Linux.com

Adaptec has announced a new family of entry-level RAID controllers that support RAID 0, 1, and 10. The Series 2 RAID controllers ship with open-source Linux drivers and are designed for controlling low-cost SATA and SAS disk and tape-drive systems, says the company.

picture The equivalent of Microsoft's Silverlight but for Linux operating systems is available for download as of May 13, 2008, under the label Moonlight. According to the official description of the technology, Moonlight is nothing more than the open source implementation of Silverlight, tailored for UNIX systems. With this latest step in the evolution of Silverlight, Microsoft can finally claim that the technology is truly cross-platform, because ahead of the May 13 public release of Moonlight, support was available exclusively for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

Back in January of 2007 we had looked at Linux Virtualization Performance as we had compared a running native OS (at that time, Fedora Core 6) against the same operating system running as a virtualized guest OS using Xen, QEMU with the (once closed-source) kqemu kernel module, and then KVM. In this testing we had found that KVM had performed well and won a number of the tests, but it wasn't the clear winner nor it had won by a substantial margin. However, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine had premiered with the Linux 2.6.20 kernel and it has matured quite a bit over the past year and a half since its christening. With that said, we are in the process of conducting new Linux virtualization benchmarks to see how these various implementations compare today. While the full comparison isn't yet ready, due to much interest surrounding Linux virtualization on desktops and servers, this morning we are publishing some initial benchmarks from the Phoronix Test Suite when running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS as the host OS and then running it as the guest operating system with hardware-based acceleration through KVM.

There is a growing identity crisis in the Linux community. In simplest terms, is Ubuntu taking the spotlight away from other deserving Linux distributions? This has been charged over and again. While I can certainly see how some people might feel that Linux is being seen as a single distribution, I would also point out that the Ubuntu developers and the companies that support Ubuntu are not doing anything that cannot be duplicated.

DeviceVM, the company that produces Splashtop, announced yesterday that their Linux distribution would get on four new models of ASUS motherboards. ASUS integrated Splashtop on the brand new P5Q family of products, so now there are twelve motherboards that run Splashtop. The new motherboard models are P5Q Deluxe, P5Q-WS, P5Q3 Deluxe and P5Q-E.

No matter which operating system (or systems) you choose to use, you’re sure to find an abundance of software titles that are available for you to enjoy. By default, some operating systems come bundled with enough useful tools to keep you happy, but just because that may be so it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t explore alternatives. If you only use what’s presented to you, you’ll miss out on a wide range of open source, freeware, and shareware applications.

We know a fair number of you have been around since the beginning, but we figure there are those of you who may be new to the Linux community, as it does seem to be growing at an impressive pace. One of the great things about LinuxJournal.com is that you can all come together and weigh in on any topic from so many different angles and levels of experience. We're curious. When did you jump on the bandwagon?

Latest enterprise release brings open source content management lines into wider competition. "We are building the product to customer requirements, particularly in what they need for developing knowledge worker applications, compliance applications or corporate intranets and internet Web sites," Newton told InternetNews.com. "However, this brings us into competitive and winning situations with Filenet, OpenText and EMC on the document management side, Vignette and Interwoven on the WCM (Web Content Management)side, and increasingly Microsoft SharePoint on both."

My guide based on far too many late nights tweaking far too many desktop computers in my own home.

Below is my summary, slightly long, of a working breakfast held in the European Parliament on the Community Patent. According to the European Commission, only Spain is preventing this (IMO bad) proposal from being adopted. At the meeting, it was interesting to hear the motivations for the Community Patent, and the issue of software patents was of course raised.

As a computer user, it’s easy for me to just think about everyday people like myself using operating systems. Just like me, they go to a store like Best Buy or The Apple Store, purchase an operating system, install it, and then use it for work or play, sometimes both. In the case of Linux, maybe they’ve downloaded it and have access to it in that way. Of course, aside from individuals, corporations also use operating systems, and they use them on a scale and in a way that we can’t even begin to imagine, since many of us just fire up our computers in our home office to do some simple Web browsing.

As time goes on, operating systems are becoming easier to use than many of us thought was possible, but we’re definitely thankful for these developments. Even Linux (which has been notorious in the past for its difficulty level) has become more accessible, although it’s still not on the level of OS X, or even Windows, at this point.

I have been asked this over and again - which hardware should be avoided before installing Linux? The list is actually smaller than you might expect, but it is helpful if you would like to remain in a headache-free zone.

When we write about investors on this blog we are normally referring to angel and VC investors and the funding they provide to open source start-ups. There is a small, but growing, list of VCs that clearly understand the open source development and distribution models and the long-term profit potential of open source software vendors.

Kryder's Law, a variation of Moore's Law, describes the trend "magnetic disk areal storage density doubles annually" [1]. In other words, you don't want to know how much I paid for a 40MB Seagate MFM drive in 1989, but today 1000GB drives rule the day for much less money. This increase in capacity follows a predictable trend.

In an otherwise great post about the GPL and its goals, Bradley Kuhn writes something that strikes me as a typical example of open-source political correctness that ultimately tarnishes the credibility of the community:

I wrote last week about how the conservatism of many senior IT executives is a significant barrier to widespread open source adoption. A recent post from Richard Steel, CIO of the London borough of Newham, is a reminder that the machinations of the open source software world are not as engrossing as some supporters might consider them to be.

The Fedora Project announced the availability of Fedora 9, the latest version of its open source operating system distribution. Highlights include PackageKit, a cross-distribution package management solution; GNOME 2.22; KDE desktop 4.0.3. Screenshots by The Coding Studio

The largest stock exchange on Earth is a Linux shop. NYSE Euronext has chosen Red Hat's Linux offerings to power the critical financial trading platform that services approximately $141 billion in daily trading volume. Financial terms of the deal are not being publicly disclosed at this time.

We care a lot about the health of the Internet. Recently, we've become increasingly concerned that IPv4 addresses — the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet — are running out. Current projections place IPv4 address space exhaustion somewhere in late 2011, and while technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT) can offer temporary respite, they complicate the Internet's architecture, pose barriers to the development of new applications, and run contrary to network openness principles.