Showing headlines posted by tadelste

It may take some six to nine months before Linux is ported to its new multicore T1 chip, but Sun Microsystems Inc. clearly wants that to happen.

Sun has made T1 servers available to Linux developers and is working with Linux distributors, which the company declined to name, to develop the port (see ”Sun releases UltraSparc specs to open-source developers”).

And while a port may be completed this year, it will be a while before Linux on T1 appears in production environments; application certification and support will be needed as well.

Earlier this month the state of Pennsylvania issued a Linux Server Standards bulletin describing which Linux distributions should be used, and why. It applies to agencies, boards, commissions and councils under the Governor's jurisdiction, and is recommended to other agencies not under the Governor's jurisdiction.

Excerpt from the bulletin:

In the recent past, the choice of Linux for large enterprise class environments for North American companies was limited to one company, Red Hat. Red Hat was the only vendor that had the software portfolio and support infrastructure in place to meet the business requirements of large private and government institutions. However, with the acquisition of SUSE Linux by Novell in Jan 2004, a new strong player was introduced into the enterprise Linux market along with a new variable into Linux procurement contracts.

Both Red Hat and Novell/SUSE enterprise server operating systems were chosen to be included in the Commonwealth's current standards list of Linux server operating systems. A dual standard was chosen for several reasons. First off, although each has different methods and configurations for installation and support of typical server functions, they both run on the same underlying kernel structure and thus both with the same standard set of Linux commands and shells that is common for any distribution of Linux. Because of this, a lot of the knowledge learned by using one distribution can be applied when using another. Secondly, they both are very interoperable with each other. If one software application is developed and works on one it will also work or can be ported to another. In addition, they both come with lots of standard open source applications, utilities, and functions many of which are the same.

A vendor of embedded Linux-based KVM servers (keyboard, video, mouse servers) has agreed to acquire a vendor of embedded Linux-based console servers. Avocent says its $90 million acquisition of Cyclades will allow it to diversify its product offerings, while taking advantage of Linux's rapid growth in the enterprise server market.

Advisories were released this week for ClamAV, CUPS, ImageMagick, phpMyAdmin, and several other packages. Distributions covered this week are Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, Mandriva, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

The problems with networked PCs are a modern-day plague for both librarians and network administrators. PCs crash, they freeze, they require constant updating and patching. End users amuse themselves by finding ways to circumvent whatever safeguards the network administrator has put in place. Depending on the age of the machine and the operating system installed, PCs display different desktops, a constant source of confusion for patrons. End users often intentionally or unwittingly introduce viruses into the network through them. And every few years, the library has to find funding resources to buy newer machines, because invariably the PCs become outdated and can no longer run the programs the library wants to use.

Given our recent emphasis on open source and its enterprise implications, we thought it was the right time to repost this 2003 article on the theme of open source's appropriateness for the enterprise. --Editor

Use of material fair, says court

I am the senior system administrator for a national ISP. We run a cluster of blade servers as our primary mail/Web/DNS/RADIUS farm. I have found several tools that I cannot live without in this environment.

South African search engine, Jonga, is being indexed again by Google after a 10-day hiatus from Google’s search results.

Some Web users are reporting seeing a reformatted Google results page that has the links to specialized search pages listed in the left-hand column instead of placed horizontally across the top of the search box.

After years of official separation, Mozilla is just now shaking off some of the last vestiges of its parental association with Netscape.

Mozilla's Usenet(define) public newsgroups have been moved from netscape.public.mozilla.* to just mozilla.*. The renaming officially ends Mozilla's public Netscape news legacy after more than 8 years of active use.

More than a few Linux users have become upset because they have trouble making scanners work properly with their systems. Most of the time, however, "the fault doesn't lie with Linux," writes DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols.

Instead, "it's the eternal problem of hardware vendors neither supplying drivers nor the information developers need to write drivers," he continues.

Scalix and Zimbra offer promising e-mail solutions that exploit Ajax to offer rich Web clients.

Perth based e-learning vendor HarvestRoad (ASX:HRD) has signed a software partnership deal with Linux vendor Red Hat. HarvestRoad develops solutions for the education, defence and enterprise marketson the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

PCLinuxOS, a three-year-old LiveCD desktop Linux distribution that originated as a fork of Mandrake, now has its own website. PCLinuxOS.com went live earlier this week. "We now have a home of our own, thanks to the support from donations received last month," distro founder "Texstar" wrote.

"This could be a new opportunity for Linux to find additional niches above and beyond the home and [small office] markets where Macintosh has historically been strong," Interarbor Solutions Principal Analyst Dana Gardner told

The Free Software Foundation is already hearing complaints from companies about the GPL 3's provisions for digital rights management, which it calls"a malicious feature and can never be tolerated."

[Ed: It's good for companies to be uncomfortable with the GPL's anti-DRM provision. They really shouldn't be so comfortable about depriving people of their freedom to begin with. - dcparris]

The UK Government plans to toughen up computer crime laws under proposals outlined in the Police and Justice Bill on Wednesday. The bill would double the maximum jail sentence for hacking into computer systems from five years to ten years, a provision that will classify hacking as a more serious offense and make it easier to extradite computer crime suspects from overseas. Denial of service attacks, something of a grey area under current regulations, would be clearly classified as a criminal offense under amendments to the 1990 Computer Misuse Act (CMA) proposed in the bill.

Book review The Real Stories Behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders& Deceivers

Virtualization is an old idea--running multiple distinct operating systems atop a powerful box has a lot of advantages. Xen is a new virtualization platform. Despite its youth, its Linux support is very good. Kris Buytaert explains the basics of virtualization and shows how to configure and install Xen and to create new virtual machines.