Showing all newswire headlines

There are a number of open source IT monitoring and management tools that enterprises should be keeping an eye on. In a recent InfoWorld blog, GroundWork Open Source CEO Ranga Rangachari highlights the Ganglia project. The Ganglia Monitoring System is an open source cluster monitoring technology started within UC Berkeley's Millenium Clustered Computing Labs. It has been downloaded over 110,000 times from 145 countries and currently has dozens of contributing developers. As large companies are increasingly creating server farms of thousands of servers, new server management and monitoring requirements are surfacing. On the monitoring side, polling breaks down after a few hundred servers, so you have to go to an interrupt-driven architecture with "list and announce" protocols. Also, aside from the technical issues, traditional monitoring solutions are prohibitively expensive when you roll out hundreds of servers at a time. As clustering continues to become more pervasive in enterprise IT, Ganglia will be one to watch.

Red Hat's quarterly profit more than doubled on the back of strong subscription sales from corporate customers.

This year I went to the FOSDEM for the first time, and like the last few years, I will most probably also visit Linuxtag. But what I missed so far, and where I also cannot go this time, is the Debconf, which will be in Mexico. So I searched around a bit and found almost the whole conference of last year (in Finland) on 2 DVDs, which you can download for free.

The UK's Open Source Academy has launched a new Certified Open branding scheme that it hopes will enable organizations to judge the openness of their potential suppliers and their own internal skills competency.

The company reported that its annual subscription revenue was up 53 percent from the prior year. The numbers are based on Red Hat holding onto its top customers, officials said. (Linux-Watch)

Most books on Linux software package management limit themselves to one or perhaps two distros. After all, each flavor of Linux seems to use a different tool for package management on the system. Michael Jang decides to take on all the major systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Fedora, SUSE, and Debian, plus several others. The range of this book goes from patch management on the individual computer to updating software packages on entire networks.

Once only vending machines for the free toasting of open source distributions, Freedom Toasters could soon have user upload and content-sharing capabilities. Richard Frank spoke to lead developer, Jason Hudson, to find out where the Freedom Toaster is heading in 2006.

Yesterday my son Jeremy sent an email. He is about to rent a root server together with a friend, which they want to use as a gaming server. Their OS of choice: Debian GNU/Linux.

The CSIR's Meraka Institute has developed an open source IVR designer for Asterisk, DialogPalette, which it hopes will make IVRs more locally and culturally relevant.

Smart font technology, which automatically inserts advanced typographical features in the right context, has existed for a decade, but it is still only partly implemented in most operating systems and programs. Now, a project called Graphite is not only introducing smart font technology to GNU/Linux, but offering it in a form more advanced than any previous implementations. For typographically straightforward languages like English, Graphite delivers a higher level of sophistication in document design without any effort by the user. However, for non-European languages, Graphite's smart font technology is even more important, because it simplifies their use on computers.

Today Norbert Tretkowski, one of the Debian Developers, posted about his experiences with his new iRiver T10 USB device, and his conclusion is the same I would have:

Apparently, Microsoft's next release of its flagship operating system, called 'Vista', has been delayed yet again. This really isn't surprising news, due to the fact that it's been delayed quite a number of times already.

What is surprising, however, is that according to reports, some Microsoft developers are now in open rebellion.

The first in a series of texts about optimization has been completed. In this first part the actual bits needed and goals are explained as well as some of the finer points of the steps involved. All said the first part has been very mechanical in nature. Just making sure everything would build, then adding the flag needed to perform a build of a given piece of software. The rest of the series - hopefully - will be much more engaging as the next steps are taken into this tiny study.

ANTs Data Server Supports Linux 64-bit Operating Systems on AMD Opteron and Intel Platforms

The service program revisted in C vs. Perl. A few things added and taken away, does it make sense to bother rewriting a program in another language? If you started using the first as a prototype - sure - but (as is the case this time) it is just a simple util - not really.

Novell today announced that Finland’s Ministry of Defence has selected Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as its platform for critical process management and documentation applications, messaging services, and Intranet portal. The Ministry tapped Novell's Linux platform for its proven reliability, high availability and security.

Novell used its BrainShare conference last week to elaborate on its product migration path to Linux, and included an assurance to customers that it will support NetWare well into the next decade.

Conference Report: FOSS Means Business, Belfast

The FOSS Means Business Conference was the result of a north-south, cross-border initiative to bring those interested in free and open-source software together for the first time. The conference was held to host talks by two of the free software world's patron saints, Bruce Perens and Richard Stallman.