Linux News & Articles

Red Hat (news, site), one of the poster children of the Linux and open source communities, has launched a new online community to promote open source across various industries.

For many of the regularly caffeinated it was the closing of 600 Starbucks locations; for a large portion of the medical community, the announcement of the sinking crocs ship. As for the tech geeks, it was surely Microsoft’s first-ever drop in annual Windows sales that made them realize: Oh my, the economy really is messed up!

In this case, however, the economy is not the only culprit. Microsoft’s Q4 report to the U.S. SEC includes a rundown of their risk and competition factors, and on that list are both Linux and open source solutions.

Yes, it's true, the open source enterprise content management system that seems to live to support just about any environment has added another server to the list.

Alfresco (news, site) has announced that their Community Edition 3.2 can now be easily installed on Ubuntu Server Edition, free!

Alfresco just released the Community Edition 3.2 earlier this month. The latest version of the community edition of their open source enterprise content management software also includes some updated records management capabilities, improved Forms, IMAP support and a nice solution for the iPhone.

According to their 2008 Open Source Barometer report, which is a survey that reaches out to their 74,000 content community members to find out the preferences of open source technologies in the enterprise, Ubuntu was tied with Red Hat at 31% as the Linux operating system of choice.

"Ubuntu Server Edition is the most popular Linux distribution amongst the Alfresco user community.  We see many open source community members looking to use a combination of Alfresco as their content management solution and Ubuntu as their chosen operating system," said Martin Musierowicz, VP Alliances, Alfresco Software.

If that's true, why didn't Alfresco support Ubuntu from the beginning? We suppose the important thing is they do support it now.

Alfresco Community Edition 3.2 can be installed by users of Ubuntu Server Edition 9.04. Download your copy of Alfresco now using Ubuntu’s Package Manager functionality from Ubuntu's Partner repository.

New versions of the Linux kernel typically come and go without a lot of fanfare except in the communities most affected by the latest bug fixes and other changes. However, with the release of Linux kernel 2.6.30, the broader open source community has reason to smile.

Most of these reasons involve consumer-friendly features.

A wave of excitement shot through the Internet as bloggers suddenly noticed that Amazon (news, site) had posted the source code for each version of the Kindle.

However, the code is really just the GPL'd Linux libraries and drivers (Debian Linux is the common speculation), and it's been available since 2007. The e-book reader part is in no way part of the source package.

While no license file is attached, the folder the code unpacks into is called "gplrelease," which might be a massive hint. Not to mention all that's in there is what would be required for them to release legally for the GPL portions.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon had hinted recently at a conference that Kindle books and Kindle readers were, to him, two separate businesses. Releasing a Kindle iPhone app was certainly one hint that he was serious. Another was his statement that he intended to give the Kindle device team competition by making the Kindle books available on even more mobile and computing devices.

But entirely releasing the Kindle source doesn't appear to be the way they're going to do it just now. Who knows, maybe later if Amazon decides it would rather offer their content on more devices and get out of the hardware business.

Black Duck Software recently released a report on how much the current open source codebase is worth, in terms of development costs and manpower. We caught up with their EVP of Marketing and Business Development, Peter Vescuso, to discuss the implications for the Content Management Systems community.

If there was ever a field where Isaac Newton's famous saying, "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants," held true, open source is it.

So whose shoulders are you standing on when you use an open source Content Management System? l2admin has some well thought out ideas.

Attention! The mobile world’s cluster of hopeful operating systems just got slightly bigger thanks to Azingo, who recently announced the Azingo Mobile Platform 2.0. Based on Linux and other open source innovations, the platform enters our ring of competitors bravely with dukes up, sporting a powerful browser and Web Runtime for easy Web application play.

When it came time to find an Executive Chairman for up-and-coming cloud computing vendor rPath, founder and CTO Erik Troan only had to look back in time -- and his LinkedIn connections -- to find the right candidate.

Claromentis has recently made all Linux users much happier by releasing a collaboration and information management platform for Linux.

It includes the brand new Project Manager application, content and document management, as well as process management using e-forms.

An integral part of Amazon’s cloud computing services is showing a sign of maturity, while adding a much anticipated element. The Elastic Compute Cloud (aka EC2), which facilitates a Linux server environment as a service for Web developers, has come out of beta.

Additionally, as previously rumored, Amazon.com has added an on-demand Windows Server environment to accompany the already existing OpenSolaris and Solaris Express Community Edition offerings.

In a software package it is. Alfresco announced that Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Linux-based operating system Ubuntu, will offer Alfresco Labs 3 as part of its partner repository.

Ubuntu is an open source OS containing several applications — a web browser, presentation, document and spreadsheet software, instant messaging, etc. And now - ECM functionality, too.

Virtual Bridges, a leading provider of desktop and enterprise virtualization solutions for business, has launched version 5 of its Win4Lin Desktop virtualization system for running Windows on Linux. It includes performance increases it claims beats the likes of VMware Workstation and other competitors in the desktop virtualization market.

Let’s get right to it: considering the popularity of open source applications and utilities, why hasn’t the open source flagship - the Linux operating system - caught on with mainstream PC users?

With the various incarnations of Linux available at the click of a button, why do the majority of PC users prefer to drop $200 US on a Windows Vista or Mac OS install disk instead of trying the third, free option?

I was a strong open source proponent in the past, but in the past few years I’ve gotten lazy.

I primarily use Windows on my desktop and commercial office suites. To date, few open source projects have received particularly strong reviews.

There has been a lot of discussion over whether or not it can chip away at Windows’ dominance on the desktop. Though well received, these efforts are considered a bit of an “also ran.” I’ve used Linux in some way, shape, or form for something over 7 years, so I’m not exactly new to the platform.

But, having begun digging deeper into what “open source” means today, I’m compelled to state the platform has come quite a long way!