Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

In part 1 of this series we learned how to measure how much power our systems are using, both hardware and software, and some tricks for reducing power usage without degrading performance. Today we're going to dive into the world of power management on laptops: ACPI, APM, hard disk spindowns, and spinups.

Linux and open source software giant Red Hat has abandoned plans to develop a consumer desktop product because it cannot compete with the might of Microsoft. The firm said in a statement yesterday: “As a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.

The next red-letter day for Ubuntu fans will be April 24, when Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support) arrives. Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, guarantees that the next version of the popular Linux distribution will make it on time, with something for enterprise, desktop, and Internet users. In an interview, Shuttleworth made the point that, while many executives have yet to realize it, "Open source software projects and Linux distros are actually better than proprietary companies at hitting deadlines." In particular, Shuttleworth says, "Companies are now comparing Linux with Vista, and it's clear that's Linux does a better job of meeting people's expectations.

Novell Wednesday released the beta of its new "Just Enough" SUSE operating system targeted as a platform for Linux-based appliances. The company is releasing the beta in conjunction with the creation of the SUSE Appliance Program targeted at independent software vendors (ISV) who want to package their applications with SUSE Linux on an appliance.

Once upon a time, there were no usable free web browsers for the Linux environment; the binary-only Netscape releases were all that was available to us. For many, the solution to the problem was to be found in the release of the Netscape source code; some years later, we got the Mozilla and Firefox browsers (based on the Gecko rendering engine) from this work. The KDE project, though, took a different route in the late 1990's, developing the KHTML renderer to use with the Konqueror application.

The second iteration of the subnotebook will go on sale on 1 May, although the Windows and Linux versions will include differing amounts of solid-state storage.

Linspire announced a new version of its CNR (Click'N'Run) software management system that supports the Ubuntu 8.04 ("HardyHeron") release, expected to take flight on Apr. 24. The client enables users to install, uninstall, and update desktop Linux software available on Linspire's CNR.com download site.

So you just bought an external hard drive for backups. Now, with what filesystem should you format it? Ext2? FAT32? No matter which one you choose, there are trade-offs to consider. You face the same choice whenever you buy a USB thumb drive, but for a backup drive, a lot more is at stake. Those backups have to be there and be reliable when disaster strikes. On the one hand, you need to preserve your data and your metadata, so not just any filesystem will do. But on the other, if you're not at your home base, you need to be able to access it from anywhere, so you can't be too obscure.

Sun Microsystems President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Executive Vice President for Software Rich Green run what is now the largest open-source-based IT infrastructure company in the world. Schwartz became CEO of the 26-year-old company in May 2006 when longtime President and CEO Scott McNealy moved to take over as chairman of the board. One of Schwartz's first moves was to rehire Green, who had run Sun's Java and Solaris businesses—among other things—for 14 years, from 1990 to 2004.

The Open Source Census, an effort to pin down hard statistics regarding the implementation of open-source software around the world, gets underway on Wednesday. The census was first announced in December by founder OpenLogic, a vendor of tools and services for managing open-source software deployments. It has provided an automated census tool called OSS Discovery under an open-source license for the project.

The archivemount FUSE filesystem lets you mount a possibly compressed tarball as a filesystem. Because FUSE exposes its filesystems through the Linux kernel, you can use any application to load and save files directly into such mounted archives. This lets you use your favourite text editor, image viewer, or music player on files that are still inside an archive file. Going one step further, because archivemount also supports write access for some archive formats, you can edit a text file directly from inside an archive too.

TheKDE BugSquad is pleased to announce itself! Come and learn the fine art of bug triage. How might one do so? Join us for a BugDay on April 20th (0:00 UTC to 23:59 UTC). The last one was a great success, with 355 bugs triaged, and almost a third of those closed. We would like to finish off more bugs, and could use your help! All you need is a recent version of KDE4, although 3.5.9 could also be useful. That is it!

Mainstream Linux distributions for servers have caught up substantially with Unix in terms of reliability over the past year, while Windows Server 2003 downtime has risen by nearly 25 percent, according to a Yankee Group survey. The research firm's survey also noted a significant rise in enterprise interest in Ubuntu, previously known primarily as a desktop operating system.

"Finally found it ... the patch below solves the sparsemem crash and the test system boots up fine now," announced Ingo Molnar. He described the patch as fixing a "memory corruption and crash on 32-bit x86 systems. If a !PAE x86 kernel is booted on a 32-bit system with more than 4GB of RAM, then we call memory_present() with a start/end that goes outside the scope of MAX_PHYSMEM_BITS."

Organizers of Debian are taking too long too approve new contributors and are threatening the future of the project according to some working on the open source initiative. Many Debian members are using the Planet Debian forum to express their dismay at delays of more than four months in approving new developers. The last new developer was approved in November 2007.

Under its new owner, Sun Microsystems, MySQL will remain true to its Linux roots and won’t be pulled towards Solaris or become overshadowed by the Solaris-distributed Postgres. Former chief executive Marten Mickos told Uberpulse that MySQL would stay focused on Linux, which accounts for the majority of its business (Windows rules when it comes to downloads). The MySQL team will work on Solaris "but in proportion to what it represents in our marketplace."

Before the days of Internet searches and Google maps, having an unlisted number really did largely protect you from snoops. Sure, if a person was persistent enough (read: creepy), they could follow you home from work, and learn where you lived. The Internet allows everyone to be slightly creepy, however, and no one is the wiser. Add Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Pownce, YouTube, etc -- and it's very difficult to remain anonymous anymore. It's almost like our lives themselves have become Open Source.

What we'd like to be able to do is efficiently keep two or more servers completely synchronized with each other no matter what gets changed on any of the servers. In the simplest case, we have a production server and a backup server that we need to keep in sync. We might have a cluster of servers used in a load balancing configuration. In the worst case, we might have a group of computers where changes are occurring on any or all of the devices. Consider the case where we have a computer at the office, a laptop, and a work computer at home. We want to be able to work from any computer at any time.

MySQL is targeting improved security and privacy with a version of its database codenamed Citadel due in 2009 that’ll also see MySQL speed up product release cycles. Citadel will try to close the gap on IBM and Oracle with security and privacy capabilities in the areas of group-level access privileges and transparent data encryption at the table and column level.

Desktop on Demand (DOD) is the latest contender to give users a full-fledged remote desktop instead of Web-based applications to help users to stay productive when they are on the move. Similar to Ulteo (which we reviewed not long ago), DOD gives you a full-blown remote Linux-based desktop -- but that's where the similarity ends. Unlike Ulteo, which is based on the VNC protocol and runs entirely in the browser using a Java-based applet, DOD employs the NoMachine NX technology for accessing the remote desktop.