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I'm helping to edit what is turning out to be a shockingly good book on the legal issues around open source, from the developer's perspective, which Van Lindberg is finishing up and which O'Reilly will be publishing. When it comes out, you will want to buy it. It's incredibly well-written and expresses things much more clearly than I've yet seen in my 10 years within the open-source community.

Linux in the data center brings with it a dilemma: more boxes to manage. Traditional IT management tools such as HP OpenView, IBM Tivoli, and CA Unicenter can creep up in cost as the server count increases. With management tools in the picture, the total cost of ownership may actually increase instead of decrease when Linux is brought in.

Both Mark Shuttleworth and myself have discussed this idea before. Because Mark brought it up again in a recent interview, I feel compelled to developer this idea further. The main concept is that Linux distributions, and open source in general, have a lot to gain by synchronizing their release schedules.

LXer Feature: 26-Apr-2008

Earlier this week an article concerning Vista and market share and one about how Open Source Software has cost the IT Industry $60 Billion dollars over the last five years or so hit the newswire. Needless to say this generated some conversations about their validity. I got to wondering if there have ever been accurate market share statistics for Linux or any operating system for that matter and to ask myself the $60 Billion dollar question.

Article about installing Django with Apache mod_python, with memcached caching and lighttpd for serving static files on CentOS 5 server.

One of the best new features of Ubuntu Hardy Heron is the features list itself, which taken a huge leap forward.

Terry Hancock, a regular contributor to Freesoftwaremagazine.com, offers a detailed critique of Google's App Engine which allows users to run we applications on Google's infrastructure. Google's mantra may be "do no evil" but does this seemingly generous offer disguise an unhealthy dependence on a company that has used Open Source freely but kept it's code closed?

Ubuntu is becoming more and more complete and easy to configure. However, like any operating system there’s work to be done after the installation. Here’s a list of 10 tips that you can use after installing or upgrading Ubuntu.

"I've put together an automatic system for applying kernel security patches to the Linux kernel without rebooting it, and I wanted to share this system with the community in case others find it useful or interesting," said Jeff Arnold, announcing ksplice. He explained, "the system takes as input a kernel security patch (which can be a unified diff taken directly from Linus' GIT tree) and the source code corresponding to the running kernel, and it automatically creates a set of kernel modules to perform the update. The running kernel does not need to have been customized in advance in any way."

Ubuntu's deep software catalog, focus on usability and active community combine with long-term support to put desktop Linux's best face forward. Canonical has marshaled the best of what the open-source world has to offer in Ubuntu 8.04, a Linux-based operating system that's capable of mounting a serious challenge to Microsoft Windows on mainstream desktops and notebooks.

In Q4'07 we had looked at Ubuntu's power consumption with all of their Linux releases going back to Ubuntu 5.04. While Linux has improved in recent years when it comes to power efficiency and optimizations, more processes running on the desktop had canceled out any real power improvements. Following that article was a look at power consumption between Windows and Linux. We had used an old desktop system in that comparison and Ubuntu 7.10 was consuming the most power while idling but Fedora 8 Test 3 had consumed the least amount of power and had beat out both Windows XP and Vista. While using the desktop, however, both versions of Windows had consumed less power than Fedora and Ubuntu. With Ubuntu 8.04 LTS now available, we have decided to run another simple power comparison. This time we are using a Lenovo ThinkPad notebook and an AMD server as we see whether Ubuntu Hardy Heron or Microsoft Windows Vista consumes less power.

A pint-sized, multi-functional Linux server small enough to hold in the palm of your hand, was released this week into the North American market by Japan-based Plat'Home.

In a dimly lit back room on the second level of the University of Michigan library's book-shelving department, Courtney Mitchel helped a giant desktop machine digest a rare, centuries-old Bible. Mitchel is among hundreds of librarians from Minnesota to England making digital versions of the most fragile of the books to be included in Google Inc.'s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.

In the coming months, Serenity Systems and Mensys will be offering the latest release of eComStation, 2.0. This is the new name and face on the venerable OS/2. It's all too easy to find websites discussing the history of OS/2, articles that walk through the installation process, and lists of drivers, software, and so forth. Despite the ardent love for OS/2 one finds in the user groups, it remains a fairly small niche operating system. This has little to do with the technical merits or demerits of OS/2.

Edubuntu is a customized version of Ubuntu aimed at children in educational environments. According to the distributions homepage, Edubuntu is "Linux for Young Human Beings." That works out well for me, since I have three of those in my house. I homeschool my children and use Edubuntu on a couple of our computers. My boys love having an operating system that was designed with them in mind, and I appreciate the way its applications encompass the total learning process.

One of the reasons the Ubuntu project is doing so well is that it puts a cleaner, slightly more polished face on what starts out as Debian. The new user doesn't know that Ubuntu pulls a lot of packages from Debian Unstable. Instead, they think of the Canonical-run distribution as "a Linux for the rest of us." Sure, marketing is involved, but at the core, Ubuntu is a fairly solid system -- mostly because it's based on Debian.

In the tech business the name Red Hat refers specifically to the publicly traded Linux vendor Red Hat that has been in business since 1995. There is however another Red Hat, that seems to come up in my Google News alerts for the term 'Red Hat'.

Five years from now, software historians will point to April 24, 2008, as the start of the Ubuntu Server revolution. Mainstream IT users don't know it yet, but the revolution has really begun. Here are five reasons why.

To the developers at OLPC, and the tireless volunteer community contributors unsettled by Nicholas’ plans — remember that no matter what happens, your work has not been for naught. Far from it. You brought the smiles to children’s faces in Escuela No. 109 in Florida, Uruguay. Your work astounded me with the results, after little more than half a year, in the mountains of Arahuay, Peru. Bryan Berry’s team is kicking ass on establishing a pilot in Nepal because of your work. And if you haven’t read the linked articles yet, now’s the time. Nothing can take away the real, palpable impact you’ve already had on children’s lives.

If there appears to be more interest in the release of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) than the average distribution, I think I should take some of the blame. Last month, a piece which I authored about what I perceived to be the significance of the release commanded extraordinary interest. And thereafter I noticed a spate of something in the nature of copycat pieces springing up all over the web - with no attribution at all.