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At the LinuxWorld expo in San Francisco, analyst Jay Lyman of the 451 Group spoke about the potential for enterprise adoption of Ubuntu and the impact that community-driven Linux distributions will have on the market. Companies are increasingly choosing free community-driven Linux distributions instead of commercial offerings with conventional support options. Several factors are driving this trend, particularly dissatisfaction with the cost of support services from the major distributors. Companies that use and deploy Linux internally increasingly have enough in-house expertise to handle all of their technical needs and no longer have to rely on Red Hat or Novell, according to Lyman.

IBM has reconfigured its Lotus Foundations software, which includes Lotus Notes, Sametime and Symphony, to preload on Linux distributions like Red Hat, Ubuntu and Novell's Suse Linux. The repackaging makes the middleware easier and cheaper to install on Linux PCs and free desktops from Microsoft software, IBM said.

Over the years I have made my share of cluster mistakes. Each problem presented an opportunity to learn something new, become a little smarter, get some scar tissue as it were. I had just such an opportunity this week as I as teaching Intermediate Beowulf: An Introduction to Benchmarking and Tuning as part of the ARC HPC Training at Georgetown University. I’ll get back to my teaching experience in minute, but first I wanted to talk about HPC education.

The network file system (NFS) protocol is getting its biggest overhaul in more than a decade, and the results could be profound for end users (see The Future of NFS Arrives). Version 4.1 of NFS, developed by a team of veterans from various storage interests, promises to unlock new performance and security capabilities, particularly for enterprise data centers. NFS was originally designed to solve the problem of remote access to home directories and supporting diskless workstations and servers over local area networks. With the advent of cheaper high-performance computing in the form of Linux compute clusters, multi-core processors and blades, the demands for higher performance file access have risen sharply. It's no wonder that a protocol designed for 1984 speeds would be unable to cope.

I have some screenshots from an old Caldera OpenLinux Lite CD that a member still had in his possession to show you. They disprove certain allegations SCO has made regarding Linux, I think, in the IBM litigation. For example, SCO claimed that it never released anything under the GPL. And it tried to allege that some headers and other features were their property and that Linux infringes them. I will show you differently.

A classic of Linux/Unix humor and a funny fake ad for anxiety medication ...together at last ;)

Building and using Linux-based PCs is a rewarding and fullfilling pastime for open source enthusiasts, but spreading the gospel to the masses can be even more satisfying. And if the masses include schoolchildren from low-income homes , cash-strapped non-profit groups and far-away developing nations where technology isn't something easily affordable, then it can be even more soul-satisfying.

When the story about Microsoft shelling out $100,000 to Apache for ASF sponsorship broke across my radar it rather tickled my funny bone and my curiosity. When ASF Chairman Jim Jagielski declared that “Microsoft’s sponsorship makes it clear that Microsoft “gets it” regarding the ASF” I had a fit of the giggles—and then, like many others, I started to ponder on the reasons why and what it actually meant.

Many college graduates are finding it difficult to enter the information technology world with little or no work experience. There is no such thing as an entry-level position anymore, and more and more graduates are finding themselves in a catch-22 situation because of this. Searching the numerous jobseeker Web sites, such as dice.com, will return thousands of positions available in the IT field. But when you look closely, most positions, such as an entry-level software engineer, have a minimum requirement of at least one year's work experience in a related field. The search field criterion doesn't even offer a selection for graduates with less than one year's experience.

A startup called Unison Technologies has released a commercial "unified communications" groupware suite based on Ubuntu Server, and announced a beta release of a Ubuntu desktop client. The Unison suite combines e-mail, instant messaging, a PBX, contacts, and calendaring, says the company.

Intel's latest performance desktop chipset is now the X48 Express, but there still is life left in the X38 Express, which was released late last year. The Intel X38 and X48 Chipsets share many of the same features including support for the latest dual-core and quad-core Intel processors, DDR3 system memory support, and 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 interfaces with there being very few differences to the end-user between these chipsets. In addition, benchmarks we have delivered from different motherboards have shown the X48 has little to no performance improvements over the older Bearlake chipset. ASUS's X38 motherboards are still very much in the market place and today we happen to be looking at one of their workstation motherboards based around the X38.

Another look at the renewed ASUS-Microsoft relationship (and Intel); CompTIA returns to haunt

InfoWorld has announced the 2008 Bossie Awards for the Best of Open-Source Software. Awards were given to 60 winners across 8 categories covering business and productivity applications, development tools, middleware, networking, security, and storage.

Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) provides a way for you to build a server and then add diskless computers to the server thus creating a huge savings for an organization. To the user, they will not recognize that the computer they are at is without a hard drive. They typically notice the fast speed at which the workstation runs and the features that are available.

Google on Tuesday said its Android mobile operating system is not planning to join a growing consortium of mobile Linux companies even though the two sides have similar foundations and goals of besting Apple's iPhone. Eric Chu, a group marketing manager with Google's Android group, downplayed any talk that his company would be lending its name to the Linux Mobile Foundation -- or LiMo -- in an attempt to standardize mobile middleware. LiMo said on Monday that it has signed 11 new member companies in recent weeks and said that the number of mobile devices running the LiMo OS now totals 21.

Shakiness of macroeconomy plus general problems with travel arrangements caused many usual attendees to sit out this year's LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. More than 7,500 people signed up, but about half that actually showed up, some estimates said. But there was no lack of enthusiasm for new product releases — especially in the data center, mobile and cloud computing sectors. Those who stayed home missed a lot of good new products and plenty of good networking opportunities.

[This article has much nicer pictures than what I took, which I will try to rectify next year. :-) - Scott]

This year's Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas is pretty much like all the ones in the past. It's a world-class conference with speakers that either bore you or blow you away. Black Hat is known for releasing a few Zero-day exploits and exploring nearly every other covered topic far better than any other computer security conference. Unfortunately, about half the presentations are wastes of time, with the speakers seemingly spending more time trying to make weak jokes than to present cutting-edge facts.

Imagine being able to open any Web page on your server in OpenOffice.org, edit it, and save the changes back to the server by pressing the Save button. It may sound too good to be true, but that's exactly what the ODF@WWW project is set to achieve. Started as a relatively simple hack, ODF@WWW has become a nifty solution that allows end users to create and edit Web pages in OpenOffice.org. ODF@WWW is based on three components: a few custom configuration options in the Apache server, the JODConverter utility, and a couple of bash scripts.

More than 100 solutions providers are now backing Vyatta’s open source networking gear, The VAR Guy has learned. But that’s just the start of an open source networking tidal wave. Take a look

As powerful as all this cool technology is, it's also fragile, as I learned yet again today. A storm blew in and it was a doozy- high winds, machine-gun rain, lightning, and thunder that felt like it was RIGHT HERE. What can the mighty Linux and FOSS machine do in the face of Mother Nature pitching a little fit? Not a darned thing. They're not even relevant.