Virtualisation Technology – Pie in the sky?

There is much talk of Clouds and Virtualisation, how much is real, how much is hype of things to come, and how much it pie in the sky? Surprisingly the value of these technologies is actually far greater than the buzzwords might suggest, but conversely the technology available is far less mature than we might like or expect. (more…)

Update on the Development of Ubuntu 11.10

I’m sure you’re all awaiting the exciting release of Ubuntu 11.10 on the 13th of October. So what has been updated so far? Well the power icon that sits in the top right of the menu-bar has now been changed completely and is now called a “Power-Cog”.

It now features some new menu’s too, listing what devices are connected to your PC/Laptop, the “settings” menu which contains links, and the all important power-options. This isn’t all that’s been updated, Empathy will feature “video effects” as well, just like cheese does.

On the development side of things, the developers hit Feature freeze 2 weeks ago. “This is the big date that all developer dread the most. Now features and new upstream versions have to have landed, everything else will be a matter the release team has to decide upon. We are rushing towards release with UI Freeze and Beta Freeze coming up next week. Exciting times!” – Daniel Holbac, OMGUbuntu. The wallpaper list seems to be pretty impressive so far as well! Wanna see some? (more…)

Desura coming to a Linux PC near you

Desura (A Steam like  games portal/client), have for some time had a banner at the top of their website stating they are working on a Linux port of their client.

Keith Poole (aka. Platima) Desura’s “Linux guru”, has been keeping people up to date with development of the Linux client on the Desura news blog, and in an interview with Liam Dawe from  GOL (Gaming On Linux), explains his thoughts on the Linux port.

Part 1 of the GOL interview can be found here – Interview with Keith Poole from Desura Part 1

UPDATE: Part 2 of the GamingOnLinux interview can be found here – Interview with Keith Poole from Desura Part 2

and the third and final part 3 here – Interview with Keith Poole from Desura Part 3

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Groklaw to continue under new management

Further to the original announcement that Groklaw articles were to end on May 16th 2011, Pamela Jones (aka. Groklaw founder, ‘PJ’) has listened to the many readers of her popular blog, and decided not to close down, but instead to hand over the Groklaw reins to previous Red Hat general councel, lawyer and law professor, Mark Webbink.

As ‘PJ’ explains in the new announcement…

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Groklaw Articles Ending on May 16th

Pamela Jones (aka. Groklaw founder, ‘PJ’) has announced the ending of articles on Groklaw from the sites 8th birthday, May 16th.

I for one am going to sorely miss digging through new articles for all the juicy bits, and being continually amazed at the dirty tricks uncovered.

PJ, a Linux and Open Source advocate, and paralegal, founded Groklaw as a blog intended to look into “the crisis SCO initiated over Linux”, and in no small part was instrumental in seeing this through to its final outcome… “Linux won. SCO as we knew it is no more”.

Pamela, (along with other Groklaw contributors) used her ‘monumental’ legal research skills to show how SCO’s claims against Novell and IBM were completely unfounded… they also helped show how Microsoft were behind the financing of the SCO lawsuits.

In the article on Groklaw, PJ says “We’ll keep the Timelines up to date with court documents, and we’ll still finish the Comes exhibits if it kills me, so just email me your work when commenting is closed, if you are willing to keep helping.”

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openSUSE 11.4 Released

In the midst of the troubled sale of Novell to Attachmate, which includes the selling of 882 patents to CPTN Holdings – a group which includes Microsoft, Apple, and Oracle –  and the news that the sale is now on hold until April due to an investigation by the US. Department of Justice…

The openSUSE Project announce the release of openSUSE 11.4, the latest version of their well known open source Linux distribution.

openSUSE is driven by the openSUSE Project community and sponsored by Novell to help in the development and maintenance of  the other  (commercial) SUSE Linux distributions.

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Canonical release Certified Component & PC Catalogs

How many times have you ever been asked which components or complete systems will work properly with Linux? .. Well the answers may have just become easier to find, at least for Ubuntu.

Canonical (the company behind the Ubuntu project) have just released its Component Catalog , a database of more than 1300 components from 161 manufacturers that are “certified” to work with Ubuntu. The searchable database can be viewed by manufacturer or component type.

They have also released a searchable Ubuntu-certified hardware database of Laptops, Desktops, Servers, and Netbooks that have “all been awarded the status of Certified or Ready for Ubuntu”.

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Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) released

After 2 years of constant development, the Debian Project announce the release of their new stable version 6.0 (code name Squeeze). Debian 6.0 is a free operating system, coming for the first time in two flavours, Debian GNU/Linux, and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is introduced as a technology preview.

Debian 6.0 includes lots of updated applications, new features and improvements including over 10,000 new packages like the browser Chromium, the monitoring solution Icinga, the package management frontend Software Center, the network manager wicd, the Linux container tools lxc and the cluster framework Corosync.

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Ubuntu Customization Kit (UCK) 2.4.3 Released

Have you have ever wished that the Ubuntu LiveCD came with different software packages, or had the ubuntu-restricted-extras (flash, mp3 support etc.) and b43-fwcutter (Broadcom wireless firmware/drivers) packages installed by default ?

You can easily create your own custom Ubuntu LiveCD using the Ubuntu Customization Kit (UCK).

UCK is a tool that helps you customizing official Ubuntu Live CDs (including Kubuntu/Xubuntu and Edubuntu) to your needs. You can add any package to the live system, for example language packs, or applications.

Features:

• Create bootable LiveCD with predefined languages based on original Ubuntu/Kubuntu live CD using wizard with GUI
• Build live CD with special features using scripts. It is possible to customize root filesystem (for example install/remove packages), ISO contents (add/remove docs, change names) and initrd (add modules to boot, change boot sequence)

Below you will find instructions on UCK use.

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