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Part of my job is finding and testing open sourced solutions for already prominent commercially available software. The concept is simple: If it's open sourced, it can be customized, be platform independent, and it can be free. In the business world, this poses two key benefits. Having software that can be customized means fewer problems and more functionality. Getting it for free means lower cost for the services we provide to our customers, and having more money to spend on employees and infrastructure. As simple as this sounds, finding the right fit can be a laborious task of trial and error. Part of my job is minimizing the trial and error.

Dell is reversing its position on 3rd party drives. I don’t think I bothered to complain here but I sure sent my fair share of nasty grams. In fact Dell became one of my four letter words after I heard they were firmware locking Gen11 servers to only dell drives. Of course it was a mistake but I loved to unashamedly repeat the famous quote from Howard Shoobe.

I've been writing about such cockle-warming subjects as how Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx beta 2 and its 2.6.32 kernel handles such things as turning off kernel mode setting for Intel video that can't deal with said mode-setting, as well as the ever-moving buttons on application windows, and how the new gthumb is the best damn Linux/Unix photo-editing program for journalists. But I haven't said much about exactly how well Ubuntu Lucid runs on my old hardware. Pretty darn well.

Linux distributions don't simply appear on mirrors and BitTorrent networks fully formed. A great deal of work goes on behind the scenes before a release sees the light of day. Linux users who aren't involved in the production of a Linux distribution may not fully appreciate all of that work. Take, for example, the work done by Debian's ftpmasters team.

Software engineering tends to be an evolutionary process. Problems are addressed with solutions that can create new problems and subsequently new solutions. Ideally, the new problems that are created justify the original solution. The technology discussed here is one of the secondary solutions to a problem created by server virtualization. Before delving into KSM, however, let's take a quick look at the original solution and how KSM is applied here and elsewhere.

There will always be people who can't help but engender dissent, and there will always be those who betray their allies. This sad reality is on display in the Open Source world this week as another of the community's foremost commercial supporters is merrily thrown under the bus. Of the more recent examples, two come to mind. First was Cisco, which was burned at the stake last year as an Open Source archenemy over its Linksys product line. Cisco, as we said at the time, is a gold member of the Linux Foundation (at $100,000 a year), and counts on its rather long list of Open Source activities some 0.5% of contributions to the Linux kernel. Truly the heartless beast.

There is a lot of info on using wine to run Kindle for PC, but there are a couple of things you must know to make it actually work. (Of course, there ae no guarantees!) Once it does work, it works passably well.

Let's face it. Most people don't back up their important computer files with any regularity. The time you do think about doing a backup is typically right after you discover your hard drive has crashed. At that point it's too late. The only real way to consistently backup your files is to have it done automatically for you.

Memos for your Boss that create awareness of the possible pitfalls and caveats of proprietary software plus the proposal of open source software and its ability to prevent vendor lock-in situations when using proprietary programs.

The ODF Plugfest is a Conference whose goal is to to achieve the maximum interoperability between competing applications, platforms and technologies in the area of digital document sharing, and to promote the OpenDocument format (ODF). This is a short technical summary, primarily aimed at developers, of what happened during the first day of the conference

Watch this: a Linux powered baby dinosaur, with a arm processor heart. The robot runs Live OS. An embedded, linux based operating system which features a custom programming language, giving the possibility to interact with the robot on the programming level. It features Artificial intelligence,programmable emotions and lot's more.

This post will guide you step by step in the process of installing a robust server, capable of serving hundreds of pages per second, without losing performance. While simultaneously serving the pages fast enough to avoid you loosing visitors due to excessively long waiting times. As the title suggest it is based on Nginx, it also uses Apache as PHP interpreter, and of course MySQL and PHP, all installed over an Arch Linux Server.

Lately, it seems as if quite a few people are concerned about the status of Android as a Linux fork. Their is quite a bit of talk about re-admitting the Android Linux kernel into the vanilla Linux kernel source.

Monitorix is a free, open source, lightweight system monitoring tool designed to monitorize as many services as possible. At this time it monitors from the CPU load and temperatures to the users using the system. Network devices activity, network services demand and even the devices’ interrupt activity are also monitored, and more. The current status of any corporate server with Monitorix installed can be accessed via a web browser.

Software patent law is not for the faint hearted. Now the FSF has funded a new video where top hackers and legal experts explain where the idea came from and just why it is so bad for free software. With increasing evidence that patents harm, rather then help, innovation, is the tide beginning to turn against software patents?

This article shows how you can install the PowerDNS nameserver (with MySQL backend) and the Poweradmin control panel for PowerDNS on an Ubuntu 9.10 system. PowerDNS is a high-performance, authoritative-only nameserver - in the setup described here it will read the DNS records from a MySQL database (similar to MyDNS), although other backends such as PostgreSQL are supported as well. Poweradmin is a web-based control panel for PowerDNS.

In this two-part article by Alfonso V. Romero, author of VirtualBox 3.1: Beginner's Guide, you shall: * Create your first virtual machine in VirtualBox, using Ubuntu Linux * Learn about your virtual machine's basic configuration * Download and install Ubuntu Linux on your virtual machine * Learn how to start and stop your virtual machine

When it comes to Sun Microsystems’ technology, Oracle’s top partner priority is to promote Sun servers and storage. But if you listen closely to Oracle Channel Chief Judson Althoff, you’ll discover that he’s already contemplating channel partner strategies for Sun’s MySQL, Java and OpenOffice offerings.

Android's deviant Linux could be re-admitted to the main kernel following talks at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco today and Friday. Developers from Google's Android team are due to meet the Linux kernel devs in the hope of working out their differences and closing an awkward chapter in the history of Linux.

Frustrated by Oracle's delay in releasing the latest version of OpenSolaris, the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) is growing uneasy over Oracle's lack of communication regarding the future of the Unix OS code.