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The Malaysian Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) last week issued a tender for a nine-month study to evaluate the usage of open standards in its information communications technology (ICT) deployment. The study will also look into how the Malaysian public sector should migrate to open standards and the ODF, according to the Malaysia Open Source Software Alliance (MOSSA).

According to Ditesh Kumar, OSS developer evangelist for Malaysia's Free and Open Source (FOSS) Foundation, OSS is being widely adopted across all the major verticals including public, technical, educational, financial and services sectors, and even within small and midsize enterprises (SMEs), Ditesh said. "On a scale of one to 10, I would give it a healthy seven," he told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail interview, as he described the state of open source adoption in the country.

Bloomberg believe VMware’s IPO today may the largest technology offering since Google. But doubts have been cast over the company’s supposedly proprietary ESX product, which may be derived from Linux. Linux acts as the bootstrap for the VMkernel. When ESX boots, Linux is ESXs kernel: vmkmod is a driver, and vmkernel a large piece of software loaded by that driver that functions in kernelspace. After that, vmkernel takes over and hosts Linux as a VM. The only way to load vmkernel is by vmkmod, a driver that requires Linux. Proprietary kernel modules for Linux do exist and according to Torvalds, that’s fine - as long as a driver clearly doesn’t need Linux to start it - as is the case with Nvidia's kernel modules. But this doesn't appear to be so in VMWare's case.

This document describes how to install a Proftpd server that uses virtual users from a MySQL database instead of real system users. This is much more performant and allows to have thousands of ftp users on a single machine. In addition to that I will show the use of quota with this setup.

Deciding whether a particular computer is a good candidate for installing GNU/Linux can involve a nightmare of details about hardware compatibility. Nor is assembling a custom computer on which to run GNU/Linux any easier. In both cases, you need to evaluate video cards, sound cards, printers, scanners, digital camera, wireless cards, and mobile devices for compatibility with the operating system. Fortunately, help is available.

Faced by technical inferiority and an inability to compete on price, Microsoft has resorted to spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt, says the Linux creator.

After years of living in the Linux wilderness, Gnucash, the open-source small business accounting program, now runs on Windows. Popular with Linux users, the program isn't likely to threaten Quicken and MYOB's market dominance in the immediate future.

"Either people really are calming down, and figuring out that we're in the stabilization phase," Linus Torvalds began in announcing 2.6.23-rc3,"or it's just that it's the middle of August, and most everybody at least in Europe are off on vacation." The actual source-level changes can be browsed via the kernel.orggitweb interface. Linus went on to summarize:"Regardless of why, -rc3 is out, and doesn't have the tons of changes that -rc2 did. But there's some scheduler updates, sparc64 and powerpc changes, and random driver updates (the lpfc SCSI driver kind of stands out in the diffstat).Shortlog appended, I don't know what I can add to it.. Please do give it a good testing, unless you're on a beach sunning yourself (and who are we kidding: you're pasty white, and sand is hard to get out of the keyboard - beaches are overrated)."

DesktopLinux.com launched its 2007 Desktop Linux Survey on August 13, asking users of Linux desktops to identify what distributions they use, as well as their choice of windowing environment (KDE, GNOME, etc.), web browsers, email clients, and Windows-on-Linux solutions.

A project aimed at building a Linux distribution for media center PCs has achieved a major new release. LinuxMCE 0704 is based on Kubuntu, and offers lots of flashy features, such as whole-house high-definition video distribution, optional alpha-blended graphics, gyroscopic remote control, and much more.

Many PHP developers believe that because standard PHP lacks threading capabilities, it's impossible for a practical PHP application to multitask. Not true...

I am pleased to announce you that I just released the Release Candidate of what it will be Custom NimbleX 2. It allows you to generate your customized Linux distribution by choosing what packages you want to have and it also allows you to configure several other stuff like the default wallpaper, volumes, sounds, greetings, passwords and the language of the interface. Now there are over 150 packages to choose from and more than a dozen languages.

I’m still kind of “watching” the market. And though I would like to have a PC with Intel’s open-sourced integrated graphics, but Intel processors are still only a second choice. Why? AMD chips on the other hand have still the lower wattage on idle (a mode which most of our computers are in most of their time), and they are more than good enough for anything you want or need to do. I have set up a sheet with comparable machines, one AMD (powerful) system, one Intel, and one with a focus of real low power demand (also AMD based). The comments are in German, but you should get the idea.

Ready to try Linux but want some hand-holding when you do? Here are three videos that walk you through the process of installing Fedora GNU/Linux. Video number one steps you through the process of installing Fedora 7 to your hard drive, video number two shows you how Fedora looks and acts the first time you boot it, and video number three shows you how to install and remove software in Fedora 7.

Mimicking a scene from Monty Python'sThe Holy Grail, the SCO Group has issued a statement declaring that it's not dead yet. Last week, a judge dealt a devastating blow to SCO's legal actions against both Novell and IBM. Not so, according to SCO. Probably...

That doesn't bother you? When we have dedicated people begging for nickels and dimes so they can get the hardware they need to test their distros and Microsoft is making millions from the sale of Suse Linux? If there seems to be a different tone or pitch to my writing from here-in, it's because I had to get up and take a shower.

Why do I see this message in my syslog: “kernel: VFS: Busy inodes after unmount. Self-destruct in 5 seconds. Have a nice day…”? There is a condition in both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 where the kernel fails to properly clean up inodes after an NFS filesystem is unmounted. When this happens, the above message is printed to the /var/log/messages file.

I've had a chance now to think a bit on what's left after the court's ruling Friday. SCO's statement yesterday seems to indicate that they are looking at what they can do next, so I'm doing the same. I'm seeing some new FUD in response to the judge's ruling in SCO v. Novell, so let me explain a few things, using Paul McDougall's article in Information Week, "Novell's Victory Over SCO Could Have Downside For Linux Users", as a template. The most important thing to understand is that both Novell and IBM will go to trial insofar as this ruling is concerned.

[A great rebuttal to this article that was recently posted to LXer—Sander]

Proprietary code powers the world banks, networks, voting machines and other critical applications that we regularly interact with. But the real question is where mission critical applications like this can be done with open source code, as many open source advocates would like to see happen. There are concerns regarding the security of allowing open source applications into the mission critical fields, such as voting and banking, while others believe that with certain implementations, it could be done securely.

You have just written a fantastic and useful Python application, and you're ready to share it with the world. Distutils, a Python module that provides a standard way of distributing and installing Python apps, can help you simplify the process of installation. This article shows you how to package your Python application with Distutils.