Linux life-span on the up
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Random acts of senseless violence against Linux and Unix servers have dramatically decreased recently, with the average low-value Linux box expected to last a few months before being compromised, a report out this week says.
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Opteron to gain power preservation tech - and other goodies
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A rash of supremely affordable PCs preloaded with Linux has hit mainstream retail stores. And trying one is not as risky a proposition as you might think.Photos: Three sub-$200 Linux PCs
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The combined worldwide market for desktops, servers and packaged software running on Linux is forecast to grow at a 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate of 25.9 percent worldwide, reaching $35.7 billion by 2008.
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(InfoWorld) - As Red Hat prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations. Makers of "software appliances" are using the launch as an opportunity to predict that the days of the monolithic OS are numbered. They say the future lies in a modular system in which software runs with only enough lines of OS code to make it work. Some see promise in the appliance alternative to the OS, while skeptics think large enterprises will still need a general-purpose OS. The same questions arose recently around the launch of Microsoft's Windows Vista. A trio of Gartner analysts published a report in 2006 that said the increasing complexity of Windows makes it "unsustainable." Gartner predicted Windows will be broken up into modular components. The same could be said for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), said Billy Marshall, CEO and cofounder of rPath Inc., a software appliance platform vendor. As new features are added to it, RHEL 5 has become just as unwieldy as Windows, Marshall said. "It's bigger and more bloated." OS vendors add all sorts of functionality in the event some enterprise may want it, and the addition of these features is one of the reasons why both Microsoft and Red Hat have encountered delays bringing their products to market, he said. Installing an OS could use as much as 1.82G bytes of space on a hard drive, he said. A software appliance with only the code to run one application would use just 300M bytes, he said. "The general-purpose OS model is breaking," Marshall said. Another software appliance vendor, Ingres Corp., on Feb. 27 launched a database management software appliance it calls "Icebreaker" to compete against IBM Corp.'s DB2 and Oracle Corp.'s database software. Software appliances may have a place in some niche environments in which a customer needs to run just a few pieces of software, said Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group. But a larger business would probably still need the various programs that are bundled into an OS, he said. It might be possible to run an enterprise infrastructure without an OS, Lyman said. "But then again, you've already got people [in your IT department] running the OS, and it's a pretty critical part of the infrastructure." Rather than seeing OSes fading, "I think we're seeing the trends going the other way," said Adam Jollans, director of worldwide strategy for Linux and open source at IBM. At a time when IT administrators want to get more out of their existing hardware, isolating software applications and running them only with small pieces of code seems counterproductive, Jollans said. "Many more people want to run multiple applications and do many different things. ... so I think we need the generic operating system to support all the different things people want to do," he said.
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I have an observation I'd like to disclose about the Open Source community: we tend to leap into all kinds of things before we have all the facts and/or information necessary to make intelligent decisions. We criticize other communities, laugh at things like directory services from the two major NOS players, talk about all our great applications, etc. we hang on to old notions about a what makes Linux tick. Sorry, but that model Eric doesn't fit any more. The community natter appears to come mostly from people who lack deep technical skills and knowledge of enterprises.
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InfoWorld - As Red Hat prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations.
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According to the Yankee Group, the adoption of Linux on the desktop should grow to the mid-single digits in the next year. It&#39;s common knowledge that Microsoft rules the desktop operating system (OS) environment
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When Novell&#39;s Linux desktop arrives at the end of this year it will be stripped down to avoid integration problems and to keep it simple for users.
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p2pnet.net News:- The average unpatched Linux system survives for months online before being hacked, but unpatched Windows PCs often, âare hacked within minutes of connecting to the Internet,â according to a story in TechWeb News.
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Let's see how long have I used Linux as a desktop? Hmmm. Over 10 years? That's right. And the first issue I had at that time was finding an easy way to get to my ISP. The second issue at the time was the lack of a graphical web browser. Then Netscape produced an unsupported one that worked fine.
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When it comes to the corporate customer, desktops are still king, particularly because they're the easiest and least expensive to upgrade with fast, power-hungry components. Yet one researcher predicts it will be five to seven years before only the "die-hard" desktop users are left. Is it time for you to make the switch?
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com September 14, 2004, 3:25 PM PT. With the economy slowly turning up, upgrading hardware has been on businesses radar in the past 12 months as their number two priority.
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The other day I was thinking about all the edge-cases within Linux and how there are hundreds of little commands and tricks.  I these know now but only after using UNIX for more than 15 years now (has it been that long!).  I wish I would have known all these tricks when I was just getting started.  This is similar to Danny O'Briens Life Hacks  but since so many of us spend our life tied to our shell these are essentially "Shell Hacks".  NetCat is one example.  Very powerful tool with a simple syntax.  Just run 'nc' and you can connect to a host/port and interact with it manually.  You could even write an HTTP client with bash if you really wanted to.  The zsh  shell looks like it might becom ...
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The new release of Ubuntu Linux, dubbed "Gutsy Gibbon," makes substantial improvements to the user experience in the free and open-source operating system. New interface enhancements and the ability to seamlessly import settings and data from Windows make it the easiest Linux yet.
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Why your beloved gadgets die so young. By Kris Wagner from Wired Test.
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Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco&#39;s community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.The surveys help inform Alfresco&#39;s technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco&#39;s chief marketing officer. &quot;It&#39;s important for us to know which platforms to test against first,&quot; he said, adding, &quot;It&#39;s in users&#39; interest to give us good data.&quot;Among Linux operating systems, usage of Ubuntu and Red Hat stood at 35 percent and 23 percent, respectively, according to the survey. Suse, OpenSuse, and Suse Enterprise collectively garnered 13 percent; Debian, 15 percent; and &quot;other&quot; distributions usage of 14 percent.Users also reported using a variety of proprietary enterprise software.Among Windows users, Vista adoption was just 2 percent, compared to 63 percent for Windows XP and 28 percent for Windows Server 2003.Microsoft&#39;s Office suite remained strong, however, with 66 percent usage. Twenty-four percent of the respondents reported they used OpenOffice. However, German and French users were twice as likely to use the latter compared to those in the U.S. or U.K., Alfresco said.Tomcat held a dominant position in the application server category, logging 72 percent. JBoss&#39; entry stood at 18 percent. Entries from Sun, BEA, and IBM rounded out the field.In the virtualization category, VMware perhaps predictably ranked highest, at 61 percent. Microsoft&#39;s Virtual Server took 16 percent, followed by Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron and &quot;other&quot; offerings, according to the study.MySQL took home the database prize, with a 60 percent tally, followed by Oracle with 14 percent and Microsoft SQL Server with 13 percent.&quot;It kind of validates that people want to have a mixed stack,&quot; Howells said of the overall results.Alfresco collected data between July and December of last year, with survey participants coming from 260 countries, according to the company. Fifty percent were from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, while 24 percent were in the U.S., and 26 percent from other nations, Alfresco said.