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You can monitor your computers in a wide variety of ways. Large proprietary applications make sense for large installations that can afford the expense of both the software and consultants who fine-tune the systems. Open source monitoring solutions like Nagios or OpenNMS cost nothing to acquire but still require planning and tweaking. When you need to address smaller problems with process data on a system, the process monitoring tool ps-watcher comes in handy.

Oracle announced at its OpenWorld event this week two new partnerships intended to boost the firm's cloud computing offerings. The enterprise software maker announced Monday that it has teamed with Amazon to offer enterprise customers options available via the mega-e-tailer's Elastic Compute Cloud service.

One of the most frustrating aspects of open source but commercially supported software is that it takes many orders of magnitude of freebie customers to attain a base of core customers who will pay for a glorified product with commercial-grade installation and ongoing tech support. There is always a temptation to try to monetize the vast installed base of users who are making use of the so-called development or community editions of programs. But Red Hat isn't going for it.

Despite a slowing U.S. economy, Linux vendor Red Hat continues to grow, thanks in part to uptake of its JBoss middleware solutions as well as an expanding business for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux solutions. But it cautioned investors not to expect an immediate return from its recent moves in virtualization and from other initiatives, like Fedora.

Everyone is all ga-ga this week over the G1, the new HTC phone from T-Mobile, which is the first phone powered by Google's Android phone OS. So to temper the excitement a bit and get back to reality, I came up with a list of 5 reasons not to get the G1.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0 on a headless Ubuntu 8.04 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

A year ago, 15 percent of Alfresco’s sales involved IT channel partners. This year, the open source content management company will drive 60 percent of its sales through IT channel partners. Here's how.

Intense Debate is one of the newer comment systems that aim to replace the built-in comments of the various blogging platforms. With their recent acquisition by Automattic (the makers of Wordpress) I believe the time has come to make them come to the "light side".

Ah, the Linux (or BSD) distro review. They're relatively easy to crank out, they bring the traffic in a major way (especially when the excellent Distrowatch links to you). But do they mean much? Not really, I think.

How to replace system boards using DR for maximum uptime on Mx000 series Sun servers. Shifting gears again, today we're going to take a look at doing some hardware maintenance on Sun's (or, technically, Fujitsu's) new Mx000 series servers. At this point, I think there are only 4 variants available; the M4000, M5000, M8000 and M9000.

Kudos, Red Hat: You beat financial estimates for your current quarter. Wall Street was impressed. Still, The VAR Guy was disappointed will one key data point you shared this week. Here's why.

I applaud Canonical for pushing Ubuntu beyond the desktop. But I wonder: Can Ubuntu really gain traction on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Or put more bluntly: Does the world really need another mobile operating system to compete against Apple iPhone, Google Android, Windows Mobile and all the mobile Linuxes? I applaud Canonical for pushing Ubuntu beyond the desktop — up onto servers, and down onto mobile devices. But I’m starting to wonder: Can Ubuntu really gain traction on Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)? Or put more bluntly: Does the world really need another mobile device operating system? Frankly, I'm not sure.

You have to give Oracle credit for persistence. The software giant has been trying to build out its groupware business for nearly 10 years, and has as yet modest success. Now, with Beehive, the next generation of its collaboration suite, Oracle may be sniffing some fresh and meaningful blood in the enterprise messaging waters.

Large Chicago law firm Jones Day is suing a tiny Internet startup called BlockShopper over the use of the humble hyperlink. But BlockShopper has picked up a pair of allies in the form of the EFF and Public Citizen, and the two groups jointly filed anamici curiae brief with the court that points out the obvious:"linking is what web sites do-that is, after all, why it is called the 'World Wide Web'."

Many applications need to graphically display the relation between two data axes. Common examples are how one resource such as CPU load or an exchange rate varies over time. GtkDatabox makes presenting such information in a GTK+ desktop application much simpler. Version 0.8.2.2 is packaged for Fedora 9, while version 0.7.0.x is available for both Ubuntu Hardy and as a 1-Click install for openSUSE. I'll build from source using the latest version 0.9.0.1 on a 64-bit Fedora 9 machine.

With the Atom-based ASUS Eee PC 901 we have already delivered disk encryption benchmarks and a Linux distribution comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva. This Intel 1.6GHz Diamondville processor isn't the fastest, but it's performing quite well for a netbook. With netbooks and their users often on the go though, for those not using the suspend and resume mode the boot time can be equally important as the in-desktop performance. To look at this we are delivering boot performance benchmarks for the Eee PC 901 from Fedora 9, Fedora 10, Ubuntu 8.10, and Mandriva 2009.

The students of a missionary school in Pakistan, from first graders to graduates, have become enthusiast Edubuntu users thanks to the cooperation between their administrator and an Italian LUG. Padre (Father) Aldino Amato is an Italian missionary who has been working for 25 years in the schools of the Rosary Christian Hospital, a nonprofit charitable institution in the village of Rehmpur, near to the city of Okara in the Pakistani province of Punjab. In 2006, during a holiday in Italy, a friend suggested Amato publish in an Italian missionary newletter a request for all the things his schools needed but couldn't find easily in Pakistan. The first item on that list was computers. A newsletter reader pointed Amato to Golem (Gruppo Operativo Linux EMpoli), an Italian Linux user group (LUG) founded in 2000 in Empoli, a Tuscan town about 30 kilometers west of Florence.

It is becoming more and more clear to me that decision makers in healthcare policy and especially in healthcare IT policy do not understand the real underlying problems of interoperability in healthcare applications. Dare I also say that most developers don't either?

IBM has announced a new corporate strategy regarding its participation in the hundreds of standard-setting organizations relevant to its products. Simply put, it only wants to work within an environment that is open and transparent."There is simply no justification for standards to be created in nontransparent ways," said Bob Sutor, IBM's vice president of open source and standards.

It was nearly two years ago at the 2006 Oracle OpenWorld conference that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled a plan to have Oracle provide support to Red Hat's own Linux customers. The controversial plan sparked debate over whether Oracle was trying to kill off Red Hat by taking away Red Hat's revenue stream. Oracle and Red Hat representatives questioned during this week's Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco offered strikingly different perspectives on how well Oracle's plan has worked out.