OS News

As we come to the end of Akkana Peck's excellent series on mastering GRUB2, it's not clear what advantages it has over legacy GRUB, or even good old LILO. It seems it's gone backwards. In today's installment we learn how to translate some common and mysterious error messages, and how to manage a multi-boot system with GRUB2.

Part of the repositioning of the KDE brands was choosing an appropriate 'KDE Software Label' for developers working on applications outside the main KDE Software Compilation. Technology developed by KDE is used far and wide, as can be witnessed on kde-apps.org and other sites. Some of these applications are developed by people closely entrenched in the KDE community, others by developers who just happened to like KDE technology and don't feel part of the KDE community in any big way. To allow authors to express their connection to the KDE community, the KDE community has chosen three appropriate labels. We are also presenting the first draft of a guide for distributors of KDE software on how to integrate their communications with our brands.

Here's an interesting story: Microsoft deciding to release some code as open source for all the right reasons (although there's still a fly in the ointment...).

The Linux Professional Institute (LPI), the world's premier Linux certification organization, announced that its affiliate organization LPI-Spain ) had partnered with Proyecto Universidad Empresa (PUE) to promote LPI certification and training within Spain's public schools. PUE is Spain's leading agency in the development of IT training and certification and provides academic programs for such major IT organizations as Microsoft, Cisco and Sun.

The inability to play the latest off the shelf commercial games has been a thorn in the side of Linux for a long time. With companies such as Valve starting to embrace other platforms, will that be the catalyst Linux needs to become a first class citizen?

For a few years I have been trying to create a "distributed cluster storage system" (see below) on standard Linux hardware. I have been unsuccessful. I have looked into buying one and they do exist, but are so expensive I can't afford one. They also are designed for much larger enterprises and have tons of features I don't want or need. I am hoping the Linux community can help me create this low cost "distributed cluster storage system" which I think other small businesses could use. Please help me solve this so we can publish the solution to the open source community.

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavour that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday’s story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released.

[Not Linux or FOSS related, but interesting history I think - Tracyanne]

Ex-Sun open source veteran Simon Phipps has been elected to the board of directors at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) group. Phipps confirmed in a blog post today that he would start his new role on 1 April. On Monday he quit Oracle-owned Sun, where - prior to Larry Ellison's acquisition of the database firm - he had worked for nearly a decade. His resignation marked the latest in a long line of big guns at Sun who have left the firm following Oracle's $7bn takeover.

The major goal of the regional server is to distribute the results of all service checks to the central server. The regional Nagios machines must use OCSP and OCHP in order to send the proper updates to the central server. This tutorial shows you how to set one up.

Late last year we reviewed the Jetway NC92 Atom IPC motherboard that was a nice Mini ITX board with an Intel Atom N230 processor. A few weeks after that, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new Pineview processors were shown off. The Atom N400 and D510 Pineview CPUs are only a moderate upgrade from the very common Diamondville Atoms, but the newer Atoms are beginning to work their way into more nettops and netbooks. Jetway is one of the vendors that was quick to design a new IPC motherboard that bears the Intel Atom D510 dual-core processor with Intel GMA 3150 graphics and the NM10 Express Chipset.

Like we told you a few days ago, Banshee 1.5.5 (aka 1.6 RC1) got a very nice new YouTube extension but the new version also brings some other new features like Grid View and Gapeless Playback:

CloudLinux Inc., a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, has announced that VPS.NET, a leader in the cloud hosting arena, will begin to offer CloudLinux as one of its standard Linux Operating Systems (OS) on all of its VPS cloud offerings. VPS.NET is an elastic cloud hosting provider offering instant scalable Virtual Private Server (VPS) solutions. By leveraging its Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology, the CloudLinux OS allows VPS.NET to deliver increased performance and flexibility to its suite of secure cloud service offerings.

Mandriva began life in July 1998 as Linux Mandrake in France in Gael Duval's bedroom after he ported a KDE 1.0 desktop onto Red Hat Linux 5.1, uploaded the result onto two FTP servers, went away on holiday, and came back to find that he had a popular and successful Linux distribution on his hands...

Here is an account of my experience receiving training from Verizon on my Droid phone. Generally speaking, the training session went very well, but scheduling the training was a real annoyance.

If you’re a Linux user, you’ve likely come across Git at some point, perhaps while trying to download a new program or looking into version control systems like CVS or Subversion. Git is the revision control system created by the Linux kernel’s famous Linus Torvalds due to a lack of satisfaction with existing solutions. The main emphasis in the design was on speed, or more specifically, efficiency. Git addresses many of the shortcomings of previous systems, and does it all in a lot less time.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has elected Simon Phipps to the board of directors; Phipps recently left Oracle after serving as Sun's Chief Open Source Officer. He will take up his new position on the OSI board from April 1st. In a blog posting confirming the appointment, Phipps says he is "honoured and delighted" to take up the position on the board of an organisation which "still plays a very important and relevant role in the world of software freedom".

By a remarkable vote of 633 to 13, the Parliament rebuked European negotiators who have been drafting the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in a series of confidential meetings around the globe. No version of the document has been disclosed by the participants, which include the United States, the European Commission, Japan, and Canada. Parliament's resolution demands that the European Commission--the EU's executive branch--grant "public access" to the ACTA documents. If the negotiations are not sufficiently transparent, the resolution says, Parliament "reserves its right" to take legal action.

[Three cheers for openness! - Sander]

The HP Elite 7000 Microtower is quite capable: it has an Intel i7 860 2.8GHz quad-core processor with an 8MB L2 cache and an ATI Radeon HD 4550 graphics card built for Blu-ray movie playback…

I'm not really a music lover, but would I have been an artist it would surely be my choice: A keyboard running Linux on common hardware, at least the operating system. This is really a very Cool device.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.1.x on a headless Fedora 12 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment. Fortunately, VirtualBox comes with a tool called VBoxHeadless that allows you to connect to the virtual machines over a remote desktop connection, so there's no need for the VirtualBox GUI.