TimburyDotOrg

I ran my first Linux live CD in January 2007. I’ve been using free, open-source operating systems on my personal machines for much of my work for the past two years, more intensively in the last year. And right here, right now, with a collection of old and dying hardware, my main laptop being a 2002/03-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101, I’ve moved from OpenBSD 4.4 to Ubuntus 8.04-9.10 and now to Debian Lenny, and things are going better now than I ever thought they would.

Chalk up another win for open source. Opengear, which makes an open source server console, has won a $1 million business deal. Plus, Linode (a virtual private server specialist) is embracing Opengear. Here are quick details.

KDE users love the look of all those pretty applications. The key is the toolkit KDE uses: Qt. You can learn to create beautiful applications yourself using Python-Qt. Akkana Peck shows the way.

Some hard drive cloning programs support a wide variety of filesystems. Some can create image files and store only the sectors that are actually in use. Some can clone over a network, and a few can multicast a drive or image file to multiple targets simultaneously. Clonezilla can do all of the above, with the added benefit of being free. It’s a live CD with partitioning software and simple cloning interface packed with useful features. In this guide, we’ll be using Clonezilla to run a disk-to-disk copy and checking out a few of the more interesting options.

“I love Linux. We’re big supporters of Linux, [but] Solaris is an older and more capable operating system,” Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said. While he expects to see Solaris primarily at the high end, it will go all the way down to the desktop for development. Nevertheless, he stressed that the high end is the home for Solaris, which could be a cloud of x86 or SUN SPARC machines. “We think it will be a long time before Linux ever catches up,” Ellison said. “But again we will have Linux — I’m a Linux fan and if you want Linux we have the best Linux in the world. If you want UNIX, we have the best UNIX in the world. And again, they are different and I don’t think the high end is in trouble at all.”

Cypress Semiconductor announced a touchscreen device driver for Android and Linux that supports Cypress’ TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, complete with “all-points” multi-touch signaling support. Meanwhile, “Cyanogen” has hacked a multi-touch interface for Google’s Nexus One phone, and Google is upgrading the Android-based phone’s spotty 3G support, says eWEEK.

DE Software Compilation version 4.3.5 is released. This latest KDE (Linux Desktop environment) Software Compilation is a package of 15 packages with applications. This version is mainly a maintenance release.

Some 95 percent of Malaysia’s government agencies have adopted open source software (OSS), but the remaining 5 percent have not warmed to the concept–and is unlikely to anytime soon, according to a government official.

This tutorial shows how to do data striping across four single storage servers (running Ubuntu 9.10) with GlusterFS. The client system (Ubuntu 9.10 as well) will be able to access the storage as if it was a local filesystem. GlusterFS is a clustered file-system capable of scaling to several peta-bytes. It aggregates various storage bricks over Infiniband RDMA or TCP/IP interconnect into one large parallel network file system. Storage bricks can be made of any commodity hardware such as x86_64 servers with SATA-II RAID and Infiniband HBA.

Not all servers can–or should–be virtualized, says Novell cloud computing CTO, Moiz Kohari, who urges cloud service providers to focus on making their heterogenous setups work as one.