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IT shops the world over are continuing their inexorable march: They're jettisoning legacy Sun Microsystems Inc.'s Sparc systems running Solaris and moving to commodity Intel or AMD-based x86 systems. And now Transitive Corp. is here to help with its QuickTransit application migration software, the most popular version of which transfers Sparc-based systems onto x86 servers.

Open source moves at a different speed to commercial software. This has become apparent over the last decade as Linux and its Open Source fellow travelers (Apache, Open Office, MySQL, Firefox et al) gradually established their position in the software world. It may have been frustrating for the Open Source activists, more vocal than numerous, who had been hoping for more instant gratification than the software market delivered. Nevertheless Linux and many of its associated Open Source products continued their forward march.

Linux started out on desktops and servers, but has now shipped on about 20 million mobile phones. Ever wonder how it made the jump? In a new whitepaper, embedded industry pioneer Jim Ready offers a concise technical retrospective on Linux's transition into a mobile phone OS. Ready credits semiconductor vendors, embedded Linux providers, and the open source community with helping to make Linux the powerhouse it is today in the mobile phone market. Other factors include Linux's horizontal, vendor-neutral nature and customizability, and "Moore's Law," which over time has resulted in processors powerful enough and memory inexpensive enough to make Linux practical in mobile devices.

As I was getting ready for LinuxWorld, I went around booting Knoppix on everything I could get my hands on, and all the Dells I tried from other people at the office all worked fine. The deal was sealed when the D620 of the last post arrived and worked so well. It was time to try Linux on the Dell C400.

In this tutorial I will describe how to install and configure mod_deflate on a lighttpd 1.4 web server on Debian Etch. mod_deflate is included by default in lighttpd 1.5, but not in 1.4 where mod_compress is used instead. The advantage of mod_deflate over mod_compress is that it can compress static and dynamic files (such as PHP files), whereas mod_compress can compress static files only. The lighttpd version coming with Debian Etch is 1.4.13, so we have to patch it to support mod_deflate. mod_deflate allows lighttpd to compress files and deliver them to clients (e.g. browsers) that can handle compressed content which most modern browsers do. With mod_deflate, you can compress HTML, text or XML files to approx. 20 - 30% of their original sizes, thus saving you server traffic and making your modem users happier.

No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer. Nor can you find many retailers willing to customize laptops as readily as they do workstations. In this situation, ndiswrapper and the Broadcom firmware cutter provide a functional, if not always satisfactory, solution.

For the third year in a row, the geeks will gather in Bickford Park to eat drink and be nerdy. This year, just like last year, non-geeks and people who just like penguins, are invited. A computer swap meet is planned along the south edge of the park (tentatively 10am - 3pm) where we have the luxury of having a truck come by ,later in the day, to pick up the detritus. So bring all your computer junk and tell all your friends. The gathering starts at 11:00 hours and will end at 20:00 hours.

The BBC iPlayer has been a hot topic on everyone's lips. It's late, doesn't work very well yet, presents some ISPs with a big economic problems, and is limited to Windows XP users running Internet Explorer. That last point has proven particularly sticky for the Beeb's spinners in the last few weeks, but in reality reveals as much about Microsoft's plans for DRM as it does about any supposed "corruption" of the BBC by some Gates-backed Sith.

Swisscom IT Services, a subsidiary of the largest telecommunications provider in Switzerland, is using a wide variety of solutions from Red Hat for its Linux software infrastructure. Swisscom is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Cluster Suite, JBoss Enterprise Platform and other Red Hat offerings in multiple data centers. It provides outsourcing information technology services to more than 50 customers.

A U.K.-based embedded software consultancy says it recently implemented a Linux driver and other software for a marine-based military application involving high-speed, fiber-optic networking. Pebble Bay Consulting Ltd. says it helped U.K.-based defense contractor Kaon implement an "embedded Linux" solution for an unspecified military customer. Pebble Bay's role reportedly included re-writing a Linux driver, creating an FPGA (field-programmable gate array), interface, and creating a user-space API (application programming interface) library.

Open source is changing not just how companies make software, but how they sell it. Alfresco's Matt Asay explains the new sales cycle and the skills that today's software sales people need to close deals.

In this 12-minute video watch and learn the order of magnitude simplification that XForms can offer to the development of applications that interact with users to collect the XML data that drives back-end business processes.

In Part 1 of this series, I explained my reasoning behind creating an open source strategy. In Part 2, I will discuss our progress. Our first step was to create an inventory of the open source products that we use at my IT shop. We have a few areas within the organization that were early adopters of OSS and have a variety of products in use. When polling the staff for OSS products, I expected to find between 20-30 actively being used. I was shocked to find that we have around 100 different OSS products in our inventory (not including the ones packaged within proprietary closed software products). What an eye opener!

Very little, in my opinion. While Matt Asay sees the deal as "a big win for open source... mostly because it pegs the value of an open source company quite high" I'm not sure that's true in this case. I've got to agree with Raven Zachary over at The 451 Group when he writes that "It wasn’t open source that provided the 150x multiplier." Yes, the open source Xen project is at the heart of XenSource's business, but Citrix did not pay $500m for the Xen project. As Savio Rodrigues notes if Citrix was after Xen it could have got its hands on it for a lot less than $500m

Linux buffs tend to scoff at one of the major reasons that Windows users like me haven't switched yet: We don't want to give up our favorite applications. With countless open-source options, plus a rising number of commercial apps for Linux, their argument goes, we can certainly find a replacement for whatever software we're running on XP or Vista. I spend a good chunk of keyboard time dealing with text in varied forms, so one of my top requirements is a robust application that can elegantly handle plain ASCII text and rudimentary HTML.

The offer of pre-installed Linux by mainstream PC makers doesn't mean the open-source operating system is poised to sweep aside Microsoft’s; but while its cost advantages may never be compelling, finance departments must prepare to consider the merits of switching their own operations to Linux – and to hear a stronger case for its company-wide adoption.

Some quarters in the software industry still carry a bias against the credibility of open source security applications. Open source network gateway developer Untangle did not expect to find its request for certified testing of the popular open source virus security product ClamAV shunned. When it was, Untangle decided to do its own test. "We found that ClamAV was the quickest with the least drained resources. We also noticed that same thing with other types of open source security products," Dirk Morris, Untangle's founder and CTO said. "I didn't believe that open source was better. Now I do."

A new business model has emerged based on the concept of products that are community-based and available with the source code at no cost – the open source movement. The open source effect is now making itself felt in the integration marketplace, where Mule from MuleSource has become established as a popular ESB and integration platform. As businesses look to become less dependent on software vendors to solve their integration issues there is a groundswell of support for open source solutions.

SCO may have lost a major legal battle with Novell, but it refuses to admit that it may have lost its Linux IP war. When the U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City ruled that Novell, and not SCO, owned Unix's intellectual property, many SCO watchers assumed that it was game over for SCO's long war against Linux and the companies--Novell, IBM and Red Hat--that supported it. Never one to stay down for long, despite numerous setbacks, SCO CEO Daryl McBride insisted in a letter to SCO's partners and customers that it's not down for the count.

It has been said there is no such thing as a 'true' Free Software business. Blue GNU interviewed the Ada Core Technologies team to learn about the company that has been a 'true' Free Software business for over 20 years. Ada Core is one of a few businesses listed as such by the Free Software Foundation/GNU Project.