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Most open source luminaries are known for their code, their successful startup successes or even their outspokenness. Andre Boisvert comes to open source from a different angle. Having worked for two billionaire programmers, Larry Ellison and Jim Goodnight, Andre’s transition from proprietary software to open source software has been an interesting journey. Andre started out his career at IBM where he spent 3 years. At Big Blue he was fast tracked through various positions in sales, marketing and R&D as part of their executive program. He then left for a turn around at Cognos (now owned by IBM). He’s been the President and COO of the world’s largest private software company, SAS Institute Inc. and has been the SVP of Marketing at Oracle. After working for some of the largest proprietary software companies, Andre now works primarily advising open source startups using his experience in order to help them better compete with some of his former employers. Though he keeps a relatively low profile in the open source community though he’s definitely a mover and a shaker.

Pardus is an independently developed system with notable visions/history. The first version was released during the end of 2006. The initial version had many promising features like a new package management system, control center, installer and init system. Pardus 2007 also had one of the best looking KDE customizations.

I have a constantly running server that would be a perfect on which to run torrent downloads. The only catch is that the server is headless -- it has no monitor or keyboard. To overcome this obstacle, I use rTorrent as my torrent client, and GNU Screen so that I can disconnect my terminal session and leave rTorrent running. rTorrent is a full-featured BitTorrent client that was built to run on a terminal. It uses ncurses as an interface layer and libTorrent under the hood. rTorrent is in the package repositories for most major distributions. If it is not available on your system you can download and install from source.

Hitachi was the first company to release a one terabyte hard drive, and they've sent us the DeskStar 7K1000 model for review. Our benchmarks show it performing better in Linux than Windows!

This tutorial shows how to set up a two-node Apache web server cluster that provides high-availability. In front of the Apache cluster we create a load balancer that splits up incoming requests between the two Apache nodes. Because we do not want the load balancer to become another "Single Point Of Failure", we must provide high-availability for the load balancer, too. Therefore our load balancer will in fact consist out of two load balancer nodes that monitor each other using heartbeat, and if one load balancer fails, the other takes over silently.

MySQL Workbench is a visual database design tool recently released by MySQL AB. The tool is specifically for designing MySQL database. MySQL Workbench has many functions and features; this article by Djoni Darmawikarta shows some of them by way of an example. We’ll build a physical data model for an order system where an order can be a sale order or a purchase order, and then, forward-engineer our model into an MySQL database.

The Banshee Project has achieved the first major, stable release of its eponymous music jukebox application. Banshee 1.0 features faster searching, browsing, and management functions, along with improved memory usage, faster start-up, and a more responsive interface better supporting large collections, project leaders say.

How to use chkconfig to manage Linux services and work with the run levels you need them turned on and off for.

A third release candidate of Mozilla Firefox 3 has been issued with a workaround for a bug introduced in the latest 10.5.3 update of Mac OS X. The problem causes the operating system to hang on shutdown if an application tries to open the VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin file, which is a browser plugin included in OS X and accessed by Firefox under certain circumstances.

Last week we learned how to make simple video screencasts on Linux with recordMyDesktop. Today we're going to record audio from a microphone, get acquainted with JACK, and convert MyDesktop's Ogg files into AVI formats. Even the most low-budget onboard sound chip should have a microphone input. Plug in your mic, and then make sure it is enabled in your mixer. If your system has only a single sound card, enter hw:0,0 as the recording device in your recordMyDesktop configuration. And that's all you need to do.

I have recently bought a Huawei E220 HSDPA access device (or a so-called “3G modem”) from Three UK. In this article I’ll share with you my experiences of using Three 3G modem in Ubuntu Linux distribution. And don’t worry, it works just fine.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I'm reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu. Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3 -- nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

Discover Database Connectivity, a JavaScript API and implementation that enables Web clients to use an Ajax style of programming to directly access server-side relational data without compromising enterprise security. Also, learn how Web 2.0 applications can use this middleware to access relational data as a first-class construct instead of through ad hoc protocols.

Co-founders Jake St. Peter and Thomas Ingham started Coalmarch, a Web applications development company, in 2004 after "about 10 years' background in Web development" for other companies, St. Peters says. After working for a company called gotickets.com, he and his partner decided to launch their own business, providing content management systems and shopping carts. They use open source software, but with it they built a proprietary package -- because, St. Peter says, that's what customers want.

Since our article yesterday entitled X Server 1.4.1 Is Released, No Joke where we shared that the X.Org server update -- a critical part of the Linux desktop -- was released albeit significantly late and the blocker bug list wasn't even cleared, it's sparked discussions on our forums and other online communities on how the X.Org release management can be improved and how new developers can become involved. One of the most common recommendations has been to get more software (distribution) vendors involved, seeing as they are the ones shipping X.Org to many of the desktop users around the world. However, as there hasn't been a list (or at least not in some time) that looks at each of the commits to the X server in regards to each of the companies and the developers involved, we've provided one in this article that covers all X Server activity going back nine years.

Campsite is an open source content management system (CMS) tuned for professional journalists. Like its broadcast radio sibling Campcaster (which we covered last year), Campsite targets independent media operating in emerging democracies and countries in transition. The CMS's latest release, 3.0, is a major update designed to be simpler to install and maintain. Campsite is a free software project developed by the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF), a New York-based non-profit organization. The project's name derives from its development hub, MDLF's Center for Advanced Media in Prague (CAMP).

To celebrate the release of KDE 4, the KDE French contributors and the Toulibre LUG organised a two-day event on January 25th and 26th 2008 in Toulouse, France. On the 25th, Kévin Ottens made a general presentation of KDE 4, and on the 26th there was a day of technical conferences featuring speakers such as David Faure, Laurent Montel, Alexis Ménard, Kévin Ottens, Aurélien Gâteau and Anne-Marie Mahfouf. The videos of all these talks, in French, are now available for download.

When you think of databases usually MySQL or Oracle or even Microsoft SQL Server come to mind. Yet, object oriented databases have the potential to cut down coding nuts and bolts and speed up app development time – particularly for those migrating to Linux from Windows. Here’s one such compelling SourceForge hosted open source system to do just this.

Breathe new functionality into your router with Tomato third-party firmware for popular models of Broadcom-based routers, including popular models manufactured by Linksys. Most consumers and users don't know the code for Linksys firmware is entirely open source and based on Linux. That allows developers to create customized firmware that extends the functionality of the router through a plethora of new features. Tomato provides a robust set of advanced features that outperform the default Linksys firmware, and rival other open source firmware such as DD-WRT in terms of functionality. Many different routers support Tomato, including models from Asus, Buffalo, and Linksys; a full compatibility listing can be found on Wikipedia or in the developer FAQ.

With the simplest of tools, I created a set of dynamic web pages. The tools I used were a sparse set of lean text files for content, one template page and all augmented by some anorexic php code. It's my propensity to experiment hastily pasting in rash changes that some times I soon rue. Nonetheless, my making such mistakes were the source of my determination to implement the subset of dynamically driven web pages described here. The aforementioned experience changed my direction as a developer. That outcome was positive for me. Finally,I can recommend these techniques to others that have a similar conditions on their site.