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In early February, Sun Microsystems had released a second preview release of Project Indiana. For those out of the loop, Project Indiana is the codename for the project led by Ian Murdock at Sun that aims to push OpenSolaris on more desktop and notebook computers by addressing the long-standing usability problems of Solaris. We were far from being impressed by Preview 2 as it hadn't possessed any serious advantages over a GNU/Linux desktop that would interest normal users. However, with the release of OpenSolaris 2008.05 "Project Indiana" coming up in May, Sun Microsystems has today released a final test copy of this operating system. Our initial experience with this new OpenSolaris release is vastly better than what we had encountered less than three months ago when last looking at Project Indiana.

Brazil's Ministry of Education ("MEC") is installing Linux in labs used by 52 million schoolchildren, reports KDE developer Mauricio Piacentini. Piacentini's blog post describes MEC's "Linux Educacional 2.0" as "a very clean Debian-based distribution, with KDE 3.5, KDE-Edu, KDE-Games, and some tools developed by the project."

"HAMMER is going to be a little unstable as I commit the crash recovery code," began DragonFly BSD creator Matthew Dillon, adding, "I'm about half way through it." He went on to list what's left for crash recovery to work with HAMMER, his new clustering filesystem, "I have to flush the undo buffers out before the meta-data buffers; then I have to flush the volume header so mount can see the updated undo info; then I have to flush out the meta-data buffers that the UNDO info refers to; and, finally, the mount code must scan the UNDO buffers and perform any required UNDOs."

So, Microsoft gives customers of now defunct MSN Music a final farewell kick in the teeth by pulling the plug on any future downloads or license activations. Your existing music will work until the authorized PC dies, after which it’s back to the store to repurchase the music. As of August 31st, we will no longer be able to support the retrieval of license keys for the songs you purchased from MSN Music or the authorization of additional computers.

Douglas Wightman, Director of Software Engineering at Cluster Resources, Inc., will present a technical session on Moab’s Energy-Saving and Green Computing Solutions for Data Centers and HPC Environments at the 9th LCI International Conference on High-Performance Clustered Computing, to be held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois, April 29 through May 1, 2008.

Financial and ERP applications are arguably the last bastion of proprietary software giants, but the Kuali Foundation wants to eliminate those remaining barriers to open source enterprise systems, at least in the educational realm. Kuali is a nonprofit collection of colleges, universities, commercial companies, and consultants who hope to "bring the proven functionality of legacy applications to the ease and universality of online services." Kuali's first project, Kuali Financial Systems, is already working on its 3.0 release, scheduled for the end of this year.

The PolishLinux article goes through multiple WhereIsIt alternatives for GNU/Linux like: GTKtalog, CdCat, Kat, Katalog and GWhere. For those interested, one more read is recommended: Tellico: manage your collection of CDs, coins and… wines.

Following last week's release of Phoronix Test Suite 0.3.0 and the 0.3.1 hot-fix, a surprising amount of changes have wound up in this week's development release known as version 0.4.0. In fact, there are 21 major changes in this new release not counting general development work and minor bug fixes. Among the changes are new test profiles, a number of new PTS options, PTS External Dependencies support for new Linux distributions, reworking how results are saved, and the graphs are now rendered locally when saving the results.

YouTube is a very popular web service that allows people to share video content online. Although YouTube and other streaming video websites satisfy many users, you may have reasons to create your own streaming video website. Perhaps you work for a company that wants a more professional face on their media. Or, you may want more control over exactly how your videos are presented.

I was left without the GRUB bootloader. In order to restore GRUB, I started with the Debian Lenny business-card CD in the "rescue" mode. All I want to do is reinstall GRUB, and I'm being asked all kinds of questions about my drives, how I want them formatted, waiting for the base system to install ... I got out of there quick. I didn't want to screw up my current Lenny install, which I'm actually relying on heavily at the moment.

gpgdir uses GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG) to encrypt and decrypt files or a directory tree. You could accomplish the same objective by tarring the filesystem up and then encrypting the tar.gz file with GnuPG, but then you would still have to shred or wipe every file in the original directory tree. With gpgdir the whole tree is encrypted in one command.

A couple of years back, Oracle chief Larry Ellison and then Sun CEO Scott McNealy held an event in Redwood City to renew their vows. Oracle signed on to ship Java for ten more years, and Sun started bundling Oracle's database on its servers at no charge. That last bit was meant to give Sun an edge over hardware rivals, although we can't claim to have heard of it ever making a difference in the market and aren't even sure the deal is still going. What we do know is that Oracle is working over Sun customers who have adopted the multi-core T2 processor and its recent successor the T2+. In fact, Oracle looks set on exacting some measure of punishment on Sun customers who - dare we say it - want to use the T2 boxes for databases.

The Phoronix Test Suite is for testing hardware performance under Linux. It's still very young and incomplete, but it's worth getting acquainted with--it is based on the the scripts developed by the fine folks at Phoronix for hardware testing.

If you use wireless networking in GNU/Linux with native drivers, then chances are that you benefit from work done by the Rt2x00 project. You may use the MadWifi Atheros drivers with OpenHal, or drivers for the Realtek RTL8180 chipset, but most likely you use one of the drivers developed by the Rt2x00 for Ralink chipsets. In the nearly four years since the project began, its work has moved from having a reputation for bugginess to the point where some of its drivers are now part of the latest Linux kernels. Recently, Linux.com talked to three of the lead developers on the project about where Rt2x00 has been and where it is going.

Arguably the world’s most popular free anti-virus software, Grisoft’s AVG, has just been upgraded, set for free download from Friday, the 25th of April. We’re sure AVG’s servers are about to get hammered even harder as millions of AVG 7.5 users take advantage of the new version!

Your editor has certainly attended no shortage of Linux-related conferences. Many of those are developer conferences, which are invariably interesting events. Others are oriented around marketing or outreach, with rather more variable results. The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, which ran from April 8 to 10, is unique, though, in that it attracts representatives from throughout the Linux ecosystem. Developers are not in short supply (though it seemed like there were fewer than last year), but those developers spend three days talking with corporate executives, industry analysts, and, crucially, a number of high-profile users. This mixture of people creates a very different dynamic which supports a whole range of interesting conversations.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a gOS Rocket G 2.0 (GNOME) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. gOS is a lightweight Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu 7.10, that comes with Google Apps and some other Web 2.0 applications; gOS Rocket G 2.0 uses the GNOME desktop.

I reported about printers which work well with open source once in a while. This time, it was myself who needed a replacement for the fax machine, so I was looking for an all-in-one printer / scanner / copier / fax. And I found one which I really like.

Generally speaking, I have been quite happy using Nautilus with a little help from Tracker from time to time. Nautilus is a no nonsense file manager that allows most users to get the most out of their files and the way they choose to manage them.

Discussing the latest breakage of the linux-next tree, Stephen Rothwell noted that the problem went unnoticed due to the arm tree not currently being included,"this is why I would have liked you to participate in the linux-next tree ...". Arm maintainer Russell King questioned the usefulness, saying,"linux-next will not give me anything which -mm isn't giving me. As I said in the discussion, linux-next value is _very_ small for me. Sorry but true."