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Finally, finally, finally!! I and a few folks have been living with a secret. And of course I wanted to share this as soon as possible. But some events at work (the famous DNS Bug) kept me massively busy. And since work is - well work - you earn a living from it - it got priority. However this nonetheless does not make the secret any less important nor interesting. So, what is it about? What's it about? Hm, let's think... the title says "sugarize it". Sugarize what? As you probably know, sugarlabs.org became independant from OLPC with Walter Bender starting a new organization to continue the dream of an open source user interface for OLPC and for other laptops.

Microsoft is bumping up its monetary investment in its controversial partnership with Novell. Styling the deal as a so-called incremental investment increase, Microsoft will buy up to $100 million in Suse Linux Enterprise Server support certificates. The certificates are sold and exchanged for IT support from Novell for its Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

In the current economic climate, businesses of every size are looking to reduce their spending wherever possible. Open source software, which has no upfront licensing fees, is one way of achieving significant savings. However, in order to protect their enormous revenue streams, large software corporations have invested millions in spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) about the security of open source software. In this post, I will examine and debunk five commonly held myths about open source security and why large corporations are promoting a “fear factor” mentality around open source software.

BusinessWeek says open source companies are struggling to monetize their products and show growth. But new channel strategies from companies like Compiere — an open source ERP and CRM application provider — could prove BusinessWeek wrong. Here’s why.

There are numerous documents, tutorials and guides detailing the workings and usage of cron, the de facto tool for scheduling jobs on Linux. While traditional cron jobs are executed at set times, inotify cron, or incron, is a cron clone that watches the filesystem for specified changes and executes the relevant commands. You can set incron to monitor a particular file or directory for changes and schedule jobs for when those changes occur. Fedora users can use yum to install incron with the yum install incron command. Once installed, you need to start the incron daemon before you can schedule jobs. The command, service incrond start, executed as root, will start the incron daemon on and the chkconfig incrond on command will configure it to be started at boot time.

Microsoft isn't just buying Linux subscriptions from Novell to give away...it's buying them so they can sell them. So that means for the past 18 months, Microsoft has been selling Linux. How much Microsoft is actually making by selling Linux is difficult to determine but it could be as much a $99 million.

Layer 2, the Data Link layer, is where Ethernet lives. We'll be talking about bridges, switching and VLANs with the goal of discovering how they interact in this part of Networking 101.

The realities of using OpenBSD on this old machine have had me booting Puppy more and more. The reason is that Firefox in OpenBSD can't handle posting to Movable Type. Scripts are constantly timing out, and the experience is more than a little frustrating. The Dillo browser runs great in OpenBSD. It doesn't have tabs, like some versions of Dillo do. But as an interface to something as complicated as Movable Type, Dillo won't work. Since then, I've discovered the free (but not open-source) browser Opera, which is a good deal faster than Firefox (or anything else based on Mozilla) and in Windows a great deal faster than Internet Explorer. Could Opera help me in OpenBSD?

Back in June we had exclusively shared that CrossFire would be coming to Linux as part of their Radeon HD 4800 series strategy. CrossFire (or CrossFire X as it's now known) allows the graphics rendering workload to be split between multiple Radeon GPUs to deliver faster performance. Meanwhile, NVIDIA's multi-GPU technology known as SLI (Scalable Link Interface) has been supported on Linux since 2005. While AMD is still working to address some issues with their ATI Linux driver, they have been working hard on new features like CrossFire. How does this feature work though on Linux and does it deliver similar performance gains to their Windows driver? Today we have a full rundown on ATI CrossFire for Linux along with benchmarks from the ATI Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870.

Olympics aside, summer 2008 will be remembered for at least two other reasons. It will be seen as a time when the noise over Linux as a platform for mobile devices reached a crescendo. Second: it marked Debian's fifteenth anniversary. Bringing both together, Debian developers have delivered a version of their Linux distro for Openmoko's FreeRunner handset.

A book on (gulp) law? Why would I want to read this? Well, if you're a developer (open source or not) and you are at all interested in protecting the fruits of your labors, you will want to know this the same way you want to know about locking your house when you leave for work each morning. The next question is, "Will I understand anything the author is saying?". Depends. If you're an attorney, the answer is "yes". If you're a software engineer, the answer is..."yes". What? How can that be? Turns out the author is both a software engineer and a practicing attorney (at least, according to the blurb on the back cover of the book). Is it possible he can speak to both audiences? Let's find out.

According to its past and present marketing, Foresight Linux has three claims to fame: Its user-friendliness, its use of the Conary package management system, and its role as a showcase for the latest in GNOME. In practice, its latest 2.0.4 version is not more user-friendly than any other GNOME-based distribution -- if anything, it is slightly less so because of its limited software selection and package management -- but its other claims are enough to make Foresight one of the more distinctive modern distributions.

Clay Shirky is a leading thinker about how the Internet is changing the world. In his writing, especially the recent book, Here Comes Everybody, he detailed how the networked world allows people to form leaderless groups that still do useful work. Through illuminating examples like his calculation that Wikipedia was created in about the same amount of time that Americans spend watching commercials each weekend, Shirky argues that humans in the post-industrial age are just coming to terms with how to spend their "cognitive surplus."

The collaboration is nothing but another attempt to stop Red Hat, Ubuntu and the rest of them, ensuring all of GNU/Linux is taxed and policed by Microsoft.

It's becoming increasingly clear that one of the key players in the open source ecosystem is Mozilla. This is a due to two factors. The first is the continuing move to browser-based ways of working: think Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook and the rest. The rise of cloud computing, which is also implicitly browser-based, will only accentuate this trend. This makes Firefox, with its steadily-rising market share, a pivotal program, and the organisation behind it a major force in computing.

Following some developer complaints of slow progress, Google Inc. on Monday released an updated version of the Android software development kit as well as a timeline for future releases. In addition to fixing "tons of bugs," the update includes a "ton" of user interface changes, according to a blog post written by Dan Morrill, a developer advocate at Google. It also includes new applications such as an alarm clock, calculator, camera, music player, picture viewer and messaging application.

Proponents of open source software are trying to make a case for using the collaborative approach to conquer the world's most vexing medical problems. However, established practices of avoiding the spotlight and protecting vested interests in breakthrough results still hamper the collaborative process.

The Ubuntu Live CD installer does not support software RAID, and the server and alternate CDs only allow you to do RAID levels 0, 1, and 5. Raid 10 is the fastest RAID level that also has good redundancy too. So I was disappointed that Ubuntu did not have it as a option for my new file server. I did not want shell out lots of money for a RAID controller, especially since benchmarks show little performance benefit using a Hardware controller configured for RAID 10 in a file server.

The Virtual Volumes View (VVV) project lets you index your data DVDs and perform searches to figure out whether a given file is backed up and what disc contains it. If you routinely back up a large amount of data onto DVDs, you can simply number your discs and keep them in numerically sorted order. When it comes time to find an image or digital video you burned to DVD, just use VVV to figure out the disc number and quickly locate the right disc in the pile.

Microsoft and Novell expand their interoperability partnership with Microsoft buying up to $100 million in SUSE Linux certificates. The partnership helps enable SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Windows Server to work together in the datacenter. Moreover, the companies will continue to work collaboratively on virtual-ization, systems management, directory and identity federation, document format compatibility, acces-sibility technology, and the Moonlight multimedia framework.