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I’ll get back to my coverage of R real soon, but I wanted to continue my thoughts on Cloud HPC. In addition, one of the reasons I need to postpone this article again is my small personal Limulus cluster had to be been taken apart, measured, checked, and reassembled. I use this cluster to try things (like R) and develop software. I am working with a sheet metal fabricator on the next (and final) revision of case modifications. I also installed a new kernel that caused some USB issues. I resolved the issue by using a different cable, but the old kernel still works fine with both cables, go figure. Without USB I cannot control the power to the nodes (unless I rewire some things), so it was slow going for a while. In any case, I had more thoughts about Cloud HPC as well.

At the end of last month I wrote a brief guide for getting Starcraft 2 working under Linux using Wine. In the last ten days that guide has gotten nearly nine thousand views and currently has ninety comments.

Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president for Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, came to LinuxCon with a message: The open source operating system will remain a priority at Oracle even now that it owns Sun Microsystems and its competing Solaris OS.

Martin-Éric Racine has just announced the release candidate of the X.Org Geode 2.11.9 driver in preparations for the X.Org 7.6 Katamari. The AMD Geode driver is not to be confused with the AMD/ATI Radeon drivers for Linux, but rather this is the driver Geode GX and Geode LX embedded SoC such as what's used by the One-Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. When announcing this driver, Martin-Éric has shared that AMD engineers are back to actually contributing work towards this driver.

Those who are in favor of open source frequently become near apoplectic at the thought that open source software can be, and in fact should be, patented. The reality is that forward thinking companies that operate in the open source space do make use of the patent system. A quick search of Freepatentsonline.com shows that Red Hat, Inc., one of the preeminent open source companies in the world, is named as the assignee on some 263 US patents or US patent applications. So if you are about to make an enormous mistake and listen to the “open source means free” community, ask yourself why a highly successful company like Red Hat uses the patent system and acquires patents. If patents are good for Red Hat, an open source company not at all enamored with the existence of software patents, then why are software patents bad for you? Shouldn’t you model your business off successful companies?

If you've ever run a Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB), or booted from a rescue disk, you've probably used a version of SYSLINUX, even if you didn't know it at the time. SYSLINUX, the work of H. Peter Anvin, is a bootloader for Linux which can boot from an MS-DOS FAT filesystem or create a bootable floppy (very old-school!); its close cousin ISOLINUX handles booting from CDs and similar media. SYSLINUX has always been enormously useful for first-time installs, when you're often booting from a machine that is currently running Windows, but until fairly recently, you had to switch to another bootloader post-install, since SYSLINUX doesn't handle ext* filesystems.

A local outbreak of a mobile trojan in Russia has shown us something new: The Android operating system might need an antivirus. The malware was detected by security firm Kaspersky, who confirmed the file is named “Trojan-SMS.AndroidOS.FakePlayer.a” and is downloaded as a typical .APK Android app. The company stated this is the first known Android (Android)-specific trojan.

Faenza icon theme is probably the best ever icon theme I have downloaded from third party sources. And when used along with Equinox GTK theme, this is by far one among the best themes for Ubuntu yet.

This may not be a big deal for a vast majority of you. But keyboards shortcuts are very essential for my mere 'existence'. And those of you who have similar addiction with keybord shortcuts, here are a few of them which I think are really useful for everyday use.

The Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC) has joined the Linux Foundation as a platinum member, the highest tier of membership. The news was announced this morning at LinuxCon, the foundation's annual Linux conference. It reflects the growing involvement of mobile hardware vendors in the Linux technology ecosystem.

The Linux Foundation has announced a new compliance program to help companies that wish to use Linux and other Open Source software responsibly know how to comply with licenses. The Software Freedom Law Center is backing it, along with gpl-violations.org, the Open Invention Network, and OSI, as is pretty much every major electronics company, including Adobe, AMD, ARM Limited, Cisco Systems, Google, HP, IBM, Intel, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Novell, Palamida, Samsung, Sony Electronics, and more than 20 other companies and organizations -- even the Codeplex Foundation supports it. Here's the complete list.

If you use Tomboy as a drafting tool, a word count can come in handy in many situations. While Tomboy doesn't offer this functionality out of the box, you can easily add it using the Tomboy-Wordcount add-in.

Dell makes PCs for consumers. The company that made its name selling directly from its website, doesn't claim to be on the bleeding edge of PC hardware but if consumers want it, Dell will deliver it. So it's unsurprising that in the main Dell has always supplied PCs equipped with Microsoft's Windows.

Gnome and KDE are great – they give you a beautiful desktop with all the tools and utilities you need. On either system, you’ll find a solid window manager, desktop icons, a panel full of applets, the works. That’s all well and good for your average desktop PC, but what if you need something lighter, faster, or cleaner in appearance? You could try a smaller desktop environment like XFCE or go with something ultra-slim like Openbox or WindowMaker. On the other hand, you could get exactly what you want, no more no less, by combining individual pieces together into your own custom desktop environment.

The Software Development Times has published an in-depth look the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) attempts at breaking down barriers for women in open source. It highlights the recently released report by the FSF's Women's Caucus, a mini-summit held last year to address issues in the FOSS community that some say prevent more females from participating.

Consumer electronics retail giant Best Buy has tipped an upcoming Android-based "Rocketfish" tablet, say industry reports. Meanwhile, the rumored Android tablet from Motorola and Verizon won't ship until Feb. 2011, and other tablets waiting for Android 3.0 may also miss the holiday season, sources say.

Canonical developer Dave Walker investigates the importance of governance in a community as rich and diverse as Ubuntu’s…

Nginx (pronounced "engine x") is a free, open-source, high-performance HTTP server. Nginx is known for its stability, rich feature set, simple configuration, and low resource consumption. This tutorial shows how you can install Nginx on an OpenSUSE 11.3 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

User interface prototyping is supposed to be a creative discipline, where the tools don’t get in the way, so you can place your ideas on the screen just like you would draw them freehand on the back of a napkin. Up until recently, however, there was not a high quality open source UI prototyper. Those days are in the past, though, thanks to Pencil.

Ubuntu development is rocketing along and so are the various editions of Ubuntu related books. On the surface, the first thing I noticed about the fifth edition of the Prentice Hall book is that it's had a make over. The cover has (finally) lost the brown, "human" theme, once invariably associated with Ubuntu itself, and has taken on a more sleek and polished look. Of course, "never judge a book by its cover". What lurks beneath?