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Yes, Sun is acquiring MySQL for $1 billion. But Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz isn’t done modernizing his company. Not by a long shot. The VAR Guy isn’t ready to predict which company Sun will acquire next, but he has noticed Schwartz getting pretty darn cozy with two fast-growing open source businesses.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it's making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels, formerly SWSoft, the company behind the open-source virtualization program OpenVZ, is best known for its Parallels virtualization software that works with Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation for Linux won't let you run Mac OS X, but it will enable you to run multiple versions of Windows or Linux with Ubuntu.

Did you know Red Hat’s introducing online training? When we heard that, we went digging to find somebody that could tell us more. Joshua M. Hoffman, the Product Manager for Virtual Training / Live Access Labs, was willing to fill us in. So here’s the details on Linux training… from the comfort of your living room.

Thoughts on being a good System Administrator. Best practices for keeping things running and minimizing the number of off hours work.

Let me ask you a basic question: Which operating system do you use? What are the possible answers? Windows, Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X of course. But let us try to think different for a moment. Maybe it is possible, that this answer would be, for example KDE?

While the world is still recovering from the work on KDE 4.0.0, we are ready to announce the release of KDE 4.0.1, the first bug fix update of the KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.1 contains numerous bugfixes such as stability improvements, performance improvements and, as in every point release, updated translations for most components. Lots of work has been put into shared components making the life of most applications easier. Particularly striking is also the high number of bugfixes in KHTML.

A community driven project for Ruby source code to run natively on Microsoft's .NET framework has shut down, faced by progress from an official Microsoft effort. Rather than repeat the work on Microsoft's own IronRuby, Ruby.NET is closing its doors just three months after its latest milestone release, and following an initial wave of developer buzz,.

The Elive Linux distribution combines beauty with ease of use. Elive is based on Debian and uses Enlightenment as its windows manager, which gives the distribution a Mac OS X look and feel. Elive comes with dozens of easy-to-use desktop applications that just work. Elive started as a live CD, but now at version 1.0 it works well as a standard hard drive installation. The latest unstable ISO, 1.5, should be released shortly.

On this Super Tuesday here in the United States, Red Hat has this morning released the first and only alpha release for Fedora 9. This ninth Fedora release, which has been codenamed Sulphur, will ship in April and go head-to-head against Ubuntu 8.04 LTS "Hardy Heron", but what features can one expect in this forthcoming release? Among the features being worked on are encrypted file-system support, updating the KDE spin to KDE 4.0, PackageKit integration, and switching to upstart initialization. In this article, we are taking a brief look at Fedora 9 Alpha and the features planned for Fedora 9.

RTTS tests and monitors mission-critical applications to help companies prevent failures that could shut down operations. To do that, it combines open source tools with its own custom-developed interface and offers a software-as-a-service solution that proves the adage "necessity is the mother of invention." Bill Hayduk, founder and CEO of RTTS, says of open source software, "In the late '90s, a lot of the stuff out there was kind of clunky and not mature." By the turn of the century, though, "as it became more mature and adaptable, we started adopting a significant amount of it.

It was recently pointed out that most of the x86 architecture patches had been merged into the mainline 2.6.25 kernel, except for the kgdb patches. Linus Torvalds replied, "I won't even consider pulling it unless it's offered as a separate tree, not mixed up with other things. At that point I can give a look."

In the past we have examined OggConvert and Thoggen, two GUI tools for simple encoding or transcoding video into free Ogg formats. But if you are interested in codecs other than Theora and Dirac, you have a lot more options to choose from. Let's consider two utilities that advertise both ease-of-use and quality: RippedWire targets DVD ripping and conversion specifically, and WinFF, which can convert DVD content and other video sources.

February 11th, 2008 will see the Florida Linux Show (www.floridalinuxshow.com), a one-day event aimed at business people and systems administrators who are trying to learn about the latest in Free and Open Source trends. The event will be held at the University of North Florida, University Center at Jacksonville, and the admission charge is ten dollars.

Terra Soft today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a popular derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), YDL v6.0 offers enterprise quality for the home user. .

Domainkeys is "a method of e-mail authentication. Unlike some other methods, it offers almost end-to-end integrity from a signing to a verifying Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). In most cases the signing MTA acts on behalf of the sender, and the verifying MTA on behalf of the receiver. DomainKeys is specified in Historic RFC 4870, which is obsoleted by Standards Track RFC 4871, DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) Signatures." according to the wikipedia. So why a how to on it when there is DKIM? Well domainkeys is still actively being used and is more widely deployed than DKIM, the developer Yahoo still uses it to sign and verify mail although they are contributers to the DKIM standard.

Last Friday 4Front Technologies had released the binaries and source-code to OSS 4.0 Build 1013. This new build of the Open Sound System brings two major changes, which include the full source code now being available for the M-Audio Revolution and Delta sound card drivers, and a beta driver for the Sound Blast X-Fi series from Creative Labs. While earlier Sound Blaster generations have worked quite well with ALSA and OSS, the Creative X-Fi series is a black sheep under Linux. The X-Fi support that Creative Labs has provided to the Linux community has been abominable and support via ALSA (the Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has yet to go anywhere while support for the complete X-Fi series via OSS is just starting to emerge. Interestingly though, Creative had provided the register documentation and other code to 4Front Technologies for this new "sbxfi" driver.

Apple's much-touted new operating system, OS X Leopard, is in some ways worse than Windows Vista, says the founder of the Linux open source project, Linus Torvalds.

The atool package is a collection of Perl scripts that allows you to handle many different archive formats and compression schemes using a single command-line interface. Atool uses other tools behind the scenes to perform the heavy lifting. With atool, you can handle any archive without having to remember what command-line tool to use to expand it and which options that particular tool expects.

Sunbird is a calendar application built by the people at the Mozilla Foundation. It s entirely standalone: it doesn't require the bulk of another application to manage all of your appointments and events.

Google Inc. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called Yahoo Inc. CEO Jerry Yang to offer his company's help in any effort to thwart Microsoft Corp.'s unsolicited $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo, say people familiar with the matter.