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One of the advantages, touted by the Open Source community is that you can read the source code and make changes to it if you need to. Now to be honest, how many of us even bother to look at the source code? Come on, fess up. Yes, that is about what I thought. To the five percent of you that do read the code (or tweak it), bravo, but, while most of us do not live in C (or C++ or insert your favorite language here), we do have to configure, tweak, twist, bend and occasional bully the code into working correctly and in a useful manner, whether that is playing nice with our libraries or other application. So, the Open can also mean transparent. And this is a good thing.

Cluster computing has played a pivotal role in the way research is conducted in educational environments. Because the amount of available money and hardware varies between university researchers, often it's necessary to find a clustering solution that can work well on a small scale, but also can be expanded into a large computing cluster. To maximize grants, researchers typically ask for an open source solution to meet their needs. Despite the lack of certain desirable features, Rocks clusters are among the best open source solution for building a computing cluster.

Science is the effort of trying to understand how the physical world works. From observation and experimentation, science uses physical evidence of natural phenomena to compile data and analyze the collated information. Science really prospers and advances when individuals share the results of their experiments with others in the scientific community. There is a certain logic that scientific software should therefore be released in a freely distributable environment.

When I was a kid, I used to make crude little animated cartoons in my notebooks using the flipbook technique. Walt Disney had nothing to worry about. I was awful even by the 3rd grade standards of White Pine elementary. Today, I could be great, because almost all top animation and special effects artists are Linux users.

The other day I was talking with a bunch of other tech heads about the ongoing Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux market share war and why, from a stats point of view, that Mac and Linux were still trailing far behind Windows. “It all revolves around killer apps,” pipes up one of the tech heads. “The problem with both Apple and Linux is that neither OS has a compelling killer app driving the user base.” The conversation then went off on to discuss apps such as Photoshop and AutoCAD and how with Windows you have a single unified platform that’ll run almost any professional grade package that you can think of, while with Mac and Linux your choices are restricted. Bull.

While there is never any shortage of hope in the world of technology, perhaps the largest gusher in the last 20 years came from two words: open source, a term that is too large for one column (too big for most books, in fact). This week JargonSpy takes a trip back in time to understand how many of the hopes and dreams for open source ended up creating a world just like the one we always had. To reduce the scope of our discussion to a digestible size, we must add a qualifier, so this week we are going to look at "commercial open source."

[Lookout, major lapse in research ahead. - Scott]

In an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK on Friday, Torvalds said that, while it is relatively easy for coders and organizations to contribute small patches, the contribution of large patches, developed in isolation, could lead to both new and established contributors becoming frustrated.

Last month we started a tutorial series covering tips and tricks to help you make the transition from Microsoft (MS) Office to OpenOffice.org (OOo) 2.4 easier. We discovered how to add more templates and clip art to OOo, include grammar checking, and replicate the convenient Split Window feature of MS Office. This part of the series will take you through the process of importing the custom dictionary of MS Office, setting OOo to always save in the MS Office format, and using MS Office. Ready, set, go!

Lenovo will make the leap from ThinkPad notebooks to servers in September, introducing its first Linux and Windows server systems, The VAR Guy has learned. Here are the details.

Ubuntu is well known in user circles as the cool kids' Linux. It's available preinstalled on PCs and laptops from Dell Inc. and from numerous smaller computer vendors. What Ubuntu hasn't been known as is a Linux distribution that matters to CIOs and IT managers. Things are changing. Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu's parent company, is finally taking serious action on its long-announced plans to become a serious enterprise Linux player. The Isle of Man-based Linux distributor isn't just targeting data center servers, although that's on its list.

Buckling under the weight of the Internet radio royalty hike that SoundExchange pushed through last July, Pandora may pull its own plug soon. Despite being one of the most popular Internet radio services, the company still isn't making money, and its founder, Tim Westergren, says it can't last beyond its first payment of the higher royalties.

The explosion of low-cost, ultra-portable laptops that started to appear in computer stores is a dream come true for many technology enthusiasts and free software developers who are keen to offer solutions for the new computer class. In this week's issue we take a first look at Mandriva Flash 2008.1, one of the first distributions with official support for the ASUS Eee PC. Does it really work "out of the box" as claimed? Read on to find out. In the news section, Slackware introduces KDE 4.1 into the development tree, Fedora hints at a major problem with its update infrastructure, and Linux Mint suffers from a crippling attack on its web site. Also in this week's issue, links to two excellent interviews with Ubuntu's Scott Remnant and gOS's David Liu. Finally, after a short break, we have resumed adding new distributions to the DistroWatch database - one of the new ones introduced last week is FaunOS, an interesting Arch Linux-based desktop distribution optimised for USB Flash drives.

Three students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) were ordered by a federal court judge to cancel their scheduled presentation at DEFCON about vulnerabilities in Boston's transit fare payment system, violating their First Amendment right to discuss their important research. EFF represents Zack Anderson, RJ Ryan and Alessandro Chiesa. The Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) sued the students and MIT in United States District Court in Massachusetts, claiming that the students violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) by delivering information to conference attendees that could be used to defraud the MBTA of transit fares.

NimbleX, a Slackware-based distribution, advertises itself as "the new wave of Linux." However, what is appealing in NimbleX -- its speed and small footprint and the resulting selection of alternative software choices -- will likely strike veteran GNU/Linux users as being very old school. By contrast, its limitations -- too little attention to such aspects as the installer, packaging, and security -- seem all too modern, being reminiscent of other distros intent on commercialization or emulating Windows, even though NimbleX is a community distribution and largely a labor of love for Romanian developer Bogdan Radulescu.

Microsoft's Open XML format overcame its final stumbling block and is moving forward as an official ISO standard. The file format had been held back earlier this year by claims that the voting process was rushed and that Microsoft's specification information was incomplete.

OpenBSD provides a UNIX distribution with a primary emphasis on security and cryptography. If you're looking for a UNIX distribution to deploy in the most critical nexus in your network infrastructure, look no further than OpenBSD. The recent release of OpenBSD—version 4.3—includes several new features and bug fixes that this article reviews.

Debian GNU/Linux is now 15 years old -- which isn't too shabby for an operating system. Yet though Debian is still alive and kicking, I'm not so sure it holds the market position that it should at this point in its maturity.

Intel's P45 Chipset was released this summer along with the P43, G43, and G45 Chipsets as the mainstream Eaglelake alternative to Intel's current flagship X48 Chipset. Though over the older X48 motherboards, the P45 has the advantages of using Intel's newer ICH10 / ICH10R Southbridge and support for up to 16GB of DDR2/DDR3 memory, which is double that of what's supported by the X48. Today we are looking at two Intel P45 motherboards compliments of Gigabyte with their EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R. The EP45-DS3L and EP45T-DS3R are just two of Gigabyte's motherboards bearing the P45 Chipset but in total they have eight different motherboards using this version of the Eaglelake Chipset.

“Hacking Exposed Linux” by ISECOM (Institute for Security and Open Methodologies) is a guide to help you secure your Linux environment. This book does not only help improve your security it looks at why you should. It does this by showing examples of real attacks and rates the importance of protecting yourself from being a victim of each type of attack.

This tutorial explains how you can set up a FreeRadius server with Wifi authentication and accounting in conjunction with MySQL & web management with Daloradius on Ubuntu 8.04 (LTS). This howto should work for a newbie. Production deployment is also possible with minor tweaking.