Open Source

If you want an old-style, hard-working, windows, icons, menus, and pointer desktop, then what you want is Linux Mint 15.

Mint isn't just an outstanding Linux desktop, it's the best new desktop operating system of any kind available now.

The memory-mapped I/O can potentially double the performance of the embeddable SQL engine but care needs to be taken with its use. Other enhancements make SQLite databases easier to identify and improve error reporting

Microsoft's Skype division has released a new version of its proprietary voice, video and text messaging client for Linux that includes user interface improvements and fixes a number of bugs including a crashing problem when using the call window

While the rest of Linuxdom was reading of the Debian 7.0 and Mageia 3 releases, the OpenMandriva gang have been hard at it trying to get their new distribution some attention. The OpenMandriva name was made official and an alpha was released into the wild. On May 6, João Patrício announced that the decision that an official name for the community Mandriva/ROSA distribution. As predicted, and is now obvious, OpenMandriva beat out other contenders such as Moondrake, OpenMDV (which would probably be pronounced the same), Lomax, and ROMA. And if that wasn't enough excitement for a Tuesday night, Bernhard Rosenkränzer recently announced a tech/developer preview or alpha. Not much information accompanied the announcement except that a grub issue was addressed and the new branding is replacing ROSA's. Rosenkränzer said, "This should be good enough to get up and running..." It's a live image and it looks very much like we remember. We'll check back again soon. Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Software rosa (add alternative, post review) Related Blog Posts Raspberry Pis Chained Together Provide Massive Computing Muscle (post comment) Mageia 3 Released with Steamy Goodness (post comment) openSUSE 13.1 Off to the Races (post comment)

After trashing its public OpenStack cloud efforts Monday in favor of reselling third-party widgetry – and reportedly canning workers in the 300- man group according to TechCrunch – Dell folk who are left were anxious to say that Dell is still in the private OpenStack game, pointing to another press release put out Monday saying that Dell will enable Microsoft’s Windows Server Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor on the OpenStack cloud platform.read more

Mageia has long been what you might call a "best-kept secret" of the Linux world, consistently residing among the top five distributions in DistroWatch's page-hit rankings despite minimal marketing and hoopla.read more

A first stable series 2.2 version of the PHP web framework is now available. The new release includes additions such as a new diagnostic feature for ZFTool and supports dynamic DDL queries

Sony has released proprietary drivers and libraries of its Xperia S smartphone, Xperia Z smartphone and Xperia Tablet Z along with source code from the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) to make building custom firmare easier

In a major announcement from Dell yesterday, the company announced that its public cloud ecosystem and strategy will be centered on partners Joyent, ScaleMatrix and ZeroLag, and will emphasize recent acquisition Enstratius. The announcement represents one of the biggest snubs to the open source OpenStack platorm yet, as Dell had previously announced that its whole cloud strategy would be built around OpenStack. According to Dell's announcement: "Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. Acting as a single-source supplier, Dell will offer customers a choice of vendors and technology, freedom from lock-in to a single platform or pricing model and a central point of solution integration and control. Sales of Dell’s current in-house multi-tenant public cloud IaaS will be discontinued in the U.S. in favor of best-in-class partner offerings." Wow, that's a far cry from the OpenStack-centric, flexible and open plans that Dell had been discussing.  “Many Dell customers plan to expand their use of public cloud, but in order to truly reap the benefits, they want a choice of providers, flexibility and interoperability across platforms and models, the ability to compare cloud economics and workload performance, and a cohesive way to manage all of it,” said Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president, Dell Cloud, in a statement. All of this is exactly what I was referring to in my recent post "In Five Years, Expect Far Fewer OpenStack Service Providers."  OpenStack has more hype than it does deployments. The OpenStack Foundation is crowded with heavy-hitting sponsors and partners, and in recent months we've seen OpenStack services and announcements from Rackspace, HP, Internap and AT&T. Red Hat and IBM are also diving into the fray, and Dell was a notable participant until now. It seems inevitable that there will be further market shakeouts, and some organizations deploying OpenStack could end up very unhappy with the support and services that they are getting. Support, in particular, is part of why a company like Dell would want to align with partners in the cloud rather than forge its own path. It's hard to support cloud deployments, and some providers of OpenStack services and support are going to confront that issue the hard way. Dell does have big plans for Enstratius, though, including working with some OpenStack deployments by pass through with Enstratius. The company noted the following: "Dell’s newly acquired multi-cloud management platform, Enstratius, will help customers manage both single and multi-cloud environments, and can help integrate the partner offerings into Dell’s end-to-end cloud solutions. Enstratius currently supports more than 20 public and private cloud platforms, including OpenStack, VMware, Rackspace and Windows Azure, with the added flexibility to easily add new clouds." Related Activities Comments (0) Post a Comment Ask a Question Related Blog Posts Rackspace Creates Bridges Between .NET and OpenStack Platforms (post comment) Project Savanna, Bridging Hadoop and OpenStack, Moves Forward (post comment) Now, More Than Ever, VMware Must Embrace Open Source (post comment)