Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

This time last year, Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network launched at OpenWorld to much fanfare. It was supposed to be a Red Hat killer. It has had as much impact upon Red Hat has a dead sheep. Larry Ellison says this is going to change. During his OpenWorld keynote this year, the Oracle CEO said the company means business next year. Oracle VM server virtualization, launched this week, will "differentiate ourselves from Red Hat", he proclaimed. And "going into the second year we will have sales with support and engineering, and we will grow faster."

WorkshopLive.com is a virtual music school that features dozens of professional instructors teaching lessons online for all levels of expertise, in guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. When WorkshopLive was in the early stages of development, the company had limited funds to devote to hardware, software, and human resources, so CTO Marilyn Hoefner decided to give open source software a try. "We've been extremely happy," Hoefner says.

As hordes of European Java programmers descend on the JavaPolis conference in Belgium in mid-december, the developers of XWiki hope to turn heads with their "second-generation" wiki software that includes experimental integration with the Google Docs spreadsheet module. XWiki faces formidable competition, though. JavaPolis's own site runs on the competing Confluence platform, said by its developer to be in use by more than 4,000 organizations; XWiki's clients number in the hundreds. Confluence has its own spreadsheet plugin that interfaces with EditGrid rather than the ubiquitous Google Docs. XWiki hopes Google integration will be the killer plugin that raises its profile as an enterprise wiki.

I’ve been demoing this little green laptop for months. Everywhere I go, it’s a star, and everyone who sees it always asks me the same question: when can I get one? Finally, I have an answer: right now. But you’d better hurry, because they are only available for another 12 days. And here’s a little secret: it’s a really good deal. The mission of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is ambitious: to empower the children of developing countries to learn by providing one connected laptop to every school-age child.

Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get. Though of no use against actual insects, Mantis is great for the other variety, since it lets end users report bugs or suggestions, and gives developers a full workflow solution so bugs can be assigned and progress on them checked until eventually the problems are fixed.

Red Hat and systems management specialist Hyperic have formalized their ties. The companies now plan to create an open source systems management package that will run across Red Hat's portfolio. Up until now, Red Hat's JBoss unit showed Hyperic the most love. It developed code on top of Hyperic's base software as part of the JBoss Operations Network. That work will continue and should benefit from more communications between Red Hat and Hyperic. The two companies plan to discuss roadmaps and work to share core more liberally. In fact, Red Hat will contribute its code to the open source Hyperic project.

Ubuntu is extremely popular on the desktop, but it's made comparatively little progress on servers. That's about to change. Dell is expected to announce in the first quarter of 2008 that it has certified Ubuntu Linux for its server lines. In an interview with Rick Becker, Dell Product Group's vice president of solutions, Becker said that Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. "But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I'd say it'll be announced in Q1 next year."

You can think of Kile as an IDE for the LaTeX document layout system. Instead of requiring you to learn a considerable amount of markup language, as LaTeX itself does, or providing you with a graphical interface that hides you from the complexity, as Lyx does, Kile automates the process of working with LaTeX while keeping the markup visible. This arrangement makes Kile an ideal way for beginners to learn LaTeX, as well as a convenient and efficient way for more advanced users to work with LaTeX.

Today we're going to create menu icons for launching our backups whenever we darned well feel like it, set up a simple network backup scheme, and create automatic scheduled backups.

Sun yesterday announced its new open virtualisation and management platform, xVM.

Logitech's Harmony series of programmable universal remote controls ship with Windows and Mac OS X configuration programs. That wasn't enough for Phil Dibowitz, though -- he set out to build his own Linux support. Remotes from the Harmony line feature fully programmable buttons, an infrared (IR) receiver that can learn commands from other remotes, LCD screens (some in color) with reprogrammable labels, and user-defined macros with which you can script multiple-command sequences involving multiple devices. All of these advanced features are configured through a GUI application that accesses Logitech's remote database of home theater devices and uploads your settings to the remote over a USB cable.

Microsoft's charge into the high performance computing game continues at pace. The software maker this week announced that its new cluster operating system - HPC Server 2008 - based on Windows Server 2008 will ship next Summer. In addition, the code dandy has fired up a Parallel Computing Initiative to develop more parallelized software for both HPC and business users. Microsoft? HPC? Surely, we jest.

In a bid to speed up application development for its new mobile operating system, Android, Google is offering $10 million in prizes in the Android Developer Challenge.

Linux is becoming a credible threat to Windows on the desktop, and will grow over the next year as its distributors continue to work hard at making it an enterprise-class offering, research group Forrester predicts. "Will desktop managers continue down the path of standardization on the Windows platform, and will Linux not exist on enterprise desktops? Not a chance," Forrester analyst Benjamin Gray says in a report released Nov. 12 and titled, "How Windows Vista Will Shake Up The State Of The Enterprise Operating System."

Have you ever tried to unmount your USB thumb drive only to get the message "device is busy"? Like me, you probably thought, "I know I closed that file manager window. What's keeping it busy now?" fuser is a command that can answer that question for you, along with similar questions about what processes are using what files or sockets.

In what can be seen as inspiration for South Africa and the developing world in general, a machine in India has taken fourth place in the latest list of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

Like Al Gore claiming to have created the internet, Sun Microsystems claims it was a virtualization pioneer. While announcing open-source-based virtualization and a Solaris server partnership with Dell on Wednesday, Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz told Oracle's OpenWorld that Sun was "one of the first" in the industry to deliver a virtual machine - the Java Virtual Machine (JVM).

Microsoft's Network Access Protection platform is being extended to Linux and the Mac in heterogeneous network environments through third-party products. The Redmond, Wash. software maker announced at its TechEd IT Forum, here on Nov. 13, that UNETsystem will release Linux and Macintosh versions of its Anyclick for NAP (Network Access Protection) product next year.

While it's unclear what Maka stands for, the "giga" part of Makagiga most likely refers to the number of tools this application has on offer. It comes with a to-do manager, RSS reader, a basic photo viewer/editor, a text editor, miscellaneous widgets, and much more. Makagiga is written in Java, so it runs on any platform with Java Runtime Environment. Better yet, you can download a portable version of Makagiga that runs equally well on Linux and Windows, so it makes an ideal companion for use on the move.

Tired of the regulation grey bars at the top and bottom of your Gnome desktop and hankering after something a little cooler? Say something a little bit more like the dock in Apple's OSX? Then give AWN a run and get all the bouncing icons you can handle.