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Qumranet, a rather small software company, wants to make a very large play in the virtualization market with a new product. It's looking for Solid ICE to go up against the desktop virtulization wares from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and a host of start-ups. Those of you in the open source kingdom will know Qumranet best as the corporate sponsor of KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), which had made its way into major Linux operating systems as the default server virtualization package. Canonical, the, er, corporate sponsor of Ubuntu, is perhaps the most vocal backer of KVM.

Sun says the open source version of its Java development kit has been picked up by two popular Linux distros. Canonical's Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution and Red Hat's forthcoming Fedora 9 both include OpenJDK, with the latter also to offer NetBeans 6.0, Sun's open source IDE (integrated development environment). Additionally, Canonical has certified Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition on several of Sun's x86-based hardware systems, the companies announced.

It's very rare that I've every been in a session at any conference session where an attendee heckles the panel and storms out. In a session at Interop on Open Source Risk that's exactly what happened..and it was intense!

Does it matter who pays the salaries of Linux kernel developers? If so, how much, and in what ways? The threads fan out from Linux Kernel Development (April 2008) — a report by Greg Kroah-Hartman, Jonathan Corbet and Amanda McPherson.

"Btrfs v0.14 is now available for download," Chris Mason announced, adding, "please note the disk format has changed, and it is not compatible with older versions of Btrfs." The project has gained a new wiki home page on the kernel.org domain, where it is explained, "Btrfs is a new copy on write filesystem for Linux aimed at implementing advanced features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair and easy administration. Initially developed by Oracle, Btrfs is licensed under the GPL and open for contribution from anyone."

When Ubuntu 7.10--aka "Gutsy Gibbon"--came out, one of the major complaints from the masses was about video problems. Some video problems were so bad, that the machines were all but unusable. To their credit, the Ubuntu folk heard their cries, and quickly released a raft-load of bug-fixes. However, that didn't fix all of the problems.

This article provides a basic knowledge of Eclipse Mono Integration and Nant, which are the most active C# and .NET toolkits available for Eclipse. You will also learn how both Emonic and Nant can help build .NET applications in Eclipse and how to migrate and existing C# project into Eclipse.

After several years of development, SymphonyOS this month released SymphonyOne 2008.1, the first stable version of its distribution. When SymphonyOS first emerged three years ago, it offered a Linux desktop experience unlike any ever seen before by structuring the computer desktop to function more like a real-life desk instead of just another system folder. Featuring the Mezzo desktop environment, Symphony simplifies the desktop concept for users. This release brings a new level of stability to the design, making it a viable alternative to KDE, GNOME, or Fluxbox.

Ever since my exploration of the various PCLinuxOS spins, I've been impressed with the project. Now that I'm having so much relative success with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, it's unlikely that I will be running PCLinuxOS on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, but a) you never know and b) I'm looking for a good system to install for others, and PCLinuxOS is a top contender in that department.

Sony Ericsson is planning to offer developers the opportunity to embed Flash Lite applications inside J2ME midlets, in the hope that two mobile phone application platforms will prove better than one. Flash Lite has proved popular for highly-graphical mobile phone applications, and is supported on quite a range of handsets. J2ME is more widely supported and flexible, but suffers from compatibility issues and isn't very graphic artist friendly.

Last month we had looked at the Gigabyte AirCruiser N300 GN-WI30N-RH 802.11n WiFi adapter. The wireless adapter uses the Ralink RT2860 chipset, which doesn't have a Linux driver in the kernel, but we were able to easily get this 802.11n wireless adapter working with Ubuntu when using ndiswrapper and the Windows driver. Today we have our hands on the Gigabyte AirCruiser N300 Dual GN-WI06N-RH, which is a PCI Express Mini-Card with dual-band 802.11a/b/gn support. How well does this Atheros-based WiFi card work on Linux? We'll tell you in this review.

The OpenBSD project is ready to announce the new release, OpenBSD 4.3, that will be officially available on May 1st (the only way to get it earlier is ordering the CD package). As usual there are a lot of improvements and new tools and features, and it sounds amazing that they keep delivering these results with a six month release cycle.

There are two kinds of Linux people in the world, those that will help people fix their Windows spyware problems, and those that will not. I land squarely in the former camp, and I think that it's important for us all to consider doing the same.

The interest in the Ubuntu Server is directly related to the interest in the Ubuntu Desktop. How does this impact the deployment and use of the Ubuntu Server?

This tip shows how to add logging to your PHP script and how to add configuration so you have basic, configurable logging. The PHP script requires two PEAR packages, Log and Config. To use the code in shown in this tip, you'll need to PEAR installed along with PHP and you'll need to install both the Log and the Config PEAR packages.

With vncthumbnailviewer you can see many VNC desktops at once and jump in to control any of them with a double click. vncthumbnailviewer acts like many VNC clients, so it can help you monitor many VNC servers. vncthumbnailviewer was created for monitoring desktops in a computer lab environment. It uses the TightVNC Java code, and is thus fairly stable and glitch-free. There are no vncthumbnailviewer packages for Ubuntu, openSUSE, or Fedora. vncthumbnailviewer is written in Java, so you need a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed in order to run it. For this article I used version 1.4.1 of vncthumbnailviewer with IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b21) 64-bit as my Java runtime.

VIA Technologies, Inc, a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, today announced the launch of a beta version of the VIA Linux Portal as part of an initiative designed to extend collaboration with the Open Source community. The VIA Linux Portal will initially offer graphics drivers for the VIA CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the new Ubuntu 8.04 LTS distribution. Documentation and source code for these drivers will be released over the coming weeks, with official forums and bug tracking scheduled for implementation later this year. The VIA Linux Portal will also adhere to a regular release schedule that is aligned with kernel changes and the release of major Linux distributions.

Botnet fighters have another tool in their arsenal, thanks to Microsoft. The software vendor is giving law enforcers access to a special tool that keeps tabs on botnets, using data compiled from the 450 million computer users who have installed the Malicious Software Removal tool that ships with Windows.

The JyDT plug-in enables Eclipse to work as a Jython/CPython IDE. In this tutorial learn how to configure the JyDT and a brief description of it. Learn to use the PyDev perspective and explorer, compile and run code, use the debugger, do unit testing, refactor, manage Python projects, and use the editor and IDE.

In this installment of our co-published Fedora Interviews, Jeremy Katz, David Cantrell, and Chris Lumens talk about the improvements to Anaconda in Fedora 9.