6 Linux pranks for April Fools' Day
There's been no shortage of April Fools' Day pranks in the tech world this year, and the Linux community is no exception.
There's been no shortage of April Fools' Day pranks in the tech world this year, and the Linux community is no exception.
Critics of free and open source software are fond of making the argument that software must be locked up, patented and jealously guarded if it is to serve as the basis for a successful business. Well, Red Hat just refuted such claims in a big way this week with its fourth quarter earnings report, which blew away analysts' expectations and placed the company well on track for billion-dollar revenues in the upcoming year.
Linux has long played a leading role in the world of servers, due in large part to its stability, security and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). What many don't realize, however, is just how ubiquitous it's becoming in other parts of life as well.
Back in November I wrote about the 233-line patch that was expected to bring a huge speed boost to version 2.6.38 of the Linux kernel, and that's just what made its widely anticipated debut on Monday night.
The newest update to the Linux operating-system kernel features a number of enhancements that should offer a performance boost, particularly for running databases and other programs that require maximum resources from the server.
The final release of "Natty Narwhal," or version 11.04 of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux distribution, may still be more than a month away, but project founder Mark Shuttleworth on Monday officially inaugurated work on its successor with the announcement that version 11.10 will be called "Oneiric Ocelot."
For many small business users, all the rational arguments for using open source software like Linux make a great deal of sense: It's free, customizable, compatible, and it's free of vendor lock-in, to name just a few.
Whatever your opinion of Linux's desktop potential, few would dispute the value of the open source operating system in embedded devices such as mobile phones and personal media players. After all, it's fast, it's free, it's open source, it's customizable and it's extremely stable, among many other advantages.
Later this year, Oracle will begin requiring people interested in gaining Java and Solaris certifications to attend "hands-on" training courses, at an additional cost of thousands of dollars.
Sun Microsystems' mishandling of Solaris on the Intel platform left an opening for Linux to become established, when the company's Solaris OS could have won out instead, Sun co-founder and former CEO Scott McNealy said when interviewed Thursday evening by former Sun President Ed Zander at a Silicon Valley business and technology forum.
Web surfers tired of waiting for the official release of hardware featuring Google's Chrome OS now have a browser-based alternative right at their fingertips: Splashtop Linux 1.0, a downloadable instant-on operating system tailored to life in the cloud.
Canonical made quite a splash last fall when it announced that the Unity interface used in its Ubuntu Netbook Edition would become the default interface in the Linux distribution's desktop version as well beginning with version 11.04, or Natty Narwhal.
As a longtime fan of Linux, I'm a big believer that most business users would benefit greatly by dumping Windows and switching over to the open source operating system instead. It's stable, it's reliable and it's highly secure, among many other advantages.
Though hardware compatibility with Linux improves with each passing day, users of the free and open source operating system can still encounter problems with particular devices and components.
Following a full two years of development, the Debian Project on Sunday released version 6.0 of its namesake Linux distribution, code-named "Squeeze."