Showing headlines posted by Sander_Marechal

Despite the “out of the box” nature of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, today’s lawyer needs to do more than create an Office document, send e-mail, or surf the net. He or she needs to use case management, litigation support, and billing/accounting software as well. Just go to your software vendor’s web site and click on System Requirements to see for yourself. It's available for Windows and the Mac, but not Linux

If you're a newb looking to dip your toe into the waters of the Linux world, Dell's line-up of preinstalled Ubuntu PCs is a very good first choice. After all, you'll be able to get started right out of the box, without having to struggle with unsupported hardware and missing drivers. But while Dell certainly appears to have the best offering of Linux desktops and notebooks at the moment, it isn't the only choice out there. Here are five alternatives for Linux-ready PCs.

With projects like Gobuntu and gNewSense aiming to provide a platform that is zealous about free software, the obvious question is “where can I run it?”. Pretty much any laptop you can buy today needs some sort of non-free bits to make the most of its hardware. Right now, software freedom isn’t a huge priority for most of the companies that make up components for the PC and laptop industry. To that end I’d like to build up a list of people would potentially buy a high-powered laptop if it were guaranteed to work completely with free software drivers and OpenBIOS.

We've recently hired our first CIO at MySQL, and it's interesting to consider how the role of the CIO is different from what it used to be. MySQL has some particular challenges from an information management perspective because we have so many employees working from home around the world. Otherwise, I think the role of CIO at our company is not that different from most other young companies. But what's really changed is the nature of IT in the past six or seven years.

I questioned the value of VC investments in OSS in a previous post. I estimated that the investments would have to be worth between $12.5B and $19.6B to be in line with the historical rate of return for VCs (i.e. 57%). Well, I was wrong, (somewhat). Matthew provided the yearly details of OSS VC investments and calculated that the investments would have to be worth $9.5B at the end of 2006.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced a new"freedom-focused flavour of Ubuntu" devoid of any proprietary software, which may hold special appeal for open source purists. Meanwhile, some in the Ubuntu community are skeptical of the whole Gobuntu concept.

Voting is now open for the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee elections. All 13 seats are up for election. Anyone who has signed the Fedora CLA, and has an addition account (like ambassadors, art, cvs*, fedorabugs, l10n-commits, web, etc.) in the Fedora Account System is eligible to vote. Voting will end at July 22 23:59:59 UTC.

This week's Open Tuesday event in Joburg had enthusiasts chatting over drinks and snacks about all things open source. A talk by Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za began on the issues of translation and culminated in a discussion on the upcoming meeting over Microsoft's attempt to have its OOXML accepted as an international standard. Bailey is on the committee that will be meeting with SABS to discuss and vote on whether or no Microsoft's OOXML document format should be accepted as a standard.

A computer running Linux can outperform the same computer running Windows XP or Vista. Even so, you may be able to make your Linux system even faster. Here are three optimizations, at different levels, that can make your Linux system perform better. Getting better performance is always a good practical goal. The three suggestions in this article provide separate but related enhancements that can provide better overall speed for your Linux PC. It is always nice getting a bit more "oomph" out of your hardware!

On paper, Linux seems to be the ideal workstation operating system for the corporate environment: highly configurable, free, secure, easily deployed in a network, extremely stable.... So why are medium and small businesses, the backbone of the US economy, not switching over to Linux? I have my own theories, working as an IT manager for a small company myself.

[Warning: FUD ahead. While the author doesn't say the points are valid, he doesn't disprove them either. -- Sander]

Linux vendor Linspire on July 11 said that the new Open XML translator is now available for use in its latest Freespire and Linspire distributions. The Open XML translator enables bi-directional compatibility, so that files saved in the Microsoft-created Open XML format can be opened by OpenOffice.org users, and files created by OpenOffice can be saved in Open XML format. Using the translator, OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office users will now be able to share files because documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites, a Linspire spokesperson said.

After the French Parliament’s migration to Linux, the Italian Chamber of Deputies (Camera dei Deputati) chose to let "The Penguin" enter into the heart of the Italian Democracy. As reported by the Italian newspaper Repubblica on July 10th, 2007, a plan suggested by the left deputies Pietro Folena and Franco Grillini to migrate all the computers of the Parliament from Windows to Linux was approved by the Chamber.

With 320GB SATA drives on sale with free shipping, I decided to increase my workstation’s RAID capacity for the last time. One nice things about SATA drives with Linux these days is you don’t ever need to shut the system down. In fact, with SATA, Linux software RAID, and the XFS filesystem I was able to add 320GB of capacity to the RAID filesystem without even unmounting it. During the entire time the system was completely usable, including all data on the RAID volume. Here is how I did it.

I was reading a recent article in which the argument and proof is given for a number of Linux customers moving from Linux to Windows Server. To say so is a little misleading. What I see is, large companies like Overstock.com, Jelly Belly, and Unilever probably have something in common - a poor supporting IT staff to make Linux work, and work well!

When I first setup my VMware Server to run an existing Windows Install from a physical partition, I was asked to reactivate Windows XP before I could use it as a guest OS. I received a lot of complaints from people saying that they were then again asked to reactivate Windows again once they booted back into Windows natively, and then again under VMware and so on every time the OS was booted in a different environment. If you replace the WPA files prior to booting based on whether you’re using VMware or booting natively you won’t have to reactivate. Here's how to do it.

The next release of the Linux kernel will apparently gain an all-new scheduler said to deliver better desktop scheduling. Ingo Molnar's CFS ("completely fair scheduler") implements a fair scheduling approach long advocated by Con "Conman" Kolivas. Molnar, a Red Hat employee who maintains the kernel's scheduling subsystem, describes CFS as follows: "Eighty percent of CFS's design can be summed up in a single sentence: CFS basically models an 'ideal, precise multi-tasking CPU' on real hardware."

"I'm a bit of a rebel," Benjamin Mako Hill says,"with rather too many causes." Best known for his many roles in Debian, Hill is also a member of the Ubuntu Community Council, an advisor to One Laptop Per Child, a director of Software Freedom International, and the originator of several free software projects -- to say nothing of an active voice for the Free Culture Movement, and the occasional organizer of such activities as last fall's iPod Liberation Event in Cambridge, Mass. Hill recently took on his largest challenge yet as the youngest director on the Free Software Foundation's board of directors.

Another move in the software patent game. IBM is offering a patent covenant to implementers of a bunch of IT standards, with the catch being that you lose all of the covenant protection if you sue over any patent that reads on any software that's also covered by the covenant.

Amazon uses Linux. eBay uses Windows. But what OSs and webservers run Web 2.0? We tested 17 of our favorites and found out. The script is included to check for yourself. They all use Linux. Linux is pretty much it for Web 2.0 startups. If you’ve ever wondered why a site called VentureCake has so much Linux content, you now have your answer.

The general corporate strategy of standardising the platform and hiring accordingly is an echo of that argument from the 70s. Organizations standardising on Red Hat Enterprise Server generally try, for example, to hire people with Red Hat Enterprise Server experience and then press the combination as the one size fits all solution for whatever Linux needs line managers may have. Take a close look, however, at the Linux staffing issue and you should see notice that the average tenure generally exceeds the average life of a distribution -meaning that when you hire Joe, he’s likely to be around longer than the particular Linux distribution you hire him to run.