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Sun has made good on its promise to deliver OpenSolaris, the company's Unix-based answer to Linux, with a company-supported, commercial update arriving in mid-May. Although far from a complete product, the latest OpenSolaris is impressive and in the long run could prove a viable alternative to Linux. Part of OpenSolaris' appeal is that it contains a subset of the source code for the Solaris Operating System, but with an open source license. Among the familiar Sun features are the enviable DTrace tuning and monitoring tool and the ever-impressive ZFS filesystem, neither of which are likely to make it to Linux due to licensing and personality conflicts.

Over the past few years we have looked at several Tagan power supplies such as the TurboJet 1100W and BZ 900W. However, their product selection is no longer limited to power supplies and they now produce several different desktop cases as well as a growing selection of storage devices. These storage products are part of their Icy Box family, which consists of 2.5" and 3.5" hard drive enclosures as well as NAS (Network Attached Storage) devices. One of these products is the Tagan Icy Box IB-NAS4220-B, which is a two-drive SATA NAS with support for RAID 0/1/JBOD. What makes this device more interesting to us is that it runs Linux and Tagan is more than happy to let its customers modify the unit and write their own software.

About a year ago we reviewed TinyMe when it was still in its beta and test stage. But a lot has happened in the past year, and all of it good. But what makes it so good? Well, in addition to fixing all the bugs and little quirks, TinyMe has become more stable and loads faster than it was in the early days.

Hi and welcome to my first post as an iTWire blogger! Firstly, I'd like to say thanks to the iTWire team for letting me rattle on about one of my favourite subjects – using Linux. Secondly, thanks to my loyal fanbase, as it was your insistance that the iTWire editorial team listened to and they then approached me to do this.

Dimdim Web conferencing software, which competes with services like WebEx and GoToMeeting, provides almost all the important features you need for conducting a conference over the Web. It's available in three flavors -- a feature-limited but usable Web-based free version, a no-holds-barred fee-based Enterprise version, and an almost Enterprise clone Open Source Community Edition that you can host in your network. I tested the Open Source edition, using it to host conferences on an intranet and over the Internet, and it works fairly well for a beta release.

The users are asking, ok screaming, to Microsoft to please, oh please, don't take our XP Pro away from us. So far the big dumb company from Washington state is ignoring their customer pleas. Of course, Microsoft already backed off killing XP Home once they figured out that Linux was eating their lunch in the hotter than hot UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) market. If they have any brains - questionable these days I know since Mr. Bill is leaving -- they'll revive XP Pro too, since XP Home is useless for business network users.

Red Hat announced today that it has settled a patent dispute with Firestar and DataTern over two patents, including one that covers object-relational database mapping—a technique that is used in Hibernate, a component of the JBoss middleware stack. Red Hat says that the terms of the settlement will offer broad protection for upstream developers, all derivatives, and downstream distributors, as well as Red Hat's customers.

Beating Firefox 3.0 to the opening night accolades is Opera 9.5, the latest version of the free browser from the Norwegian browser company, available for Windows, Macs and Linux PCs. Time for a standing ovation?

There are some disturbing developments and they are happening in the key components of our systems: the desktop. KDE has spawned a new release. People are not only complaining about its instability, but also about its direction. Gnome is in trouble as well. There is the Mono controversy and some people feel it has become a dead project, because it has ceased to be "exciting and innovative".

Wall Street firms increasingly are buying into Linux, but some still need convincing that open source licensing and support models won't make using the technology more trouble than its worth. Linux providers, speaking this week at the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA) conference in New York City, stated their cases that Wall Street firms have nothing to fear about diving into open source. Red Hat and Novell argued that's especially true now that specialized Real Time Linux has been developed that meets strict low-latency and messaging requirements of brokerages and trading firms.

This document describes how to install and use gDesklets on Ubuntu 8.04. Taken from the gDesklets page: "gDesklets is a system for bringing mini programs (desklets), such as weather forecasts, news tickers, system information displays, or music player controls, onto your desktop, where they are sitting there in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness. The possibilities are really endless and they are always there to serve you whenever you need them, just one key-press away. The system is not restricted to one desktop environment, but currently works on most of the modern Unix desktops (including GNOME, KDE, Xfce)."

Rarely does one find the proprietor of a company that is closely connected to any kind of software getting on mailing lists to try to correct public perceptions of his product. In that respect, Mark Shuttleworth stands apart from all his peers. Even when the allegations are not exactly founded on fact, Shuttleworth retains his cool. Add to these variables, the fact that Shuttleworth shuns bizspeak when answering his critics through this medium and you can see why he enjoys rock-star-like status among a whole crowd of Linux users.

How to use ntysyv, rather than chkconfig, to manage Linux services at specific run levels.

Asus' Atom-powered Eee PC 901 will go on sale across the UK on 1 July for an Eee PC 900-beating £319, Register Hardware has learned. The 900, which went on sale back in April, was priced at £329. The new model not only sports a more advanced processor, but also includes Bluetooth, 802.11n Wi-Fi, a two pick-up microphone array and a six-cell, 6600mAh battery.

Linux is the best kernel there is, and the OSes built off of it are the best around. Period. There, I said it. Normally if I was to write an opinionated piece about Linux, I’d explain the history of Linux, the importance of open source and open standards, and ramble on and on about the benefits of it’s lack of cost, but that’s not what this is about, and usually this site strays away from opinion but I couldn’t resist this time.

Where on the Web do you go for free education and training materials? A project called Science, Education and Learning in Freedom (SELF) has created a site where educators and students can upload and download courseware without charge, or create courseware collaboratively. It maintains free-as-in-freedom content, and is intended for courses on free/libre software.

Patent Failure examines the current state of the American patent system based on the way it has traditionally been treated–as a type of property system. Using the yardstick of property rights and the economics they influence, Bessen and Meurer analyze the costs and benefits of patents to innovators. Their qualification: “If the estimated costs of the patent system to an innovator exceed the estimated benefits, then patents fail as property.”

The KDE Project today announced the eighth alpha release of KOffice 2, a technology preview of the upcoming version 2.0. Work continues in the same vein as before, with a strong focus on finishing and polishing our new features that will set KOffice. This is a work in progress, showing the changes that have been made over the last month by the KOffice developers. Most features that will be part of the final release are present now, and bug reports are welcome for the more stable components.

The days of parsing configuration files with awk and making quick changes to configuration files with ad-hoc scripts may finally be at an end. With Augeas you can forget about the parsing and focus completely on what settings must be changed. So if the configuration file moves a piece of data to the fourth column, you don't need to care; Augeas will still show it to you as it did before.

Microsoft is going to become an OSS company, not a FOSS company. We are already seeing the early signs of this. They have created a couple of open source licenses and have submitted them for approval successfully with the Open Source Initiative. Microsoft has pledged to become a more open company. Although the said pledge has been received with a lot of skepticism, I think they really mean it. They have to. Microsoft is now hard at work trying to convince the world that they really have changed. Is all this going to be enough? I don’t think so. They have to still go a little further. Lets see why.