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Often you may not necessarily know what kind of hardware you have—you may have a no-name box from a smaller company or a used machine. This month, I present the tools you can use to find out what you have installed.

With Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" set to be released in the coming months, we have decided to run a set of benchmarks looking at the performance of Debian 6.0 across different sub-systems relative to the performance of Debian 5.0 "Lenny" and Debian 4.0 "Etch" to see how this new release may stack up.

As open source adoption has ramped up in recent years--especially at businesses and organizations--Black Duck Software has steadily been extending its role in the growth, largely through a series of acquisitions. The acquisitions have transformed it from the open source auditing entity that it originally primarily functioned as into a player in the open source deployment, management and development space, and more. With its latest acquisition of the assets of SpikeSource, it is continuing that trend--all focused on open source.

The London Stock Exchange has hired 81 open source software staff for the development of the delayed Linux-based system being implemented on its cash markets. The developers on the new system will work in a C++ environment, on which the new Millennium Exchange Linux matching engine will operate. Some development is also being conducted "externally", the LSE said, referring to staff at the platform's original base in Sri Lanka. The LSE is replacing a Microsoft .Net environment.

Few days ago red Hat Enterprise 6 was released, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 includes hundreds of technical feature enhancements and additions that offer customers a significant technology leap over marketplace alternatives. In this post find a screenshots tour of this new release

Guarding your private network from the perils of the Internet is no easy task. The basics are pretty much the same from a defensive standpoint no matter how you slice it. Firewalls of one type or another protect an internal network by using two separate Ethernet connections with a software proxy filtering the traffic between the two ports. Linux serves as a great platform for this role with tools like netfilter/iptables.

Baracus includes remote boot, provisioning and power management as well as the ability to image, clone and backup systems. With Baracus, Novell is aiming to provide expanded remote boot capabilities beyond what is currently available in open source by way of the Etherboot project and its related technologies.

I’ve been trying to zip together what I know about free online collaborative projects (like free software) and commercial free culture projects (like the just-released “Sintel” from the Blender Foundation or “Sita Sings the Blues” from Nina Paley). It’s easy to get lost in the logistics of such a production. One of the questions I’m bound to be asked is “How do I know I’m going to get paid?” Artists have a strong fear against being “exploited”, though they’re often less clear on exactly what that means. A little bit of examination, though, shows this may be a strength of the “Creator Endorsed” free culture approach to marketing a work — it makes fair payment a matter of personal financial interest to the publisher, as I hope to explain here. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Find out what I like and dislike about the android system after a critical review on the Samsung Galaxy 3. And at the end there's a list of my favorite apps. ;-)

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Linux Mint 10 (Julia) desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge. Linux Mint 10 is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu 10.10 that has lots of packages in its repositories (like multimedia codecs, Adobe Flash, Adobe Reader, Skype, Google Earth, etc.) that are relatively hard to install on other distributions; it therefore provides a user-friendly desktop experience even for Linux newbies.

ine has come a long way in the last few years, making it fairly simple to install many popular Windows games on Linux. Cedega and PlayOnLinux have made it even easier by providing GUI assistance and management of your games. One game series, however, has proven to be consistently difficult to get working, and that’s The Sims. With its copy protection, hefty system requirements, and extensive dependencies, The Sims 3 is the most difficult of all. If you’ve been struggling to get this game up and running in Linux, look no further.

Zentyal 2 is something a little bit different, although it too has changed its name recently: version 1 was called e-Box. A decade younger than its rivals, it is based on Ubuntu, but its developers skip the normal semi-annual releases, and only use the Long Term Support ones that Canonical releases every other year. E-Box version 1 was based on Ubuntu 8.04 and version 2, now called Zentyal, uses Ubuntu 10.04.1.

Simon Brew wonders if there are 20 billion reasons why the spirit of open source is being distorted. Over $20bn. Twenty billion dollars. It’s an unquantifiable amount of money, which, were it to be delivered in cash, would surely result in the closure of a couple of motorways just to get it from A to B. It’s also the kind of money that’d fill a couple of buildings, and surely require half the staff of a bank to count out.

The openSUSE community is on a voyage of introspection and self discovery. SuSE Linux has been around in one form or another since 1992, and, with the possible exception of Slackware, has an older provenance than any other Linux distribution, yet openSUSE is still in search of a unifying vision that sets it apart from its rivals and its past.

Mentor Graphics is shipping a version of its Mentor Embedded Linux development platform supporting networking applications developed on NetLogic Microsystems' MIPS-based multicore, multithreaded system-on-chips (SoCs). The Mentor platform, which is available in a free "Essentials" version as well as a commercial version, supports the XLR and XLS families today, with support for the newer XLP processors planned shortly.

For this guide, I'll be addressing not a neat application (at least not directly), but rather a neat way to potentially combine your existing storage solutions while also adding some protection from a catastrophic disk failure. RAID 5, under Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx), will be the prime focus of this guide and we will make heavy use of the awesome Gnome Disk Utility tool (courtesy of Red Hat).

"The proprietary game `Minecraft`, which is written in Java, may have been inspired by Sauerbraten (also known as `Cube 2`)." ... "Minecraft and Cube 2: Sauerbraten have a lot in common, if you put gameplay footage of both in front of someone who has never played either, I think that person would think they are the same game, well, maybe without Minecraft's pixelated textures."

Last week's release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.0 generated much excitement from its loyal customers. Many of Red Hat's partners are hoping the release will provide them with an opportunity to make a great deal of money off the back of it, too. Although the RHEL 6.0 server OS includes numerous significant new features -- a new hybrid 2.6.32 kernel; support for more cores and memory; better reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) capabilities; the ext4 file system by default; and so more -- it was hard to discern that from the clamor of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) hardware partners preparing to make money by selling more of their lovely server boxes and associated services.

Last month I said what OpenBenchmarking.org is and how it should change the benchmarking / automated testing landscape once it's released in conjunction with Phoronix test Suite 3.0 "Iveland" early next year. I have also showed off the new graphing capabilities for this software and provided another update at the end of last month. Here now is another update with some more exciting details.

According to Gartner, Android is all set to become one among the most preferred mobile phone OS out there and burgeoning Android Market is a sign of things to come. Already some 100,000 apps and growing. But how many of these applications are open source after all? There are no reliable statistics. Here is a quick list of 12 useful and open source android applications you might be interested in.