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It’s well known that OpenSuse’s utility vm-install fails to perform RH PV guests install via NFS shares. Install from Internet repositories requires software download about 4GB of data for any CentOS 5.X of Fedora PV DomU. Corresponding ISO images have been copied to CentOS 5.2 box running Apache HTTP Server and located on same LAN. Then this images were loop mounted to corresponding folders under /var/www/html. This procedure provided an option for vm-install (via http) RH PV Guests at Xen 3.2.1 OpenSuse 11 Dom0 in pretty short time frame about 40-50 minutes for every DomU been installed.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and open source software, today announced that its Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) governance workgroup, called FOSSBazaar, has nearly doubled its membership since launching in January. The newest members include Ars Aperta, Black Duck, BT, Krugle, Palamida, and nexB, which contribute to 15 total members today. Like proprietary software, FOSS requires due diligence to ensure legal, financial and security compliance. FOSSBazaar is the Linux and open source community's approach to sustaining FOSS as a dependable choice for IT departments.

Solaris 10 zfs root filesystems in zones have gotten more robust and much more! Before anyone starts phoning in, I do realize this is not "brand new" :) It's just brand new to me and the place I work. Now that we're starting to pull in some of those Mx000 Series Boxes, we're finally up to date on Solaris 10! Plus, I'm sure it's patched to the gills ;)

The report concludes that open source is less of a business model than a business tactic. Within the post about the report, there is an executive summary (PDF) which points to some interesting trends for open source, outside the constraints of the question The 451 Group was trying to answer.

Last weekend I finished a home project I’ve been slowly working on for several months. I finally finished converting all the CD’s in my collection from physical media to digital files. It turns out that every CD I ever bought, which now comes to somewhere around 400, fits within 160 gigabytes of storage. It’s hard to buy a new disk that small these days, that’s how much storage capacity has increased.

Linux is firmly established in the embedded market, but migrating existing source code to the operating system is a considerable undertaking. Hans Juergen Rauscher explores the different steps necessary to migrate, the technical requirements and possible pitfalls, and the differences between buying an established Linux implementation and developing and maintaining one internally.

Recently, there was an interesting article in the New York Times. The article brought up some fascinating issues about our reliance on computers — particularly in the world of finance. I touched on this briefly before and I think the article raises some good points. Basically, the “Wall Street geeks” or “quants” (quantitative analysts) develop sophisticated algorithms (evolutionary or Genetic Algorithms, GA’s) that package up securities with all the right attributes to make them attractive to other buyers. The interesting thing is that these types of algorithms produce results (in a sense “optimizations”) that people don’t really understand. In the past, I recall reading about an antenna designed using a GA. The result worked great, the design however was weird and in a sense ugly.

Back when Mandriva was called Mandrake, the distribution had the reputation of being the most user-friendly Linux distribution. Financial difficulties, personnel changes, and the rise of Ubuntu changed that, and somehow Mandriva never quite regained its reputation. With this week's release of Mandriva 2009, Mandriva has continued to work on user-friendliness. Aside from a poorly organized installation program and a few scattered problems, Mandriva 2009 offers a desktop experience that is at least the equal of any other distribution for everyday use and that has a strong claim of being the most advanced available for system administration.

This is WFTL Bytes!, your occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show for Oct 15, 2008. Today's stories include an election, a talk show, encrypted incrimination, OpenOffice.org and record-breaking downloads, Linux for poor countries, and distributions that speak in tongues.

Welcome to the future. Linux is now a first-class desktop operating system citizen. Adobe today released version 10 of its Adobe Flash Player, available now in a variety of convenient packaging formats for Linux, as well as other popular desktop operating systems. Once upon a time, desktop Linux was a second-class citizen, where Flash was concerned. As recently as 2007, Linux users waited six months for Flash 9 to arrive.

Elite routing gurus may scoff at RIP, but for smaller domains it's easy to set up and performs just fine, and virtually all routers support at least RIP v1. Charlie Schluting walks us through the finer points of understanding how RIP works, and its strengths and weaknesses.

Sound is the new frontier for Flash as Adobe Systems released its first major update in three years today, packing in features missing from May's first beta. Flash Player 10 will deliver sound file features that go someway towards giving developers working on audio the same powers of content creation and customization as video. Adobe has added the ability to read audio files' binary data and directly access the sound buffer to add the sounds filters you really want.

Typically, each new version of the Python programming language has been gentle on users, more or less maintaining backward compatibility with previous versions. But in 2000, when Python creator Guido van Rossum announced that he was embarking on a new version of Python, he did not sugar coat his plan: Version 3.0 would not be backward-compatible. Now that the first release candidate of Python 3.0 is out, with final release planned for later this month, developers must grapple with the issue of whether to maintain older code or modify it to use the new interpreter.

X Server 1.5 was officially released last month with X.Org 7.4, but there had been server pre-releases going back to earlier this year. Fedora 9 had even shipped with an early version version of X Server 1.5. For those using the open-source X.Org drivers, running the latest server is not a big deal, but those with ATI or NVIDIA binary drivers they sometimes can be slow in supporting the latest version. NVIDIA has supported X Server 1.5 for a number of weeks now, but ATI has yet to update their Catalyst Linux driver with such support. With Ubuntu 8.10 being released in two weeks and it's using this newest X Server, how will ATI graphics cards be supported? Well, an interesting event has occurred and we will tell you what has happened in this article.

This article explores the virtualization features available to administrators across several UNIX hardware platforms. Discover what they have to offer and how their features compare to PowerVM.

Today at the Qt Developer Days, Matthias Ettrich of Qt Software, formerly Trolltech, announced a new development environment for Qt Software called Greenhouse. The Qt Developer Days are being held in Munich from October 14 through 15.

Every Linux distributor must find its own peace when it comes to the issue of proprietary software. Some distributors will avoid anything non-free to the point of tearing firmware out of the kernel. Others, like Fedora or Debian, will not include any non-free code. Distributors like Ubuntu are rather more willing to facilitate the use of non-free software, but even they are, perhaps, not 100% comfortable with it. And distributions like Xandros positively embrace proprietary code.

The Hacker Underground is dead. Long live the Hacker Underground! In the most recent issue of Phrack Magazine, I read an article titled"The Underground Myth," that makes a number of astute points about the demise of the hacking scene of the last few decades. The author describes a technical landscape in which the technology security industry and a diminishing number of obvious exploits conspired to destroy the scene.

In late September 2008, the OpenVAS developer team released the 2.0-beta1 version of OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Assessment System for network security scanning.
The intended audience for this beta release are experienced users interested in upcoming features as well as developers of vulnerability checks.

Web sites that run text squarely around images even when the images don't have even borders look a little lazy. pngslice slices an image into thin vertical images and generates a small chunk of HTML to align these slices so that the original image can be seen in a Web browser. This lets you place non-rectangular floating images on Web pages and align the surrounding text to the uneven borders of the image for a professional-looking layout. While you may be able to achieve a similar effect in other ways, if you want to have your Web site viewable in both a wide variety of browsers and versions of those browsers, using image slices is an effective technique.