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An Interview with Kir Kolyshkin,Project Manager for OpenVZ.

Many in Health IT are moving to all over-the-web 'asp', software-as-service Electronic Medical Records services with total centralized control of data. John C. Dvoraksounds off a note of caution for such a trend with the recent Windows Genuine Advantage server outage which should be a wakeup call for those moving to 'online everything' applications:'What is often lost in individual analyses of how to proceed with your data-processing needs is the concept of"being at the mercy of a single company." It's something that you need to avoid at all costs. This Windows Genuine Disadvantage pothole should make all users rethink their strategies...' He further notes that this outage"happened to Microsoft, not to Alabama Joe's Server Farm and Toaster Repair." a note of caution indeed.

What happens when it comes to light that terrorists are using the Linux Operating System to conduct their business. Linux already has a black-hat, bad-boy image. Some of us have learned to create our own style of mis-teek with such misconceptions...it's what makes us feel elite. (like purposely mis-spelling a word just to be "special".) Well, it's just that sort of misconception that could find Linux on the opposite side of the law.

Continuing its efforts to connect with social activists, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has released an open letter signed by major environmental organizations. The letter urges activists to reject lockdown technologies in general and Windows Vista in particular as hostile to their ethics and the causes they support, and to support free software instead. The letter is only the first in a series that the FSF plans to release in the coming months, each of which will be crafted to make an ethical or pragmatic appeal to a specific group's concerns.

One of the fundamental principles of Linux kernel development is that user-space interfaces are set in stone. Once an API has been made available to user space, it must, for all practical purposes, be supported (without breaking applications) indefinitely. There have been times when this rule has been broken, but, even in the areas known for trouble (sysfs, for example), the number of times that the user-space API has been broken has remained relatively small.

With an avalanche of last-minute commits, the KOffice Google Summer of Code students finished yet another great Summer of Code. We had some very exciting projects this year, and most of them were as great a success as last year.

I guess I was a tad surprised that O'Reilly's "Mastering Perl" is a first edition. After all, Learning Perl is in it's fourth edition and was published over 2 years ago. I was also surprised (I guess I don't keep up) that O'Reilly had published the first edition of Intermediate Perl over a year ago. Usually for a particular programming language, O'Reilly publishes a "Learning" and a "Mastering" book. I know Perl is no cake walk, but does it really need this much attention? Also, why wait four editions into "Learning Perl" before publishing more advanced texts on this language?

Linux OEM companies can survive, even flourish. As far as I’m concerned, System76.com remains king here in the States. They've proven that a 'Linux only' approach is strong enough to stand on its own without needing to rely on Windows as a backup OS option to be pre-installed. Besides specializing in Linux-only systems, the best Linux OEMs go that extra mile in customer service, in addition to providing extra needed functionality. Especially when the distribution itself falls short in an area of hardware compatibility.

Opinion: Any company that has managed for more than a decade not only to survive within Microsoft's shadow but also to profit from it clearly knows how to run a business. For what I think will prove to be a cheap $500 million, XenSource has been picked up by Citrix Systems. So what, you ask? One of the truisms of the business is that nobody—and I mean nobody—partners with Microsoft and wins in the long run. There is, however, an exception to that rule: Citrix.

Projects like the Tux Project and the Radio Talkshow Blitz are vitally important projects when it comes to helping the Free Software movement grow. First, one might wonder why it is so important to spread Free Software and the ideals of user freedom. For one thing, we want more people to discover the practical benefits of software freedom.

If Linux is hardly affected by viruses, why do system administrators use anti-virus software on their Linux email servers? Because an anti-virus scanner on a mail server can serve as another level of defense for Microsoft Windows desktop users. Linux provides several server-based anti-virus applications, most of which can be configured to interact with a variety of messaging servers. Many use the actively developed ClamAV open source virus toolkit on the back end; others work with proprietary or commercial scanners. In this article we'll compare MailScanner and Anomy Sanitizer on a Sendmail messaging server.

Foreword: This guest whitepaper explains how a hypervisor can be used to leverage GPL software while isolating it from proprietary code, in order to ensure compliance with the requirements of the GPL. It was written by a TRANGO Virtual Processors product manager, and uses that company's hypervisor as an example.

This posting is supposed to respond HowToForge's notice that installing Xen 3.1.0 on Debian Etch AMD64, regardless of the method (Xen source install vs. Xen x86_64 binary install) didn't work. Here is how I installed Xen on my Debian Etch 4.0 (amd64) box assembled with Core 2 Duo E6600, ASUS P5B Deluxe, 2 GB RAM (Kingston non ECC) and a SATA HDD Seagate Barracuda 160 GB x 2.

Since our previous peek at the state of wireless networking in Linux, which is moving forward in an excellent fashion, the new unified Linux wireless stack (mac80211) has been accepted into the mainline 2.6.22 kernel. This is the new common base for all Linux wireless drivers. There are no drivers yet that use mac80211, but inclusion in the kernel is a huge step forward. Linux developers are hard at work porting old drivers and writing new ones, and this should attract participation from additional developers who now have a nice unified wireless networking stack to build on, instead of the previous mish-mash.

Welcome to Fedora Weekly News Issue 102 for the week of August 20th. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue102

If you use the Opera browser on multiple machines, you'll inevitably run into the problem of keeping your bookmarks in sync. While you can store your bookmarks using services like del.icio.us, you might want to opt for oSync -- a synchronization utility that has a couple of clever features besides the ability to keep bookmarks and notes in sync.

After several months of development, the SS2L OpenDev publishes a first version of the free project Kochizz. This graphic tool aims at facilitating the configuration of the Apache Web servers.

So, you have an irritatingly loud CPU fan which is making you consider whether or not launching your laptop through the nearest window is a good idea. Well, before you do that, why not give CPU frequency scaling a go.

Explaining what freedom in computing is about, is also talk about the FSF and/or the GNU project; they’re nothing less than the flagship of the free software movement and they’ve made huge steps toward freedom in computing, but they have missed a key point: If the average computer user is not on our side, we’ll get nowhere.

A distributed computing project named "Artificial Intelligence - Reverse engineering the brain" has been launched on Linux. The goal is to use the power of distributed computing to build a large scale artificial intelligence system.