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While Red Hat, Novell, Canonical and other Linux distribution providers continue to gain momentum, most of the Linux chatter has very little to do with small business success -- where Microsoft's grip on customers remains firm. Here's why.

According to the release plans, the release of X Server 1.8 should take place, and while in reality it will likely not be released today, its release is coming soon. When this release does arrive, it will add a new set of features to the X.Org stack and a number of other minor improvements and bug-fixes.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless CentOS 5.4 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.

The concept of open IT standards, which is central to the European Interoperability Framework (EIF), is to be watered down to such a degree that it will fade into insignificance. At least that's the impression given by a current EIF 2 release leaked to the Free Software Foundation Europe.

Solaris 10, the official stable version of Sun's UNIX operating system, is no longer available to users at no cost. Oracle has adjusted the terms of the license, which now requires users to purchase a service contract in order to use the software. Sun's policy was that anyone could use Solaris 10 for free without official support. Users could get a license entitling them to perpetual commercial use by filling out a simple survey and giving their e-mail address to Sun. Oracle is discontinuing this practice, and is repositioning the free version as a limited-duration trial.

In a previous MTE article, you learned how to create a unified desktop using the KDE 4 Oxygen themes for KDE, GTK, and Firefox. Oxygen is clean, simple, and visually pleasing, but some people want a little more flexibility. QtCurve is a theming system that gives you the configuring power to have varieties of themes, from downright plain to shiny eye candy.

The jQuery library provides several techniques for adding animation to a web page. These include simple, standard animations that are frequently used and the ability to craft sophisticated custom effects. In this article we'll closely examine each of the effect methods, revealing all of the mechanisms jQuery has for providing customised visual feedback to the user.

Hacker Geohot claims he has a plan to permit PlayStation 3 (PS3) users to continue running Linux on the gaming system, despite Sony's announcement that it will block alternate operating system installs. On Sunday, Sony announced that a 3.21 update due on April 1 will prohibit the installation of alternate installations, due to security concerns. Sony's upcoming April Fool's Day update, which prohibits alternate OS installations on systems prior to the new "Slim" models launched in September, is no laughing matter to Linux hackers who have enjoyed a four-year run of loading distributions such as Yellow Dog Linux on the gaming box. Yet the last laugh may be on Sony if well-known hacker Geohot (George Hotz) gets his way.

IBM and Indian company Simmtronics are marketing their 10" netbook at a cost under $200. The Simmbook netbook with a 10.1" screen at 1024 x 600 pixels (VSVGA) works with the Atom N270 processor (1.6 GHz and 533 MHz FSB), a GByte of DDR2 RAM (maximum 2 GBytes with a slot) and a 160-GByte SATA hard drive.

JumpBox has launched Open Source as a Service, which allows 55 of their namesake “JumpBoxes,” each one a virtual machine containing an open-source server application like Ruby on Rails or MySQL, to be deployed in on-premise, cloud, and hosted environments. Here are the details.

I couldn't get PulseAudio to work on one of my computers no matter what I do. But removing PulseAudio can be tricky and besides, there is a very easy way to "fix" it (if you're using GStreamer as a backend for music and videos). This is very useful for applications which use GStreamer but do not let you select the sound output module like: Rhythmbox, Totem and so on.

According to the peekabot project's Web site: "peekabot is a distributed real-time 3-D visualization tool for robotics researchers and developers, written in C++. Its purpose is to simplify the visualization needs faced by a roboticist daily—using visualization as a debugging aid or making fancy slides for a presentation, for example.

Here's a big win for open source: an Italian court has approved a law in Piedmont giving preference to open source, ruling that it is not anti-competitive. That's great for Italy, but also sets a useful precedent for other countries.

Making music on Linux used to be something for masochists. Luckily this is long something of the past, as nowadays lot's of cool Linux software and compatible hardware is available to musicians.

While Firefox is arguably still the champion of Linux web browsers, it can sometimes be slow and get bogged down by sites like Facebook. As a result (and just because it’s fun), some people have started to search for alternatives to Firefox on Linux. Thankfully, the Linux browser market has never been more full of competition. If you’re looking for a break from Firefox, there’s probably an alternative browser out there for you.

Open-source enterprise software company Red Hat has updated its virtualization platform, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (REV), to include support for desktop virtualization, the company announced on Monday. The beta version of REV 2.2 will include a number of new programs that will allows customers to run a virtualized desktop infrastructure (VDI). "It will allow you to deploy a RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] desktop, or Windows XP, or Windows 7, on a secure high-performance hypervisor platform," said Andrew Cathrow, who is a Red Hat senior product marketing manager. "By using a VDI, you are moving the [operating system] from the end user's device into the data center, where it is easier to manage and maintain."

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Mandriva 2010.0 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as a standalone server, not as a domain controller. In the resulting setup, every user has his own home directory accessible via the SMB protocol and all users have a shared directory with read-/write access.

Security expert Andreas Bogk warns that, despite recent PHP improvements, the session IDs of users who are logged into PHP applications remain guessable. Upon close examination, the alleged improvements display frightening weaknesses.

I work on a project on which I regularly want to grep the directory tree for a particular word but without including the cvs/ and doc/ directories. Happily, grep has an exclude-dir option to do just this..

I’m not suggesting that a blockbuster Canonical-Oracle relationship is set to emerge. But there are indications that Canonical continues to make some Ubuntu progress with MySQL — the open source database now owned by Oracle. Here are some details.