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Sun Microsystems upgraded the Solaris 10 operating system today, most notably enabling its OS to run Linux and its applications on x86 systems.

Michael Kerrisk, the Linux man page maintainer since 2004, gave a talk on the value of documentation during the first day of LinuxConf Europe 2007. While documents are useful for end users trying to get their job done, this use was not Michael's focus; instead, he talked about how documentation can help in the creation of a better kernel in the first place. The writing of documents, he says, reveals bugs and bad interface designs before they become part of a released kernel. And that can help to prevent a great deal of pain for both kernel and user-space developers.

Unix systems provide a number of commands to manage files and directories. Their strong point is the ability to use them in a rather simple manner against a group of files/directories meeting certain conditions. For example all the files satisfying specific criteria can be deleted or have their names changed en masse.

The first public Pseudo (alpha) release of Vector Linux 5.9 is now available. Normally a release like this wouldn’t be worth blogging about. It’s early development code. If you’re used to Ubuntu then think Tribe 1. It’s at that level. OK, it seems to be usable at this point but it’s not something I’d recommend for a system that has to do real work.

It's not in the "one small step for man" category, but my quest to run something -- anything -- from Red Hat on my VIA C3 Samuel-equipped test box has finally been successful. But not without a lot of effort.

Industry’s top open source legal experts to crack open legal issues at exclusive Linux Foundation events

This Saturday (15.09.) will see the first KDE-EDU 4.0 Polishing Day. The aim is to allow direct communication between users and developers. Issues, doubts and new ideas can be discussed, solved and coded in real time. For this purpose, a meeting will be held in #kde-polishing from 8:00 to 15:00 UTC. KHangMan, KGeography and blinKen will be this first meetings subjects. In order to participate, KDE 4.0 Beta 2 or newer is required, but using the precompiled KDE 4.0 Beta 2 packages for Kubuntu, Mandriva and openSUSE or the "KDE Four Live" CD is fine. Join in — you can make a difference!

Linden Lab, the creator of online virtual community Second Life, released its viewer earlier this year with a GPL 2.0 license, adding a clause called the "FLOSS exception," which releases developers using certain open source licenses from the requirement that any derivative works be licensed under the GPL. Linden added the exception to make it possible for many more developers to create new applications from Second Life viewer code. "We had the sense that Second Life has the potential to be much bigger than Linden Lab alone," says Rob Lanphier, Linden's director of open source development. "We needed to figured out a way to let the world build this into a much bigger thing."

That this is a second edition of a highly successful book means that it was probably updated for Web 2.0 and advances in JavaScript and Dynamic HTML. Of course, as a "cookbook" what this means wasn't that the theory and overall concepts were updated but the actual practice of developing web content was given a makeover. This doesn't mean that Goodman has produced just a dry list of "recipes" but rather has also added the "why this works" to the mix, so you aren't just stuck with a list of what temperature water boils at what altitude.

The team behind the OpenVZ project will announce today the availability of its operating system virtualization software for the latest stable release of the Linux kernel. OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 now supports user ID namespaces for improved security, and has new process ID namespace code that makes live migration possible.

When asked what the top goal for their life was, many people claimed it was to get rich. In technology, many of the great innovators and inventors got a job that secured them financially, but the main reason for taking those particular jobs was not money, but the amount of time the job gave them. They spearheaded the technological revolutions with their ideas and work, not to get rich, but because they wanted to see it happen. This is where open-source software comes in. The people who develop these programs are not doing so to get rich, but because they want to see their ideas happen

SUN paid a high price for positioning itself as the technology candyman to all those dotcom darlings consumed in the crash. Its pugnacious front man, Scott McNealy, also lost some gloss in the dotcom aftermath as the company struggled with how to position its Java and Solaris software efforts and maintain sales momentum and margins on its server boxes. In early 2006, boomer McNealy handed the CEO baton to Jonathan Schwartz. Since taking day-to-day control at Sun, Schwartz has presided over a turnaround at the proud Silicon Valley server manufacturer, which has lifted margins and returned to profitability.

Public service and administration minister Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi has accepted an invitation to become patron of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA). At yesterday's Pretoria meeting, FOSSFA executives explained to Fraser-Moleketi that her support could help the organisation to gain access to her African counterparts.

Microsoft is touting BMW and Siemens as the latest enterprises to sign up for the three-year priority support certificates for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server it offers, which are designed to help them run Windows and SUSE Linux Enterprise systems seamlessly together. But the timing of Microsoft's release of these two separate deals is interesting, as they seem to come despite the disagreement between the Free Software Foundation and the software maker over whether it is legally bound by the terms and conditions of GNU General Public License Version 3.0.

"The cfs core has been enhanced since quite sometime now to understand task-groups and [to] provide fairness to such task-groups," began Srivatsa Vaddagiri,"what was needed was an interface for the administrator to define task-groups and specify group'importance' in terms of its cpu share. The patch below adds such an interface."Srivatsa requested that his patch be merged into Andrew Morton's -mm tree to receive more testing.

VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today at VMworld 2007 announced that it has released a majority of VMware Tools as open source software as part of the project Open Virtual Machine Tools. VMware Tools is a set of guest operating system virtualization components that enhance performance and improve management of VMware virtual machines.

Occasionally throughout the summer I’ve been chatting and emailing with Saugatuck Technology analyst Charlie Burns about mainframes, IBM and Linux. Many people have argued over the past year that the mainframe is dying out (again), but Burns and some very telling market trends go against that grain with a 180 degree turn: the mainframe is surging, and it’s all thanks to Linux.

Kim Brebach, a Windows user and consultant with an Austrialia-based technology marketing group, recently took a long trip into the land of the Linux desktop and reports back on what he found. Now I, on the other hand, am an operating system expert. You name it -- OS/2, VAX/VMS, AIX, Windows, Linux -- I've run it. That's all grand, if you want an informed opinion on what's what in desktop operating systems. But, if you want to know what an ordinary, somewhat tech-savvy Windows user makes of the Linux desktop, I'm not your man. Fortunately, Kim Brebach is your guy to tell you what a beginner makes of desktop Linux.

When I've written about the inevitable march of Open Source, there are a couple of things I've failed to note, or that I just got wrong. Where I got it wrong was in equating open technology and the trends in that direction with Open Source, as defined by the OSI. Sure, the downward price pressure in software makes the current open source ecosystem viable, but that's not nearly the same as saying that trends towards openness will necessarily result in an Open Source end. The truth is, there is a wide range of points on the open spectrum.

"This patch implements a new version of RCU which allows its read-side critical sections to be preempted,"Paul McKenney said in a posting to the Linux Kernel mailing list. He described theRCU code contained in his 9 part patchset,"it uses a set of counter pairs to keep track of the read-side critical sections and flips them when all tasks exit read-side critical section." Ingo Molnar responded very favorably to the patch,"cool! Now after 2 years of development and testing I think this is one of the most mature patchsets on lkml - so i'd like to see this designated for potential upstream inclusion. I.e. everyone who can see some bug, please holler now."