Free Republic

Windows 2003 Server is a more reliable server operating system than Linux, a research firm said Monday. According to the Yankee Group's annual server reliability survey, only Unix-based operating systems such as HP-UX and Sun Solaris 10 beat Windows on uptime. Windows 2003 Server, in fact, led the popular Red Hat Enterprise Linux with nearly 20 percent more annual uptime.

Linux is insecure. Open source is insecure. Windows is insecure. All software is insecure. Deal with it. People keep having this delusion that security is a product. That, if you just buy some magic box, you'll have a program or an operating system that's as secure as Fort Knox. It doesn't work that way. Security is a process, not a product. Some systems are more secure than others. Linux, as anyone who pays any attention to security news knows, is a lot more secure than Windows. If we were talking cars, Linux would be a Volvo S80 and Windows would...

Love it, hate it, heard lots about it, but still don't have enough of a handle to form a firm opinion? Then we must be talking about Linux, the open-source operating system that's alluring because it's heavy duty and it's free. Simultaneously, it's intimidating to newbies because it's typically more difficult to install and configure than Windows. However, now is an opportune time to get past those concerns. Interest in Linux is expected to spike throughout the year, thanks to Microsoft's delay of its consumer version of Windows Vista. The hang-up could cast a pall on the year-end PC sales...

Computer maker Lenovo will not install or support the Linux operating system on any of its PCs, including ThinkPads and a series of new notebooks, the company said this week. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company is clearly positioning itself as an exclusive partner of Microsoft, several weeks after the companies announced they were "reaffirming" global market development and cooperation agreements. "We will not have models available for Linux, and we do not have custom order, either," said Frank Kardonski, Lenovo's worldwide product manager for Lenovo 3000 offerings. "What you see is what you get. And at this point, it's Windows." A...

The opening of Beta 2 testing at WinHEC for Windows Vista has once again raised serious questions about Microsoft's ability to keep its promises. We have witnessed up until now the inexhaustible reservoir of excuses coming from MS's officials, who have continuously fed us with plenty of reasons for Vista's delay: they're working on security, they're trying to make it more reliable for business, etc. Although it was initially destined to make its public debut way back in 2002, following years haven't shown us more than small bits of what was to become Microsoft's best product in more than 10...

Picasa is a photo organizing and editing tool from Google that does most of what most people need to do with their digital pictures. Now Picasa, previously a Windows-only program, has binaries available for most popular GNU/Linux distributions. The Linux version of Picasa is still a beta release, but it's ready to handle photo storage, organizing, and light photo editing on your Linux computer. Even if you don't want to use Picasa, Google's creation of the Linux version may help make your Linux computer more versatile. The Picasa Linux port is being made with Wine, and in the process more...

And so I'm falling a little bit in love with Linux. This is very much a grounded affair and I wouldn't describe myself as giddy with it, but I've changed my opinions about that whole murky side of computing life. A lot of people ask me about my opinion of that operating system with the penguin logo. It happens with such regularity that I've come up with a stock phrase I immediately fire back: life's too short for Linux. This is a bit flippant, but it's also a distillation of what I've believed, which is that Linux is great and...

TORONTO — The recent LinuxWorld trade show in Toronto was dull, but exhibitors liked it that way. Excitable younger Linux evangelists had given way to the more sober executives and IT managers. That plays into the hands of Andreas Typaldos, chief executive officer of Xandros Inc., just fine. For him, it's an opportunity. IDC forecasts that the market for new and redeployed PCs running Linux will grow to $10-billion (U.S.) and 17 million units by 2008, with an installed base of more than 42.6 million units. Mr. Typaldos is hoping to carve a niche in this growing market, offering Xandros's...

L-3 Communications Display Systems has chosen the LynxOS-178 real-time operating system (RTOS) to power a portion of the panoramic cockpit display (PCD) subsystem for the Lockheed Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) aircraft. This display system delivers information for all the major functions of the F-35, including flight and sensor displays, communication, radio and navigation systems as well as an identification system which gives the pilot total situational awareness. The key factors in L-3 Display System's choice of LynuxWorks' RTOS, which is DO-178B certifiable, were its adherence to open standards, its Linux compatibility, the interoperability benefits of a Posix API...

Apple tells hacks to stay out of its kernel Since before its release, Apple's OS X for the Intel platform had been circulating the Internet in many places, and many had been running the operating system for months ahead of Apple's own release schedules. Thanks to cunning hackery by famed OS X hacker Maxxuss, many were able to install the protected operating system on generic machines. Apple had implemented a check for a trusted platform module (TPM) chip that was integrated on specific Intel motherboards, which when detected, allowed the installation of OS X. When Apple had finally released a...

Sun Microsystems plans to offer support for the Ubuntu server Linux distribution on its T1 server line, the company said at the JavaOne industry conference in San Francisco. "We will be aggressively supporting the fork that Ubuntu has been doing," Sun chief executive Jonathan Schwartz said at the conference. "The ideals of that community are relatively familiar to us." The Ubuntu Linux distribution is based on Debian. The operating system currently provides only a desktop version that has a strong following among software developers. A first server system is scheduled for release on 1 June. The distribution is sponsored by...

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Wednesday pegged three key areas of focus for Microsoft this year: competing with Linux in the high-end server market, software as a service (SaaS) and Internet advertising. Speaking at Santa Clara, Calif., event hosted by two Silicon Valley groups, Churchill Club and Commonwealth Club, Ballmer said Microsoft may not be reporting 20 percent growth like the old days but the company has an innovation agenda that "qualifies us as a growth company." "The greatest competitive threat we face is our own ability to either embrace or compete with alternative business models," Ballmer said. In the...

SummaryLinux is found to be much faster than Apple's OS X for statistical computing. And although Linux is 5 to 10 percent faster than Windows XP, both are markedly faster than OS X. For example, in one benchmark both Linux and Windows XP are more than twice as fast as OS X. The results on this page were conducted on a MacBookpro with a 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo chip and 2GB of RAM. I had previous conducted Linux vs. Mac OS X and Windows XP and Opteron vs. G5 and Pentium benchmarks. Those results were terrible for OS X and...

URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/soa/Sun_to_make_Java_more_Linux_friendly/0,2000061733,39255431,00.htm Sun Microsystems plans to alter its licensing to make it easier to bundle Java Runtime Environment with Linux. The company will announce the changes and at least one other open-source move at the JavaOne conference later this month, Sun executives said during a press teleconference on Thursday. Laurie Tolson, a vice president in the Java platform group, said that Sun, which licenses Java to other software companies, has modified the terms to be more favourable to open-source operating systems, specifically Linux and OpenSolaris. She said the changes affect the Java Runtime Environment (JRE), the software that needs to...

2008 will be a critical year for Apple, Microsoft, and the Linux contingent. If Apple can't significantly expand its presence by then in the PC market it is likely going to be finished with this segment. Its likely path in that case will be to focus more aggressively on the consumer electronics market it currently dominates.I mentioned last week that I was planning to attend the Linspire-sponsored Linux Desktop Summit where the discussion would include reasons the folks who build PCs don't want to do Linux. Indeed, some of the commentary at the event related to Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and...

Linspire Announces 'Freespire' Version of Their Popular Linux Operating System Freespire Community Project to Offer Unique Mix of Both Proprietary and Open Source Options in Free Linux Operating System SAN DIEGO, April 24, 2006 - Linspire, developer of the popular commercial desktop Linux operating system of the same name, today announced plans for a no-cost version of their operating system called Freespire. Kevin Carmony, Linspire's President and CEO, unveiled the Freespire project in his keynote address this morning at the 4th Annual Desktop Linux Summit, running today and tomorrow in San Diego. In his remarks, Carmony explained how Freespire is...

OK, I am a very technical person. I have installed Operating Systems but they were Minaframes (OS/390 and UNIX). I have a old laptop (Compaq Armada 500) that I want to install Linux on (upon which I wish to install Linux?). But I have been out of the OS biz for a while, so can someone get me started? I am concerned about things like coordinating the BIOS with the OS, getting the proper drivers (especially wifi), etc. etc. etc. Any first steps would be greatly appreciated.

Federal Aviation Administration Saves $15 Million by Migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; FAA Achieves 30 Percent More Operational Efficiency for 50 Percent Less Cost Apr 26, 2006 8:00:00 AM Copyright Business Wire 2006 RALEIGH, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 26, 2006-- Red Hat (NASDAQ: RHAT), the world's leading provider of open source to the enterprise, today announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third...

I have a fried CD-RW. I don't know how it got that way (died all of a sudden). So, in the meantime, I'm borrowing an external Yamaha and have it hooked up--as I can't afford to replace the CD-drive. Question 1: I'm running Suse 10.0 Eval, first updated KDE to 3.5.1 and then updated the kernel to 2.6.16-default. Since the kernel upgrade, I cannot get any USB devices to start. I've tried editing /etc/fstab as recommended, but the devices won't mount--and if they do, nothing shows up in Konqueror. I did however, and only once, did Question 2: How can...

Imagine the fate of your company rests on your completing your new Linux project on time. You have a crack team of first-class developers, but they're all .Net programmers. What are you going to do? Admit that Windows is better that Linux? Cry? Resign? No, you're going to install Mono and save the world! Mono is an open source project (sponsored by Novell) that allows you to run .Net applications on Linux (as well as Unix, Mac OS X, Solaris and even Windows). To obtain it, go to the Mono download page and find the version you need for your...