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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."

Gigabyte has long been a very big name in computer hardware. They manufacture almost any sort of hardware you can imagine. High quality computer cases, motherboards, video cards, laptops, CPU coolers, you name it they have it (they even have a cell phone!). Like ASUS, they are able to diversify and cover a massive segment of the industry, and they are able to do this without sacrificing quality and performance. An impressive feat indeed. Not so long ago, Gigabyte made a massive splash in the enthusiast/overclocking world with their release of the board known as the DS3. The 965P-DS3 was one of the best overclocking motherboards ever to be released on the market. Not only was it brilliantly designed, but very importantly, it was brilliantly priced. Everyone could afford it because it was not only better performing, but also cheaper than the competition. Overclocking was BY FAR the easiest we have ever encountered in all our years of experience. This is also partially because almost all of the Core 2 Duos are simply beasts. The P35-DS3P that we will be looking at today carries the same DS3 mark. This board is really the successor to the incredible 965P-DS3 and should be held to the same standards of quality and performance.

After having spent the past year and a half living and working in the commercial open source software world, I still marvel at how “the community” supports and makes possible the creation of high quality software. At first glance, a commercial enterprise that produces open source software may look like an absurdly small number of people supporting a large number of projects and a huge number of users. But an open source project team isn’t just comprised of the people within the walls of a building in a particular office park. It also includes all the contributors, anywhere in the world, in the project’s community.

VMware introduced VMware ESX Server 3i, the industry’s next generation thin hypervisor to be integrated in server hardware from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM, NEC and others. Building virtualization into the server hardware simplifies the deployment and management of virtual infrastructure. With VMware ESX Server 3i, customers will be able to go from booting up a server to reaping the benefits of virtualization in a matter of minutes. VMware ESX Server 3i represents a major advance in a radically small footprint for unparalleled reliability and security. VMware ESX Server 3i will be showcased this week at VMworld 2007 in San Francisco.

Slackware is the Un-Buntu. It's almost the Un-Debian, but definitely the Un-Buntu. Whether this is good or bad is not something I'm going to talk about. It's just different. As I get deeper into using Slackware 12.0, I find myself reading more and more about the distribution, which is not exactly front-burner blog material.

IBM has announced that it is joining the OpenOffice.org development community, with an initial involvement concerning code contributions it has been developing as part of its Lotus Notes product.

Normally Linux systems can only read from Windows NTFS partitions, but not write to them which can be very annoying if you have to work with Linux and Windows systems. This is where ntfs-3g comes into play. ntfs-3g is an open source, freely available NTFS driver for Linux with read and write support. This tutorial shows how to install and use ntfs-3g on an Ubuntu Feisty Fawn desktop to read from and write to Windows NTFS drives and partitions.

CCP Games, one of the world’s largest independent game developers, today announced a partnership with TransGaming Inc., a leading developer of software portability products for the electronic entertainment industry. The strategic relationship will enable CCP to deliver its popular massively multiplayer online game (MMOG), EVE Online, with Linux and Macintosh platforms later this year.

The Dribble, Freshrpms and Livna teams, already joined by some Fedora contributors, are proud to announce the RPM Fusion project. RPM Fusion aims to bring together many packagers from various 3rd party repos and build a single add-on repository for Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We aim to provide support for all 'current' versions of Fedora including devel, for i386, ppc, ppc64 and x86_64.

Yesterday, OpenOffice.org announced that IBM would become a formal – and substantial - contributor to that organization. But press release was brief, as was an FAQ that was only available at the OpenOffice site for a few hours. As a result, I got in touch with IBM to see if I could interview someone to learn more, and was able to spend a half an hour on the phone with Doug Heintzman, the Director of Strategy for the Lotus division at IBM, someone who knows how the decision was made, and what the future may hold.