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The Financial Times' Richard Waters wrote an excellent analysis of Sun's open-source strategy on Monday, and in the process reminded me of something that should have been obvious: Open source is the very thing that has crippled Sun, yet Sun is looking to open source, to hobble its competitors and revive its future. We often talk in the technology industry about the need to cannibalize your own business before someone else does it to you. Sun may be a little late off the starting blocks, but it's fascinating to watch its race against time.

New Delhi resident Raj Mathur is living proof that a Free and Open Source Software advocate can earn a decent living working with clients who are using or planning to use FOSS. Raj has also been a member of the Open Source Initiative board of directors and is a leading member of his local Linux users group. He's also contributed to more than a few Free Software projects over the years. Raj is a "heartbeat of GNU/Linux" kind of guy -- not famous, but a stalwart soldier in the worldwide FOSS army. (And a nice person, too.)

We've pretty much reached the point at which it's probably cheaper to buy a laptop computer than it is to purchase a comparable desktop PC with the keyboard, mouse and monitor needed to make it all work. But laptops break. And they're hard to fix. Often really hard. And instructions on how to fix them are either really detailed (like those for Macs from ifixit.com) or, shall we say, "nonexistent."

There are lots of internal rivalries within Microsoft. One of the most constant is the battle between the Windows/Office teams and the open-source team at the company. Microsoft’s open-source team is continuing to try to build bridges with open-source providers — emphasizing Microsoft’s interest in making open and closed source products more interoperable in order to help customers. Microsoft Chief Software Ray Ozzie has made open-source interoperability one of his cornerstone platforms since he joined the company in 2005. At the same time, however, Microsoft’s Windows and Office teams are continuing to use total-cost-of-ownership (TCO) and customer case studies to prove that Linux and Open Office end up costing customers more than free/open-source software.

LinuxPlanet Classics: Multicast has become a buzzword more than once in history. IP multicast means that one sender is sending data to multiple recipients, but only sending a single copy. It's very useful for streaming media, so let's follow Charlie Schluting on a tour of this excellent protocol as we continue the wonderful Networking 101 series.

Oracle has contributed data integrity protection code, partly developed with the hardware vendor Emulex, to the Linux kernel, the vendors announced Tuesday. The code helps maintain "comprehensive data integrity" as information "moves from application to database, and from [the] Linux operating system to disk storage," according to a statement. It also lowers the possibility that erroneous data will get written to disk. The companies' effort is meant to help data center administrators track and address corrupted data quickly, lowering costs and downtime, said Scott McIntyre, vice president of product marketing at Emulex, in a statement.

I just wrote a bit of Python to generate some reports from the contents of a database. The one program that was more than just "display the data" was the one to print the transaction log. It included some sub-totals for various fields and paginated output. The one task remaining was to give it some options. That is, to pass it some criteria that would modify the report. Specifically, I wanted a start and end date and the ability to change the sort order from the default which was transaction date.

Good OS, developer of the gOS operating system, announced its latest endeavor Monday, dubbed "Cloud." The new operating system, unlike most OSes, actually boots into a browser. From there, the user may surf the Web or go to a traditional Windows or Linux operating system. The new OS integrates a Web browser with its compressed Linux OS kernel for immediate access to the Internet, integration of browser and rich client applications, and full control of the PC from within the browser, Good OS said. "The Cloud OS and Good OS are interesting, and they definitely mark a trend toward a more lightweight, nimble, browser-based OS approach for mobile Take the FREE Motorola AirDefense WLAN Security Assessment. Click here. devices, particularly netbooks and MIDs (mobile Internet devices)," Jay Lyman, an analyst at The 451 Group, told LinuxInsider.

If any process ever cried out for a graphical interface, it is using NDISwrapper to enable wireless devices to run on GNU/Linux using Windows drivers. The process is often torturous, especially for first-time users, who are unsure whether any problems are due to NDISwrapper's limitations or their own inexperience. By organizing and explaining the process, KNDISwrapper promises to remove much of the labor. But, so far, it only partly delivers on that promise by neglecting the hardest part of working with NDISwrapper -- finding the right Windows driver.

Barack Obama promises to be the most technologically attuned U.S. president ever. More than a year ago, he released a policy statement on technology and innovation that detailed his plans to employ state of the art technology to pursue a broad spectrum of goals, such as increasing national competitiveness, providing next-generation broadband access for all, creating a "transparent and connected democracy," decreasing health care costs, acting to prevent global warming, and lowering American dependence on foreign oil. In pursuit of these goals, he also promised to appoint the nation's first Chief Technology Officer. Problem is, the standards do do all of this don't yet exist.

For those of you who have not heard of Joomla!, it is a content management system that allows one to build a complex web portal without the need of advanced web programming knowledge. You download it, install it, add a template then enrich the CMS with extensions. This way you can transform your site into a webshop, link directory, photo gallery and pretty much anything you set your mind to. But like any other CMS, Joomla! is not perfect.

Hi All, Here's the 16th tip in the "OpenLDAP Quick Tips" series (as requested by Bronius Motekaitis): "You want to audit OpenLDAP for changes: who modified what at what times?":

With the EXT4 file-system being marked as stable in the forthcoming Linux 2.6.28 kernel, and some Linux distributions potentially switching to it as an interim step until the btrfs file-system is ready, we decided it was time to benchmark this journaled file-system for ourselves. We ran a number of disk-centric Linux benchmarks along with several of our real-world tests from the Phoronix Test Suite to gauge how well the EXT4 file-system performance will be noticed by desktop users and computer gamers. We have compared these EXT4 results to the EXT3, XFS, and ReiserFS file-systems.

In this article I will describe how you can monitor your CentOS 5.2 server with munin and monit. munin produces nifty little graphics about nearly every aspect of your server (load average, memory usage, CPU usage, MySQL throughput, eth0 traffic, etc.) without much configuration, whereas monit checks the availability of services like Apache, MySQL, Postfix and takes the appropriate action such as a restart if it finds a service is not behaving as expected. The combination of the two gives you full monitoring: graphics that lets you recognize current or upcoming problems (like "We need a bigger server soon, our load average is increasing rapidly."), and a watchdog that ensures the availability of the monitored services.

Domino’s Pizza will now come with a remote control – your brand-new TiVo box. Early in 2009, you will be able to order a Domino’s Pizza delivered right to your door. All you need do now is give the delivery guy your front-door key and you’ll never leave the sofa again.

Distribution naming schemes are one of the more humorous aspects of the open source community. Ubuntu uses an adjective followed by an animal name (Intrepid Ibex, Jaunty Jackalope), while Debian names releases after characters in the movie "Toy Story" (Sarge, Etch, Lenny). Fedora's method is a bit more obscure, but no less clever.

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission is likely to consider a plan this month to auction public airwaves with a mandate that the winning bidder set aside some for free Internet nationwide, a proposal staunchly opposed by the cell phone industry.

A UK company says its switch from Linux to Windows will save it £1 million (almost $A2.3 million). How does that work? According to a case study published by Microsoft, British tool and equipment hire specialist Speedy Hire has junked the Linux and OpenOffice based systems running in its depots in favour of Windows and Microsoft Office. Why? Because the company expects to save £1 million over five years. Saving £200,000 a year doesn't sound quite so impressive, but we'll let that pass.

The packaged version of Dropbox is available only for a handful of distros. You can compile Dropbox on your system using the provided source code package, but there is an easier way to make the software work with your particular distro.

Everyone knows and loves rsync, the command that lets you clone a directory tree to another disk or system with the ability to keep the clone fresh in an incremental and bandwidth-efficient manner. Sometimes, however, you want to sync in the reverse direction. With bidirectional filesystem syncing tools, there is no primary filesystem -- you just tell the tool to make sure both target directories, or clones, are identical. Here's a hands-on look at two tools designed to accomplish that task: DirSync Pro and Unison.