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Windows may be king of data centers, but Linux has a foothold in nearly every courtyard and is sure to make further inroads in the year ahead. According to the Data Center Decisions 2008 Purchasing Intentions Survey, 91% of data centers run Microsoft Windows, but a large percentage also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (48%) or Novell SUSE (21%, multiple versions) in their data centers. Nonetheless, Linux use remains limited in scope, with two-thirds of respondents running Linux on 25% or less of their servers, with application servers the most common pairing. Tech Target

One of the greatest and most destructive beliefs in the open source community is that "Because I'm not a programmer, I can't participate in an open source project." Let me be the first to tell you that if you believe that, you're wrong. Dead wrong. Why? Well let me explain.

The ecosystem that Microsoft (MSFT) has built up around its Windows operating system is showing signs of strain. In one of several recent moves by partners that sell or support the company's software, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), the world's No. 1 PC maker, has quietly assembled a group of engineers to develop software that will let customers bypass certain features of Vista, the latest version of Windows. Employees on a separate skunk works team are even angling to replace Windows with an HP-assembled operating system, say three sources close to the company. HP acknowledges the first effort. The company formed the "customer experience" group nine months ago and put at its helm Susie Wee, a former director in the company's research labs. Her team is developing touchscreen technology and other software that allows users to circumvent Microsoft's operating system to watch movies or view photos more easily than they can with Vista.

What's happening at the biggest virtualization event in North America this year? Will there be some earth-shattering announcements?

Using the MPlayer engine, SMPlayer is a powerful video player built in Qt4, with support for playing DVDs, DVD ISO images, a configurable interface, icon themes, the very useful feature of remembering settings and time left from a video after closing it (so when you restart SMPlayer the movie will be loaded from where you left it), support for subtitles and much more. SMPlayer lately gained a lot of popularity and I'm sure it will become one of the most used video players on Linux, if it's not already.

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and the Geographic Information Society of South Africa (GISSA) will host the 2008 Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) conference at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from September 29 to October 3. The annual conference is expected to attract more than 500 software programmers, government officials, business people and technology experts.

This posting follows up the recent one Vncserver on SNV97 DomU at Xen 3.3 CentOS 5.2 Dom0 (64-bit) and is targeting enabling Sun's Java Web Start in FireFox 3.0.1 Web Browser with 32-bit JRE 6.0 plugin installed on 64-bit Linux. First of all install 32-bit Sun JRE 6.0 for Linux by running ./jre-6u-linux-i586-rpm.bin.Then install FireFox 3.0.1 into folder /usr/tmp/firefox for instance Create following symlink to make firefox aware of JRE.

Asia is in the middle of a mass adoption wave of open source technology, and the floodgates of innovation will open following this wave in two to three years, according to open source vendors. Following recent remarks made by MySQL co-founder, David Axmark, on Asia's lack of contribution back to the open source community, fellow industry spokespeople were decidedly more optimistic about the region's role to play in the open source ecosystem.

Xine is an engine which allows to play audio CDs, DVDs, VCDs, various audio and video formats like AVI, WMV, MOV to list a few. The last version of xine-lib is 1.1.15, released on August 14, 2008. To compile from source and install xine-lib 1.1.15 in Debian Lenny you'll have to follow the steps below.

Being connected to the Internet means exposure to what the outside world has to offer -- including the undesirable elements. Every time you connect to the Internet, you're exposed to threats that can compromise your network's security. Although network security solutions have evolved in recent years, so have network attack techniques. To prevent ever-evolving attacks from compromising your network, you must preemptively block malicious traffic before it enters your network. Free, open source programs, such as Snort, can do the job, but setting up a full intrusion detection system (IDS) sensor, especially in an enterprise network, takes time and isn't very user-friendly. StillSecure's Strata Guard Free can be your front line of defense to face outside threats without as much hard work.

Microsoft and Novell Thursday released a virtualization bundle that represents the pair’s first fully supported joint product since their historic interoperability partnership was forged in 2006. The two have configured and optimized Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to run as a guest operating system on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. The product is the first to include technology developed by both vendors at the Microsoft and Novell Interoperability Lab they opened just over a year ago in Cambridge, Mass.

mod_spamhaus is an Apache module that uses DNSBL in order to block spam relay via web forms, preventing URL injection, block http DDoS attacks from bots and generally protecting your web service denying access to a known bad IP address.

The second episode of Microsoft's costly ad campaign is out, and it's becoming clearer what the overall purpose is: to make Bill Gates more cuddly - and de-fang Microsoft in the eyes of the public. That could mean trouble for open source, now that Google is turning into the digital bogeyman: regulatory authorities might see this kinder, gentler Microsoft as part of the anti-trust solution, not part of the problem.

In some respects, the market for Web-based applications resembles a crowded, noisy and confused bazaar. It's difficult to get a good wide-angle view of all available options. Those there to sell wares often have a hard time finding and securing the best place to set up shop.

IRC plays a major role in the Linux development and the community itself, and most distributions and software projects usually have one or more IRC channels (usually on Freenode or, in Debian's case, on OFTC) for discussing issues related to the project or just helping users.

“Our company has started offering systems with the new Asus mobo ’s with Express Gate. Asus has provided no way of installing it without Windows already installed. […] It’s on the Asus utilities disk. You can’t install it without Windows installed first because Asus only provides a Windows installer.”

Canonical, the leading backer of the Ubuntu version of Linux, is hiring a team to help make open source software on the desktop more appealing and easier to use. The company plans to sign up designers and specialists in user experience and interaction to lead Canonical's work on usability and to contribute to other free and open source desktop-environment projects, including Gnome and KDE, Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical chief executive and founder of the Ubuntu project, wrote in a blog post on Wednesday.

OSNews has been reporting on the Debian/Ubuntu/GNU/Opensolaris hybrid for several years. But for those of you who've never looked more closely at this interesting OS, a Nexenta developer has laid out some of its more noteworthy features and advantages. The Nexenta project, started in 2005, has had 6 releases (NexentaOS and NexentaCore), and is preparing for the upcoming NexentaCore Platform 2 release. If you are a Debian/Ubuntu developer, consider taking a little time to take a look at an emerging platform that provides a feature rich developer environment.

As promised (I think ;), we're back today with some code (not the entire script that encompasses the last 2 weeks worth of posts, of course) to grind out the final concept in this string of surprisingly wide-ranging topics all centered around the concepts of number pools and guaranteed matches. We've covered a lot of different aspects of mathematics, regular expression matching, etc just moving toward our Objective.

I thought Microsoft would announce they would buy Citrix a day or two before VMware's VMworld conference. Well, it is a few days before VMworld and I must admit I was starting to think I would have to write that there would be no deal and to eat a bit of crow, but today my inbox lit up with rumors.