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Today, Yahoo moved its open source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own trafic and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing stacks. We asked the cloud computing team at Yahoo for a series of guest posts about Traffic Server, and you'll find the first one here.

Red Hat has been talking about its new virtualization strategy for much of 2009. Today, the Linux vendor is making good on that talk with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, which includes a standalone hypervisor (RHEF-H) as well as a management platform (RHEV-M). The new virtualization products are intended to help advance the adoption of virtualization and enable cloud computing infrastructure deployments. "Today marks a milestone in Red Hat's virtualization roadmap, the immediate availability of RHEV-M an operational management system for virtualizing servers as well as RHEV-H a standalone, lightweight high-performance hypervisor built on KVM," Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) CTO Brian Steven said during a press conference. "With these additions to the virtualization product family, Red Hat has dramatically lowered the bar for IT to deploy and manage virtualized environments based on the RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] platform."

In case you’ve been too busy dealing with rogue iPhones, October 2009 was a big month for operating systems. Do CIOs care about operating systems? Probably not as much as they used to, but with Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" (from here on abbreviated to simply "Karmic" for sanity purposes) being released within days of each other, CIOs at least have a reason to be excited about the future of the desktop.

If you're buying a new netbook for this holiday season, odds are that it will be loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition. While many users will be happy with Microsoft's new OS, others might balk at the limitations that this version includes -- for example, you won't be able to change your desktop background, and it doesn't include Windows Media Center. And it may even add a bit to the cost of the device. So what are your alternatives?

A few weeks back, we looked at the newly announced CodePlex Foundation. At the time, there were a few questions about the foundation and its plans. We asked Sam Ramji, interim president of the foundation—and, previously, Microsoft's senior director of platform strategy—to fill in some of the gaps. Below are his answers to our questions, ranging from the foundation's governance and plans, to his thoughts on Microsoft's open source strategy going forward, as well as information about his new company and its relationship to open source software.

Techsol announced it is now shipping its Linux-ready Medallion Touch Panel Computers (TPCs) with Python-GTK support. The new support enables developers to develop embedded GUIs using Python-GTK on a desktop PC and easily load it onto Techsol's TPC touch-panel systems, thereby accelerating proof-of-concept design, says the company.

The Amarok Team have announced that Amarok project has joined the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC). The Software Freedom Conservancy is composed of various Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects and provides member projects with administrative and financial services.

During the NLUUG end-of-year conference "The Open Web" in Ede, Netherlands, we did an interview with keynote speaker Steven Pemberton. Steven Pemberton is a researcher at the Center for Math and Information Technology in Amsterdam and has been involved with the web since it's first incarnation - he vividly remembers the day the connection from Europe to the US was doubled to 128 Kbit.

Open source software company Inverse released the version 1.1.0 of Scalable OpenGroupware.org (SOGo). SOGo provides a rich AJAX-based Web interface and supports multiple native clients through the use of standard protocols such as CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV. It features a very tight integration with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning and enable mobile devices synchronization through the use of the Funambol middleware.

Google's developers clearly missed all the Halloween fun, with both the Chrome and Wave teams slinging out updates yesterday. The Wave team has pushed out a "developer instance" of the messaging everything platform.

One of the greatest things about the open source philosophy is that its principles can be applied to projects that help mankind. Content management systems, media apps, and gaming software all have their place in the FOSS ecosystem, but when projects like the Pink Army Cooperative come along, it reminds people of just how powerful the open source doctrine really is. Founded in March of this year, Canadian-based Pink Army Cooperative is using open source synthetic biology to create better drugs to fight breast cancer. The organization is comprised of members who pay $21 CDN to join the cooperative and, in turn, receive a small economic stake in the co-op.

A boot time test as a rule brings more criticism than praise for the tester, seeing that the tests are usually considered flawed. TuxRadar has fixed all that.

This tutorial shows how you can set up an Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) 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.

Leslie Stahl's complete ignorance about peer to peer networking and its role in content distribution was on full display on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

According to one leading security research lab, Windows 7 is vulnerable to an astonishing 8 out of 10 viruses it was exposed to during testing. But wait a minute, just how astonishing is this, really?

MySQL Cluster has come a long way in the 4 years since I experimented with it. Compared to when I first got the cluster working on my home computer, I didn't have to change much get the latest version up and running. So, what is MySQL Cluster? It is a database solution which tries to solve high availability issues by using multiple synchronous masters (for the lack of a better phrase) in a shared-nothing environment. In order to solve a lot of the latency issues associated with multiple masters, it keeps all the indexed data in memory to enable fast processing of the data.

For a year now we have been talking about XvBA, which stands for X-Video Bitstream Acceleration and is designed to implement AMD's Unified Video Decoder 2 (UVD2) engine on Linux systems for improving the video decoding and playback process on desktop systems. AMD has been shipping an XvBA library with their ATI Catalyst Linux driver since last year, but they have yet to release any documentation on the XvBA API or any patches to implement the support within any Linux media players. Heck, AMD has not even officially confirmed XvBA with Phoronix being the lone source of information for the past year. Today though, XvBA has finally become useful under Linux. But it is not what you may be thinking...

When you're running a machine with Intel video, a Linux upgrade can be fraught with peril. Follow along on my roller-coaster ride from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10 in parts 1, 2 and 3 of my little opera titled "Pulling the trigger on Ubuntu 9.10."

This three-part series is your starting point for tuning your system for power efficiency. In Part 3, the author compares the performance of the five in-kernel governors in both tuned and untuned states to show you how to optimize a Linux-based System x server.

It has been a few months since Novell launched the SUSE Appliance program. The early returns look promising: More than 43,000 users have embraced Novell's Linux software appliance effort. Here's the scoop.