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System Reviews It's been quite a while since I've published a review of the workstation platforms from AMD and Intel, but, with all the changes in both platforms recently, it's high time. This brings us to this review of the Intel Xeon 5300 series processors and the AMD Opteron 2200 series processors. Intel's Xeon line has gone through some major changes that provide us with a new quad-core chip and a refined chipset, designed to maximize many different aspects of the systems' communications. AMD's line has stayed fairly steady, and the biggest change the end user will notice is a move to DDR2 memory and a refined processor core.

John Halamka has a penchant for experiments with new technologies. In 2004, the now 44-year-old CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup, which runs the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, who is also a practicing emergency room physician, was one of the first people to have an RFID chip containing a link to his medical records implanted in his body (it's near his right triceps.) Next April, he and Harvard geneticist George Church will become the first humans to have their DNA sequenced and their full genetic makeup posted on the Web.

Linux may be the one to connect that call on your next cell phone. That’s because the open-source operating system is poised for strong mobile growth, analysts and a Linux startup said Wednesday. The number of Linux-enabled cell phones is expected to grow to more than 203.9 million in 2012, almost 96 times more than 2.5 million units in 2005, according to a report from ABI Research analyst Stuart Carlaw.

The latest draft of the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) has caused more ructions in the Linux community. Some have damned it for seemingly legitimising the controversial Novell/Microsoft agreement on intellectual property rights, while others say it has effectively closed the door on future collaboration between the open-source and proprietary software industries.

The project team of Damn Small Linux, one of the most lightweight Linux distributions available, released version 3.3 on April 4. The latest "DSL" features a 2.6.20.4 kernel, the Fluxbox window manager, and a rich set of applications, wrapped up tight in a 49.6 MB package.

[Fluxbox may not have all the bells and whistles but for an OS that's only 50megs in size, DSL can't be beat. - Scott]

Sun Microsystems is planning an announcement next week on a new strategy for open source network attached storage (NAS), according to industry insiders.

Linux for Clinics has released a Alpha testing release. Known issues... 1. Ubiquity icon is from Ubuntu 2. Initial boot screen on Livecd is still Ubuntu 3. Forgot to remove Gnome-Games 4. Forgot to install the medical dictionary for openoffice.org 5. No LFC upgrade path...Have not implemented our repository yet.

Yesterday we looked at spamd, a service designed to reduce the flow of spam to your email inbox. Now that we know some of its advantages, let's put it to work.

Linux has come a long way in a lot of areas, but if my experience is an indicator, we're not much further along in the use of personal webcams today than we were five years ago. After a couple of unsuccessful attempts to use Ekiga (formerly GnomeMeeting) as a video phone, I finally prevailed and got Ekiga working with both sound and video. The problem -- as always seems the case with computer peripherals under Linux -- begins with drivers, or rather, the lack of drivers.

Oxford Semiconductor is shipping a Linux-based development kit for its recently-launched ARM9-based SoC (system-on-chip) for machine-to-machine (M2M) messaging applications, including factory automation, POS (point-of-sales), and building management. The DS-OXETHx954 kit comes with Wind River Platform Linux, and trial versions of Wind River and CodeSourcery tools.

The three newest members are expected to help deepen the foundation's understanding of the issues and opportunities for Linux in multiple environments.

OpenOffice.org has released version 2.2 of it office suite. OpenOffice.org is an office suite similar to Microsoft Office, but written by the OpenOffice.org Community and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). When OpenOffice.org first came out, there where many claims that it would act as an Microsoft Office replacement with pundits citing the increased cost of Microsoft's product along with a large feature set that most users never touched.

At a high level, a cluster is an aggregation of multiple standalone computers (nodes) linked together through a high-speed connection to create a single shared computing resource. A key benefit of this distributed processing architecture is that complex computations can be broken down and run serial or parallel among the individual nodes, resulting in a dramatic improvement in the time required to process large problems and complex tasks. For that reason, clusters are used for CPU-intensive jobs where massive processing power is required, such as when running simulations, computer-aided design, and rendering.

In a nod toward the RTOS market that founder Jim Ready pioneered, MontaVista is shipping a new version of its commercial embedded Linux distribution said to offer true real-time performance along with a very small footprint. MontaVista Linux Professional Edition Version 5.0 boasts enhanced real-time performance and lower resource usage.

Come out, come out, wherever you are. The SCO Group has asked a US court to reel in the reclusive legal blogger Pamela Jones ofGroklaw fame in its arcane Linux intellectual property prosecutions of Novell and IBM.

Firefox is getting a social life. Mozilla Labs, Mozilla's research group, today detailed "The Coop," an experimental set of content sharing tools for Web browsers.

Microsoft is calling on the Great British public to join its campaign to get the XML Office format adopted as an international standard.

The first thing that naturally comes to mind is Linux and then maybe the Apache Web server project. But all across the landscape, there are a number of less-ambitious, open-source efforts under way that hold a lot of promise for solution providers looking to shore up their profitability. One class that is beginning to get plenty of attention is all the work being done around the Asterik voice over IP telephony project that is now being packaged for commercial use by companies such as Digium. The Digium offering is an appliance based on a Linux distribution created by rPath that has already received a number of positive reviews in terms of its ability to compete with proprietary offerings from Avaya and Cisco.

We’ve written about portable apps quite a number of times in the past, but why bother with just apps when there’s a whole OS that’ll fit on a 50MB USB stick? Damn Small Linux, sometimes abbreviated DSL, is a 50MB mini desktop Linux distribution.

This review takes a quick look at the just-released, Ubuntu-based SimplyMEPIS 6.5 Linux distribution. DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols finds it easy to install and configure, and a solid desktop platform to use, but notes that Beryl 3D graphics support can be challenging to get working.