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LXer Feature: 16-Nov-2009

Microsoft has released part of its .NET Framework - the part for internet-connected smart devices - into the open-source community. The company said on Monday that it's releasing source code for the .NET Micro Framework under an Apache 2.0 license. Microsoft is also creating a community of "interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product." The community's web site was still under construction at time of the announcement.

I was enjoying football Sunday with a few fellow IT friends over the weekend. Naturally, between plays, the topics tended to veer towards that of IT. I was the lone Linux guy in the crowd, so my opinion was not the norm (I’m used to that, of course). During the course of the day I pieced a few bits of conversation together and was able to finally draw a conclusion to that age old question, “Why don’t more consultants roll out Linux?” The answer should have been obvious to me all along as I long had all of the information I needed. But after hearing what I heard from the collective mouths of an IT group with years of experience and a metro city’s worth of clients, it became all too clear why Windows is always rolled out.

The Tech-no-media blog asks, "Is Ubuntu Broken?" and basically calls for Ubuntu to call the proverbial spade a spade and own up to the fact that the six-month releases aren't exactly stable.

The last two releases of Ubuntu, 9.04 and 9.10 seem to generate a lot of complaints of bugs. The good news is that this is all very natural, and even to be expected given the deep changes that are being made to the stack. Bugs cannot be fixed until they are found, and they cannot be found until users are running the code. Ubuntu’s large user base means that it will find bugs not found by the upstream developers, which is mostly teams of just handfuls of people.

Next year's US Red Hat Summit 2010 will take place in conjunction with JBoss World in Boston, Massachusetts from the 22nd to the 25th of June, 2010. While Red Hat acquired JBoss in April of 2006, the two events have only been linked since 2009. The JBoss World site has yet to be updated to reflect the 2010 event.

Continuing in the tradition of providing feature-rich, quarterly updates to the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoronix Media has announced the immediate availability of Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 (codenamed "Bardu"). Phoronix Test Suite 2.2 continues to expand the capabilities and feature set for this open-source testing framework with the introduction of many new features, a new graphical user-interface, numerous new test profiles and suites, and a public beta of the Phoromatic remote test management system.

"OpenOffice will be cheaper to maintain and will run better than Microsoft's proprietary alternative", expects Lars Roark, IT manager at the Danish municipality of Rødovre, according to reports in Danish media.

According to Business DK, the Rødovre municipality has kept its move to OpenOffice under wraps, fearing criticism from Microsoft. According to the news site, the company is trying to get fired a colleague of Roark in the municipality Lyngby-Taarbaek, Jens Kjellerup.

You want to know the funniest thing is about compared Corel Linux 1.0, released in 1999, with a typical modern desktop Linux -- say, Ubuntu 9.10? How much hasn't changed. It's sort of like comparing the then-current Windows 98 Second Edition and today's Windows 7: You wouldn't doubt for a moment that the newer version is much more polished than the earlier edition, but you'd be able to get around in both operating systems and get work done.

This tutorial will explain how to Add,Modify and Delete Users,Groups in Ubuntu.Linux users can login to the system and use with the provided previliges. Linux groups are a mechanism to manage a collection of computer system users. All Linux users have a user ID and a group ID and a unique numerical identification number called a userid (UID) and a groupid (GID) respectively. Groups can be assigned to logically tie users together for a common security, privilege and access purpose.

Dell announced a miniature PC using single- or dual-core AMD processors, available with Ubuntu Linux. Starting at approximately $230, the Inspiron Zino HD sports up to 8GB of RAM and a 1TB hard drive, comes in ten colors, and is available with discrete graphics, says Dell.

Google is just not getting enough. After its own browser and a Linux-based operating system, it's now coming up with its own programming language. Behind its development lurk some of the legends in UNIX history.

Apple has filed a patent application for an intrusive ad-presentation system that requires users to acknowledge adverts before getting on with their work. The recent patent filing carries the unusually straightforward title "Advertisement in Operating System." The described system would be buried deep in a device's OS - so deep that, in the words of the filing, "the advertisement presentation can in effect 'take over the system' in relevant aspects for a limited time."

OpenSuse 11.2 is out, it is the first time that Firebird is in the official OpenSuse repositories, after Mandriva, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora (and RHEL/Centos Fedora project repositories all the major free distributions now have the latest stable Firebird version (V2.1.3) available in their official repositories.

In this third and final installment of how to survey the airwaves with Linux tools, Eric Geier shows us more tools for network surveying and discovery, deep snooping, and intrusion detection and alerting.

The British Open University took upon itself in 2005, together with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the task of bringing online learning into the future. Unusual is that it didn't decide on Moodle for merely financial reasons or that it didn't go for professional support.

Tech Data, Synnex, Red Hat, Novell and the Open Source Channel Alliance continue to promote open source applications to VARs and solutions providers. But are open source VARs really ready for prime time? Yes and no. Here’s why.

Today’s release of the list of the top 500 supercomputers shows that well over 90% are running Linux. Also,...

When Ladislav asked me last week if I'd like to review the new release of openSUSE I jumped at the opportunity. After looking at much improved releases by Ubuntu and Mandriva over the past two weeks I had very high expectations for Novell's community distribution. The upstream problems with common Intel video and audio drivers, which created so much grief in releases from earlier in the year, seem to be solved. In my work I support Novell's enterprise operating system offerings, including both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Novell NetWare. The releases of Mandriva 2010 and Ubuntu 9.10 both installed smoothly and work nearly flawlessly on my hardware. I had no reason to expect anything less than that from openSUSE.

Last year Russia announced an ambitious plan to use free software for all its schools. Now, it seems, things aren't going so smoothly. Funds have been cut back, faulty discs containing free software were sent out - and Microsoft is offering special deals on Windows XP...