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This month's Harvard Business Review features a case study of a company debating whether to open source its software. Here's a mini review of the article.

A few days ago I finally got my copy of Running Xen. I was anxious to see how the information would be presented. I can tell you I was not disappointed. I am by no means a Xen master. I have tinkered with it a few times over the past several years but as I am getting ready to use it full time in production I need as much information as I can get. The books authors include Eli Dow, and Todd Deshane who worked on Xen and the Art of Repeated Research, as well as Quantifying the Performance Isolation Properties of Virtualization Systems. Read the full Review: Running Xen a Hands-On guide to the Art of Virtualization.

Kerala is all set to become the first state in the country to completely banish Microsoft and allow only GNU/Linux free software to be used in the mandatory IT test at the state SSLC examinations that half a million students took in March. Till last year, they could take the exam using either free software or the Microsoft platform. Not anymore

Slackware 12.1 is out. See the announcement for the full details.

For years, device and peripheral builders could get away with ignoring the Linux desktop market. It was too small to matter, they would say. Things have changed. At the Linux Foundation meeting in Austin, Texas, last month, major PC vendors ASUS, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo said they would be telling their chipset, component, and peripheral OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) that they were going to demand Linux-compatible hardware from them. It's one thing when Linux users ask for support; it's an entirely different thing when multi-billion-dollar companies demand it. This is an offer that the OEMs can't refuse.

Git is a program for Source Code Management (SCM) whose complexity has been blown out of proportion. This may be due to the fact that early on it was primarily used by Linux kernel hackers who, needless to say, do not represent most users of SCM tools. Regardless of its past, today the UI is quite simple and there are only a handful of techniques a user needs to manage their code base with git–in ways that are nearly impossible to do with the mainstream alternatives. These techniques, which are mentioned in the order of their suggested usage, focus on improving the overall quality of the code base throughout the life of a project.

F-Spot is a graphical photo manager that allows you to tag your image files and search and view images based on those tags. With phpfspot, you can share the photo collection you manage with F-Spot with others through a Web interface and let them navigate through your photos using the tags you have set up. No packages exist for phpfspot for Ubuntu, Fedora, or openSUSE. I built it from source using version 1.4 and installed phpfspot on the desktop machine that I have F-Spot installed on. If you're running Debian Etch you might like to see this HOWTO for installation. phpfspot requires PHP 5 with GD and SQLite3 extensions, as well as the Calendar and HTML_AJAX PEAR extensions and the Smarty template engine.

Last night I went to a presentation/pitch for Vista deployment in the enterprise (there's a Star-Trek joke in there somewhere). It's not that I'm dissatisfied with Linux, but I like to know what's going on with Windows, especially since we do deploy Windows machines at work. At some level I always want to learn something new. What I learned was more pitch than enlightenment. The presenter, Mitch Garvis, did a great job of pitching Vista, though I would disagree with him on several points (which I will below), but my impression (keep in mind most of the room were Windows-centric IT Professionals) was that a few people were buying the pitch, but not too many.

PCLinuxOS Magazine, May 2008 (Issue 21) is available to download. You can find it at the PCLinuxOS Magazine website. If you'd like to be informed immediately about our releases, please signup for the Magazine-Announce mailing list .

Some highlights include:

1. Manage your Ipod with Amarok
   
2. PCLinuxOS Based Distros
3. Quick Fix for Damaged Xorg
4. Don't Complain
5. Something Completely Different

6. And more...

Thanks and enjoy!

PDF Version May 2008 (Issue 21)

HTML Version May 2008 (Issue 21)

HAVANA (AP) — Cubans are getting wired. The island's communist government put desktop computers on sale to the public for the first time Friday, ending a ban on PC sales as another despised restriction on daily life fell away under new President Raul Castro. A tower-style QTECH PC and monitor costs nearly US$780 (euro505). While few Cubans can afford that, dozens still gawked outside a tiny Havana electronics store, crowding every inch of its large glass windows and leaving finger and nose prints behind.

"So how about someone gets a god damn hint here and starts questioning? Are there any geeks out there, who are well versed in the intrigues of “law” and have enough respect for a fellow Free Software supporter to actually care if he is being falsely robbed of his freedom or not?"

The One Laptop Per Child Project appointed a new president and chief operating officer on Friday to run daily operations at the nonprofit effort, sending a signal that it could be recovering from the loss of top personnel over the past few months. Charles Kane will move from the part-time role as chief financial officer to oversee the organization's operational matters and distribution of the XO laptop on a day-to-day basis. Kane will provide OLPC the leadership needed to deliver on its commitments to partners and governments, said Nicholas Negroponte in a statement.

Microsoft and Yahoo! have pulled their chairs back up to the proverbial negotiating table. Citing an unnamed source, The New York Times insists the two giants are now in "active merger talks." Apparently, Microsoft made that outrageous Yahoo! bid even more outrageous, raising its valuation of Jerry Yang and crew "by several dollars" a share. So, Microsoft is saying that Yahoo! is worth somewhere between $46bn and $52bn. Yesterday, word was that Ballmer and the Ballmerettes were mulling a raise to $33 a share, before some large Yahoo! shareholders insisted on $35 to $37.

If you pick apart the recent set of Microsoft results (Q1/08) you discover that sales of Microsoft Windows fell by 24% (from $5.3 billion to $4 billion). When the PC market worldwide is growing at 12%, a collapse of 24% sounds disastrous, but those figures provide a distorted view. The $5.3 billion figure from a year ago included $1.2 billion of presales prior to Vista’s release, which actually took place in the previous quarter. So it is more accurate to view it as a revenue decline from $4.1 billion to $4 billion (2.4%) in a market that’s growing at around 12%.

Last week I got a press release about a new utility called Paragon Rescue Kit for Mac OS X Lite. It described a Mac backup and data recovery program, now in public beta testing, and invited potential testers to download a bootable disk image that could be burned to a CD and try the software out. The developer plans to offer this free Lite version as well as a paid full version later on. That all sounds fine, and I'm always interested in learning about new Mac utilities, especially when backups are among their capabilities. I'd previously written nice things about the company's NTFS for Mac OS X software (see "NTFS Options for Mac Expand, 2007-12-09), and I had high hopes for this new utility. But as soon as I downloaded the Paragon Rescue Kit disk image, I knew something was very different. It contains no Mac software at all - it's a Linux disk image.

Recently I’ve noticed an increases in the number of people I know who are migrating from Windows to GNU/Linux. Either my tireless advocacy is grinding them down, word is starting to spread. Perhaps they’ve actually seen Vista in action and decided to jump ship now. Either way there are some things they are going to miss when they make the leap.

Sun just announced a big quarterly financial loss. Wall Street is dumping Sun's stock. And Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz may come under fire. So why does The VAR Guy continue to believe in Schwartz's long-term strategy for open source, MySQL and Ubuntu Linux? Here are some thoughts from The VAR Guy

Last month we reported on VIA's new open-source driver efforts that was announced at the LF Austin Summit. This new strategy involves VIA providing the open-source community with NDA-free hardware specifications, code, and other resources -- in a similar fashion to what ATI/AMD and Intel have been doing for some time now. However, not everyone has been satisfied by this announcement and their new Linux website isn't yet exactly useful. We explore the VIA Linux situation in this article as well as sharing what two open-source developers have to say.

Optimism and take-up is growing around the platform-independent code with the industry taking more notice of this fast growing area. Open source technology is far from a new concept, but the market has been making increased noise about its future success. According to IDC, the market for standalone Open Source software (OSS) is in a significant growth stage and adoption will accelerate through to 2011 as barriers to adoption get knocked down.

Mandriva S.A. has announced the availability of an unofficial "Xfce" edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1: "Thanks to the efforts of the Mandriva Linux Xfce development community, an Xfce edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 One is now available. Just like the KDE and GNOME editions of One, this is an installable live CD edition of Mandriva Linux 2008.1, but this time featuring Xfce as the desktop environment. As with the other One editions, three images are available, with different sets of languages on each. This is an unofficial release, but the Xfce development volunteers will attempt to address any problems or questions about this release.