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When Google first announced its Chrome OS project, many commentators assumed that the Internet giant was challenging the dominance of Microsoft Windows. The truth is, Chrome is not a threat to Windows, OS X, or any distribution of Linux--nor is it meant to be.

Some projects make it easy for Linux distros to package their software, others not so much. Google Chrome, or rather its Chromium project, is one of those projects that is emphatically not easy for Linux distros to re-package and ship. Tom Callaway of the Fedora project explained this week why he's packaging Chromium for Fedora users, but not as an official Fedora package. The rationale is interesting in the specific instance of Google Chromium, but also a good lesson for other projects and companies that are doing open source development.

Google has announced that it will be focussing its web development plans on HTML5 and that, as a result, development on Google Gears is to slowly wind down. Gears was introduced by Google in 2007 as a browser plug-in to support local browser databases and geolocation functionality. Since then, many of the functions of Gears have been incorporated into the emerging HTML5 specification which is being implmented by Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari and Google's own Chrome web browser. This has left Gears looking more like a non-standard extension, even though it pioneered the ideas of offline databases and caches.

One thing that I've always been curious about, is why Red Hat itself doesn't go after CentOS users in an effort to convert them to paid Red Hat support. Today, I got an answer on that question from Red Hat's Marco Bill-Peter, vp Global Support Services. "We are not actively chasing users of CentOS, but rather find that enterprises are naturally turning to Red Hat for the value of the Red Hat subscription model and support," Bill-Peter said. I personally find that a little 'interesting' especially in light of the comments made by Red Hat's CEO and CFO during recent quarterly investor conference calls. As an overall sales strategy, Red Hat is pursuing the free-to-paid opportunity.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on an OpenSUSE 11.2 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

Blog entry "OpenSolaris 2008.11 guest domain on a Linux dom0" was written by John Levon and supposed to help community users to install OSOL 2008-11 DomU at Xen 3.1 Dom0 on top of Fedora 8. It’s core technique utilizes virsh , so is supposed to be applicable to current release of Libvirt as well. However , /usr/bin/xenstore-read fails to obtain IP address for OSOL DomU via XenStore at Xen 3.4.2 Dom0. Posting bellow fixes this issue and provide an option to build via virsh the most recent OSOL PV DomU at Xen 3.4.2 Dom0 & Libvirt 0.7.1-15 on Fedora 12.

Learn why UNIX has thrived greatly over the years. The systems world will shortly be celebrating a major anniversary milestone. UNIX is turning 40 years old! Most of us know the story of how UNIX was born, but what about why? Was it born strictly because its founders wanted to play a computer game on a different platform? And why does UNIX continue to thrive 15 years after an (in)famous Byte Magazine article that asked, "Is UNIX dead?" How has AIX (the only UNIX flavor that has increased its market share through the years) been a part of the evolution of UNIX and what are the current trends today in the UNIX arena? These are just some of the topics this article explores.

Nokia has announced the availability of Qt 4.6, a new version of the popular open source software development toolkit. It introduces official support for Symbian S60 and Nokia's Linux-based Maemo platform.

What are the defining features of Ubuntu? Or Mandriva? Or openSUSE? What are the features born to illuminate point-of-sale material and slideshows the world over? What’s the ‘killer app’ that’s going to get the world excited about Linux?

Apple is making a lot of money these days. The more money it makes, the greater the contempt for its customers it seems to display. A critical bug recently discovered in FreeBSD, and the speed with which this bug was resolved, illustrates this rather well. If you use Apple's products in your business, be afraid; be very afraid. Here's how the sorry story unfolds. FreeBSD 8.0 was released last week, and the latest version of the UNIX-like OS was generally received with approval. FreeBSD enjoys a good reputation with its followers, and many OSes and products contain code based on or borrowed from the OS, including Juniper routers, and — ironically, as we shall see — Mac OS X.

"White space" networking, which will use unused TV spectrum to deliver broadband services, has moved a step closer. Last week, the Federal Communications Commission said it would begin establishing databases that will warn white space devices when existing TV signals are present, according to a story on our sister site eWEEK.

Can we liberate tweeting from Twitter? It's an open question. And it's one that Dave Winer hopes we can answer, in response to his post We need: An open source Twitter shell. He begins, It would do more or less exactly what the twitter.com website does.

At the heart of Cisco's new SMB products is a different approach and a different operating system than that which it has traditionally delivered to big enterprise customers. As opposed to Cisco's own IOS operating system, the open source Linux operating system is the mainstay in the new SMB products

With Red Hat, Novell - and now Intel, thanks to its $884m acquisition of Wind River - all crowding into the real-time Linux space, Concurrent has to keep on its toes and keep its RedHawk Linux, well, current. With RedHawk Linux 5.4, announced Tuesday, Concurrent is slipping into Linux 2.6.31 and offering full compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 update 4. That's because RedHawk is a tweak on Red Hat, adding real-time extensions and other goodies cooked up by Concurrent to make it different from Red Hat's own Enterprise MRG real-time Linux.

Germany's first open source professorship was established at the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg.

Firefox is Germany's most used browser, according to online and TV media and a study of Fittkau & Mass, based on a questionnaire of 126,000 internet users. Link leads to the German "Tagesschau" online, Germany's top TV news source.

[Article in German. Recap: FF3 at 44,2%, IE8 25,5%, IE7 11,8% and IE6 7,2% - Sander]

Most people require a little help in managing and organizing their life. Whether we like to admit it or not, most people tend to be disorganized and the reason why we have any semblance of organization is because we have and use tools to help us: pads of paper, PDAs, phones, groupware solutions, and so forth. If you don’t necessarily need a smartphone to keep things under control and a large groupware solution like Zimbra or Outlook is too much organization, there’s a solution called Osmo, which may be the program for you.

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Larry Augustin had been named SugarCRM's full-time CEO. After spending much of the last decade as an investor and board member extraordinaire for many (most?) companies grouped in the commercial open source category, it is good to see Larry back in the CEO saddle. This is a vindication of sorts for Larry and his vision of an open source future. After years of attempting to explain just how ubiquitous open source was going to be, he can now take the reigns of a company at a time when most customers and vendors take as a given that a substantial portion of any solution will consist of open source code. This was not always the case, especially when Larry was still CEO of VA Linux Systems, at the time the premier vendor for servers running Linux.

Google's ChromeOS is making a lot of, ahem, waves. But what is really hiding under its shiny feathers?

ZiiLabs announced a mid-range smartphone development platform supporting its Android and Linux-based "Plaszma" stacks. The Zii Trinity is based on ZiiLabs' dual ARM9-core "ZMS-05" SoC, and provides 1080p video output, OpenGL graphics, HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, and a 3.1-inch, 800 x 480 OLED touchscreen, says the Creative Technology subsidiary.