on this Power Mac G4/466. I returned to the office to find the Fedora 9 install finished. I rebooted. No X. After Debian Etch installed with no problems whatsoever, I don't know why I expected Fedora 9 to do the same thing, but I did.

Here's hoping everyone's having an enjoyable day at work (or, even better, an enjoyable drink on the beach :). I'm currently wading through a sea of bureaucracy the complexity of which demands to be taken in with nothing less than total awe. The term Byzantine been taken to another level of meaning for me. It's always an interesting thing in life when you realize that, just the other day, you thought you had it all figured out ;)

This morning EMC, Microsoft and IBM announced they had worked together over a two-year period to create a content interchange standard for enterprise content management systems. There are lot of benefits to this agreement for content management customers, but I think the real story here is that three huge companies came together for the benefit of the many over the benefit of the one. It doesn't happen every day and it's worth pointing out.

The SCHED_FIFO scheduling class is a longstanding, POSIX-specified realtime feature. Processes in this class are given the CPU for as long as they want it, subject only to the needs of higher-priority realtime processes. If there are two SCHED_FIFO processes with the same priority contending for the CPU, the process which is currently running will continue to do so until it decides to give the processor up. SCHED_FIFO is thus useful for realtime applications where one wants to know, with great assurance, that the highest-priority process on the system will have full access to the processor for as long as it needs it.

Will Linux NetBooks like the Dell Mini 9 Inspiron and Asus EeePC shift from low-cost devices to no-cost devices? MSPmentor thinks so. Here's why.

The London Stock Exchange (LSE) has failed spell out to the markets the precise cause of Monday’s catastrophic seven hour trading outage. The exchange carried out a series of upgrades and tests last weekend, but all LSE representatives are saying is that “there was a combination of software activities that coincided”, and these had caused the problem. The stock exchange has reiterated that the fault was not due to an upgrade on its high-speed trading platform TradElect.

Coworkers at the University of Tel Aviv have presented a prototype for a new host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS) for Linux. Named Korset, it uses static code analysis and promises zero failures.

Standard practice for most proprietary software vendors is to say nothing until an issue finds its way into the press somehow... and then only respond with the minimal amount of information possible... usually denying everything until it can no longer be denied. That CERTAINLY WAS NOT the case with Red Hat / Fedora. They were out early with information... so early it was incomplete... and they did it of their own accord rather than as a mandatory response to some third party.

Back in May when OLPC announced the XO-2 the organization also indicated that an XO-1.5 would be released in spring 2009. To date the only official information regarding the XO 1.5 is that it's supposed to have fewer physical parts and cost less than the XO-1.

Mark your calendars: this year's Software Freedom Day is September 20 (the third Saturday in September). If you're looking for an occasion to help out with the spread of free and open source software, that's a great one.

GNOME enthusiasts have a couple of good options when it comes to searching, launching, and otherwise manipulating and accessing files, applications, and information right from the desktop: GNOME-Do, and the GNOME Deskbar applet. GNOME-Do is a desktop search and application-launching applet similar to the now-defunct GNOME Launchbox. It's inspired by Quicksilver, an applet for Apple's Mac OS X operating system. Do was built for the GNOME desktop but also runs on KDE. Developers call Do an "intelligent launcher tool" because it uses predictive technology to guess what you want to do when you start typing the first few letters of the name of an application, file, or contact.

I used to think that Gnome 1.4 was the Last Good Gnome. Because when Gnome 2.0 came along, everything I liked was gone. It was dumbed-down to the point of unusability, and the roadmap called for yet more dumbing-down. So I switched to KDE for my main workstation, and IceWM, XFCE, and Blackbox for lower-powered PCs. For all these years I haven't seen much to like in Gnome. Not until Ubuntu Hardy Heron, that is.