Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Earlier this month at the Red Hat Summit where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 was released with support for the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. At this Red Hat event, virtualization -- particularly KVM -- and cloud computing were the most talked about topics. But how is KVM performing these days? With new virtualization refinements going into almost every new Linux kernel release, we have published a new set of KVM benchmarks using the Linux 2.6.31 kernel, to provide updated numbers against our KVM benchmarks from last year and our Core i7 virtualization numbers. This time around, we are also using a Phenom II processor for testing out the AMD-V technology.

If you have been following my postings over the last year, you will have read about my attempts to migrate to Linux. Some have been partially successful, others have been unmitigated disasters. I have heard comments from Linux is for smart people to You are right when I comment that the installation process should not be as hard as it sometimes is.

Joining the open source club has many benefits. How many Microsoft receives depends on how far it wants to go. Compare your salaryUse the IT salary benchmark wizard and know the average salary differences between different job functions.

[Uhh... right... I am tempted to file this as "humor" but apparently the author means it. - Sander]

Back in May we reviewed the OCZ Vertex SSD, which performed well against a Super Talent SSD and two different rotating mobile HDDs. This OCZ SSD was not exactly cheap but it was not too expensive either and it ended up receiving our Editor's Choice award. Since then, OCZ Technology has introduced the Agility SATA 2.0 Solid-State Drives. The Agility is designed to fill OCZ's mainstream SSD offerings with models up to 120GB in size, MLC flash memory, 64MB cache, and slightly better prices. In this review we are testing out the OCZ Agility 120GB Serial ATA 2.0 SSD, under Ubuntu Linux, of course.

One of the most striking features of any desktop environment is its selection of icons. While wallpapers and window decorations hold a larger stage, it is the bright, colorful icons that draw ones attention and speed up the process of finding what one is looking for. The myriad of available icon themes may find themselves feeling a bit lonely in the near future, however, as the GNOME Art Team has decided that — at least some of them — will face the firing squad.

Look for PC users to soon get their hardware in the same way that they get their cell phones: for free as part of telecommunications service subscriptions, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said on Friday afternoon.

Last month when NVIDIA had published their first official 190.xx driver beta, it was discovered that there was early OpenGL 3.2 support. There was no OpenGL 3.2 specification out in the hands of public developers, but with NVIDIA working closely with the Khronos Group, it wasn't too surprising...

Think of the annual Pwnie Awards delivered at the Black Hat conference as a geek version of the Oscars -- if they were combined with the tongue-in-cheek Razzies that celebrate the worst of Hollywood.

Back in May we shared that the Ubuntu Intel graphics performance was still in bad shape after testing out very early Ubuntu 9.10 packages. The netbook experience was killed in Ubuntu 9.04 after a buggy Intel Linux graphics stack led to slow performance, stability issues, screen corruption, and other problems. Months have passed since we last exhaustively looked at the Intel Linux graphics stack, but we have just carried out some new tests using Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 3. This new development release of Ubuntu carries the latest kernel, Mesa, and Intel driver packages as we see how the graphics performance is with an Intel 945 and G43 chipsets.

Zend Technologies has announced the latest version of its open-source framework for PHP, offering improved support for Microsoft and Novell environments. The changes are part of what Zend called more of a business focus, which encompasses updates to help those building and plumbing web services and enterprise applications into PHP. The PHP specialist is also due to release the latest edition of its PHP development environment, Zend Studio 7.0, which folds in changes added to the framework.

The Debian project has decided to adopt a new policy of time-based development freezes for future releases, on a two-year cycle. Freezes will from now on happen in the December of every odd year, which means that releases will from now on happen sometime in the first half of every even year. To that effect the next freeze will happen in December 2009, with a release expected in spring 2010. The project chose December as a suitable freeze date since spring releases proved successful for the releases of Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 (codenamed "Etch") and Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 ("Lenny").

Some interesting comments above, but the gross inaccuracy is in the headline and story. Peer-to-Patent has not shut down. It is still operating. The only thing that has occurred is that the USPTO has decided to suspend an[y] new applications until they have an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the program. Meanwhile, Peer-to-Patent still has 70+ pending patent applications under review. Come on over and check it out.

Amid the fanfare of last week's Chrome OS announcement, Google quietly released an open-source NX server, dubbed Neatx, for remote desktop display. NX technology was developed by NoMachine to handle remote X Window connections and make a graphical desktop display usable over the Internet. By its own admission, Google has been looking at remote desktop technologies for "quite a while" and decided to develop Neatx because existing NX server products are either proprietary or difficult to maintain.

Being a special unique snowflake, I work part-time for Red Hat as a file systems developer and part-time as a science writer and Linux consultant. I love having more than one job; boredom is my greatest enemy and switching gears every week keeps me interested and entertained.

The Linux and Free/Open Source Software world is chock-full of heavy-duty applications and suites for the enterprise, and many of them are cross-platform, running on Linux, Mac OS X, Unix, and Windows: collaboration/groupware, business intelligence, point-of-sale, data warehouse, document management, e-commerce, accounting, human resource management, content management/Wikis, and much more. Cynthia Harvey presents a list of 101 excellent FOSS enterprise applications and suites.

One of the most unforgettable quotes on Earth — witnessed live by some six hundred million people — wasn't uttered here. "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind," the famous words of astronaut Neil Armstrong upon becoming the first person to set foot on another world, have a lasting legacy not likely to be met until human exploration eventually reaches our planetary neighbors.

If your wife has been upset with how much time you spend on our forums, that you subscribe to Phoronix Premium, or that you always occupy her computer by running the Phoronix Test Suite on it, fear no more! Just send her over to the newest web property that's managed by Phoronix Media, Foodstruments. Foodstruments is a portmanteau for "Food Instruments" and this is a site that features cooking gadget reviews, inexpensive cooking tools, and other products for the home and kitchen...

IBM's Power servers topped a list of most reliable x86 and Unix machines in a new survey, clocking in at only 15 minutes of unplanned downtime per year. Linux distributions running on x86 servers also performed well, as did Sun's Sparc machines and HP's Unix boxes. Windows Server machines performed worse than most competitors, with two to three hours of downtime per year, but have still improved dramatically over previous surveys.

iTWire reported on HP's Mini 110 range in late May. Now the company has revealed Australian pricing and specifications. The 1.09kg Mini 110 will be sold in Australia in two versions, but initially it's a case of "any colour you like as long as it is black." The Linux based model comes with a 16G solid state drive in place of a hard disk, and sells for $499. The alternative is Windows XP and a 160G hard disk for $699.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about an impending meeting with Microsoft to discuss some of its actions during the standardisation process of OOXML at the ISO. I asked Linux Journal readers for some help in preparing for this, and you responded with a generosity entirely in keeping with the spirit of free software. The many helpful comments to that post give some indication of the scale of the response, but that overlooks the extraordinary emails I received from others, packed with useful information, which clearly represented many hours' work. To everyone, I'd like to express my thanks. The bad news is that the meeting is not going to take place after all. read more