Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

Pogoplugs are great little storage devices, but they can do more than they let on. Let's take a look at how you can hack a Pogoplug into a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) web server. This is a fun little project, but it does take some time and patience. Be sure to set aside a few hours this weekend to get it up and running.

The suggestion has been made countless times that manufacturers who customize their devices' builds of Android (that is to say, nearly all of them) should have the decency to offer users the option of reverting to a completely clean, stock version of the platform if they so choose. The concept came up at a press lunch featuring Google CEO Eric Schmidt last week, and the dude responded with an interesting explanation for why they don't require that of their partners: "if we were to put those type of restrictions on an open source product, we'd be violating the principle of open source."

For what it's worth, I think HP may want to get into the Linux server business by buying SUSE Linux. The root of the problem isn't that Novell can't find a Linux buyer. That's easy. The real reason why Novell is playing coy with VMware and other potential buy-out suitors is that everyone wants Novell's Linux and no one wants the rest of the company.

One of the sources said that there has been ample interest in the SUSE Linux business from other possible suitors including VMware and CA Inc, and it could fetch a rich multiple. But, the source questioned whether it would be enough to justify the lower value for the remainder of the company. "Look at the numbers: the Linux business is what everyone wants. Once you strip that out the rest is just a dying cow," the source said.

Neofonie-owned WeTab GmbH has shipped what appears to be the first MeeGo-based tablet, the 11.6-inch, Intel Atom N450-based WeTab, which is also said to be compatible with Android. Meanwhile, a super-light NFS N-Pad tablet prototype has popped up running Android on an Intel Atom N6xx ("Moorestown") processor.

MeeGo is less than a year old. KDE, by contrast, has 14 years of experience in building the Linux desktop. Even with the backing of the world's largest mobile phone and processor vendors, it takes a bold man to turn up at Akademy, KDE's annual global conference, and announce that MeeGo is "redefining the Linux desktop landscape". Valtteri Halla, Nokia's director of MeeGo software, is such a man. He not only set out his vision for how MeeGo will take over the world, but invited KDE along for the ride.

Just because a business moves its systems to the cloud, it doesn't mean less work for system administrators. Though cloud computing puts more resources and tools at a sysadmin's fingertips, there's a still a need for constant monitoring, oversight, and management -- particularly when large numbers of systems are brought online. In this guest post, Jeff McCune, Professional Service Engineer at Puppet Labs, takes an in-depth look at what sysadmins need to know about cloud computing, and how it's changing and shaping the nature of their work.

This week the Behind KDE interview is with a well known old-timer. He is the guru of kdelibs, but do you know what he does for KDE Sysadmin? Or should I say 'did'? Leave a comment if you get his old timer joke. Meet the one who moved files manually in the CVS era. Meet the guy who developed for KDE before some of you were even born. See how Charm and jazz play an important role in his life. Meet David Faure!

Even if you're not a database wonk, you've probably been hearing some talk about this newfangled thing called CouchDB. For one thing, the new Ubuntu desktop uses it for things like the addressbook and Tomboy notes. So what is CouchDB, anyway?

If you believe everything you read on the Internet, then Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu distribution, can't do anything right. Part of the reason for this attitude is that, because of Ubuntu's popularity, Canonical is under a scrutiny so intense that every fault is magnified. Another part of the reason is that Canonical is visibly struggling with balancing its commercial efforts with being a corporate citizen of free and open source software (FOSS).

This weeks interview in this series of behind KDE is with a well known old-timer. We all know that he is the guru of kdelibs, but do you know what he does for kdesysadmin? Or should I say 'did'? Meet the guy who developed for KDE while some of you were not even born. Meet the one who moved files manually in the cvs era and see how Charm and Jazz play an important role in his life. Meet David Faure!

Little dinky underpowered mobile phones, netbooks, and laptops are getting all the attention these days. Well what about us folks who still need good capable desktop PCs? So I asked for a hotrodded version of ZaReason's Limbo to review, even though the $799 base model has plenty of goodies for the demanding user

There’s a certain movement these days in the world of GNU/Linux distributions. I think we are experiencing one of these moments that starts with a question that has been asked and heard many times -should distros differentiate themselves in order to survive? & aren’t there too many distros out there?- and ends with a much more serious question: Innovating in the world of GNU/Linux. Rest assured this is not going to be that sort of rant where we conclude that “Linux is the copycat of other OSes” just like we will not, in fact answer the question of the pretendly too many distributions or their differentiation. That is, I will not really answer these questions; and the reason I won’t is that I think these are all bad questions that either miss the point or show a certain lack of understanding of FOSS and GNU/Linux in general.

Have you ever experienced the situation where you open one particular application (such as Firefox) and it brings the whole system to a standstill? If you are running a web server, the last thing that you want to see is to have an application crashes the whole system and bring all the websites down.

Mandriva is the pan European and BRIC Linux distribution for all: enterprises and individuals, beginners or most advanced users. Mandriva recovered from a difficult situation. The recovery was done through restructuring the debts, a simplification of the organization, a new investor and a new strategic focus. The Mandriva Community will be autonomous and governance structures will be created to ensure freedom. The Mandriva enterprise is just an element of this independent community.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a Home Energy Gateway (HEG) "smart grid" reference platform that can be based on three existing ARM processors or a yet-to-be-announced mystery SoC (system-on-chip). Supported with Linux and Windows BSPs by Adeneo Embedded, the HEG offers features for collecting power consumption data over ZigBee networks from Home Area Network (HAN) appliances, controlling power activation, and communicating with utility networks.

Before we get started, I wanted to mention my recent review of the new Appro Tetra GPU server which is part of the Fermi wave hitting the market. The Appro box is rather unique in that they managed to cram four Fermi cards (M2050) into a 1U box. Speaking of Fermi, yesterday I was at the HPC Financial Markets conference in New York city. As I perused the vendor tables, I noticed a vendor touting 2.01 TeraFLOPS using four M2050 cards in a big tower case. Having just spent a lot of time getting intimate with this hardware, I asked them how they managed to get such a mind-boggling number. They said it was actually the sum of the theoretical FLOPS for all four cards. Sigh. As politely as I could, I suggested that they not advertise such BS (Bovine Solids) because it creates impossible expectations for the market.

With three laptops representing different generations of mobile hardware, we loaded up the past four stable releases of Fedora Linux plus the most recent Fedora 14 Alpha release and then carried out an arsenal of tests looking at how the battery power consumption rate has changed since 2008. If you are concerned at all about running Linux on your battery-powered mobile devices, this article is worth reading.

With the event less than three weeks away, organizers of the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC) remind potential attendees that the Early Bird registration will end on Sept. 25. UTOSC attendees who register before Saturday can save 30 percent on the price of admission to the three-day event. Regular admission to UTOSC is $70 for a full-access pass, $25 for an expo pass with entrance to try-it lab workshops and $15 for an expo pass.

A mobile phone "feature" that is touted as a way to remove data from stolen phones is also being used in far less reasonable ways. It is, or could be seen as, an anti-feature added for the benefit of companies, but without taking users' needs into consideration. The "remote wipe" available for (at least) Android, iOS, and Palm's webOS allows Exchange administrators to remotely reset logged-in mobile phones—removing all personal data and resetting them to factory defaults.