Open Source Pixels

The inability to play the latest off the shelf commercial games has been a thorn in the side of Linux for a long time. With companies such as Valve starting to embrace other platforms, will that be the catalyst Linux needs to become a first class citizen?

Linux comes in all shapes and sizes…from the full-blown app-heavy distros like Fedora and Ubuntu, to the lean and mean distros such as Puppy and Damn Small Linux.

Whatever the size of the distribution, there are always going to be applications that you will want to download and install, depending on your needs. These can be essential apps, like Skype, Flash, or Thunderbird, or not-so-important-yet-fun apps like Google Earth, VirtualBox, and VLC.

For a few years I have been trying to create a "distributed cluster storage system" (see below) on standard Linux hardware. I have been unsuccessful. I have looked into buying one and they do exist, but are so expensive I can’t afford one. They also are designed for much larger enterprises and have tons of features I don’t want or need. I am hoping the Linux community can help me create this low cost "distributed cluster storage system" which I think other small businesses could use. Please help me solve this so we can publish the solution to the open source community.

Few people understand Microsoft better than Tandy Trower, who worked at the company from 1981-2009. Trower was the product manager who ultimately shipped Windows 1.0, an endeavour that some advised him was a path toward a ruined career. Four product managers had already tried and failed to ship Windows before him, and he initially thought that he was being assigned an impossible task. In this follow-up to yesterday’s story on the future of Windows, Trower recounts the inside story of his experience in transforming Windows from vaporware into a product that has left an unmistakable imprint on the world, 25 years after it was first released.

[Not Linux or FOSS related, but interesting history I think - Tracyanne]

Ex-Sun open source veteran Simon Phipps has been elected to the board of directors at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) group. Phipps confirmed in a blog post today that he would start his new role on 1 April. On Monday he quit Oracle-owned Sun, where – prior to Larry Ellison’s acquisition of the database firm – he had worked for nearly a decade. His resignation marked the latest in a long line of big guns at Sun who have left the firm following Oracle’s $7bn takeover.

The major goal of the regional server is to distribute the results of all service checks to the central server. The regional Nagios machines must use OCSP and OCHP in order to send the proper updates to the central server. This tutorial shows you how to set one up.

Late last year we reviewed the Jetway NC92 Atom IPC motherboard that was a nice Mini ITX board with an Intel Atom N230 processor. A few weeks after that, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, the new Pineview processors were shown off. The Atom N400 and D510 Pineview CPUs are only a moderate upgrade from the very common Diamondville Atoms, but the newer Atoms are beginning to work their way into more nettops and netbooks. Jetway is one of the vendors that was quick to design a new IPC motherboard that bears the Intel Atom D510 dual-core processor with Intel GMA 3150 graphics and the NM10 Express Chipset.

Like we told you a few days ago, Banshee 1.5.5 (aka 1.6 RC1) got a very nice new YouTube extension but the new version also brings some other new features like Grid View and Gapeless Playback:

CloudLinux Inc., a software company dedicated to serving the needs of hosting service providers, has announced that VPS.NET, a leader in the cloud hosting arena, will begin to offer CloudLinux as one of its standard Linux Operating Systems (OS) on all of its VPS cloud offerings. VPS.NET is an elastic cloud hosting provider offering instant scalable Virtual Private Server (VPS) solutions. By leveraging its Lightweight Virtual Environment (LVE) technology, the CloudLinux OS allows VPS.NET to deliver increased performance and flexibility to its suite of secure cloud service offerings.