Tux Watch

The December 2006 issue of CIO magazine carries an interesting story titled, “The Great OS Experiment” initiated and carried out by 44-year-old John Halamka CIO of the Harvard Medical School and CareGroup renowned for his adventurous experiments with medical and genetic technology. The experiment emerged out of interruptions caused due to updates, virus scans and much more when Halamka’s laptop was running Windows XP. This motivated him to

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Ever heard of NGO-in-a-box?

Well, if you haven’t, then you’ve been missing a lot of useful and important tools from the world of Linux and FOSS. NGO-in-a-box has been putting together a box loaded with peer reviewed and selected FOSS tools, tailored to the needs of nonprofits. It empowers nonprofits with software and provides documentation including materials that fits implementation scenarios. These boxes are

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I am sure that TuxWatch.com readers have heard about Brainbench Certifications and possibly alot of you people may have already taken some certification tests online [here]. For those who don’t know what is Brainbench is; according to their website [here] Brainbench founded in 1998, has served over 5,000 corporate and 6 million individual customers offering Certifications

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Have you ever used a really small size Linux distribution? Well you will really be entertained with a Linux distribution called Damn Small Linux (DSL). I received my first ever go with DSL when I required a small Live CD for demonstration purposes and a good scientist friend of mine based in NY proposed that I try out DSL. As the name implies, DSL is a business card size (50MB) Live CD Linux distribution. Amazingly, this little Linux wonder has a complete functional desktop including XMMS (MP3, and MPEG), FTP client, links-hacked web browser, spreadsheet, email, spell check (US English), a word-processor, three

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According to the Distrowatch website, Ubuntu Linux has maintained its position as the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution as well as being totally free of cost. I have been using the Ubuntu Linux Desktop distribution for almost over 2 years now from it’s very first release and have recommended to all my clients and anyone seeking advice. The best achievements for my record so far has been that a bank is migrating it’s 1000 Desktop network

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According to the Software For [website], Software for Starving Students is a free collection of programs organized for students (also available to anyone). They’ve gathered a list of best-in-class programs onto one CD (one disc for OS X, one for Windows), including a fully-featured office suite, a cutting-edge web browser, multi-media packages, academic tools, utilities and more. Why did they put this collection together in the first place? Well, they say the at the cost of a college education is always increasing and usually faster than students can earn money. They hope that

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The recent news about Jeremy Allison has rocked both the Linux/FOSS & Proprietary Source world. Jeremy is the co-founder and developer of the SAMBA Project, a software that bridges Windows desktop networks to Linux Servers, has quit Novell in protest over their deal with Microsoft. Go Jeremy, we love you Jeremy! This protest has revived the spirits of all those feeling that maybe a certain portion of the FOSS world was giving in to the Microvell (short for Microsoft + Novell partnership) deal.

According to Linux Insider [here] Jeremy announced last week that

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Oracle’s move into the Linux world through its new product combined with Operating System platform support strategy and distribution, “Unbreakable Linux” has already caused an unrest in the market that was already buying Linux support from companies like Redhat and Novell. Most of the industry thinks that it might be possible that Oracle will only be supported on platforms blessed by Oracle itself. The FAQs available on Oracle’s website speak of such a ‘Transition Path for Red Hat and Novell customers’ on Page#4 [here]:

“What is the transition path for existing Red Hat and Novell Linux users?
Transition is very easy. Existing Red Hat and Novell Linux customers that move to the Unbreakable Linux support program may receive credit for

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If you’re looking for an Enterprise FOSS Billing solution to run either on Linux or an Apache Web Server environment, your search may just be over. The FOSS community has long been criticized from not providing Billing solutions but that has only been some FUD from the closed source product developers and misinformed users.
Jbilling Enterprise Open Source Billing System dates back to 2003 and over the years has evolved into a very stable and robust product deployed in production environments in many companies around the world. Jbilling supports simple business rules, complex billing

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Linux has been part of mainstream technological advancements worldwide with the momentum continuously increasing everyday especially when Linux enemies like Microsoft too are digging their way into the FOSS movement through partnerships with Novell. The Information Technology industry is vast and spans globally thus anything happening in the industry in one region also affects the other. After observing the overall Linux industry trends [you can read the year 2006 reflections by at Matt at InfoWorld here], I would like to make the following predictions that will drive the next year:

• Linux will continue to be the leading and preferred server-side operating system in 2007 worldwide.

• 80% of all US based Venture Capital investments will be targeted at

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The Mandriva Linux Desktops are one of those Linux Distributions that get your heart pumping and wanting to get a deeper look into it or try it out with your own hands. Mandriva was originally developed by Mandrakesoft (originated by Gaël Duval, Co-founder) and was formerly known as Mandrakelinux/Mandrake Linux later being acquired by Conectiva and Lycoris. It originally came as derivation from Red Hat Linux version 5.1 carrying KDE version 1.0 way back in July 1998. It has now left Red Hat far behind and now comes loaded with a number of administration tools originally developed for (more…)

Short stories for humane resurgence.

It was second grade now, Mrs. Lang our new class teacher announced that we will celebrate green, and make our sandy school green with plants. Now that was interesting, all I could see around our school was sand, even our school emblem was the scorpion. Our school was on the outskirts of Dhahran built on a deserted old American Airbase in the Saudi desert established by the American Consulate. It was more of a city than a school with thousands of students and classroom blocks spread all over the place. Classrooms were bunkers; Dorms were huge canvas structures where fighter jets used to be maintained. The new airbase was still near by and at recess we could sit in the baseball field watching the jets take off and (more…)

This is Chapter.I of some true short stories from my past that encourage humane revival. Though these posts may seem bit off-topic from this blog, but if you read closely, you will see the hidden message, the true Spirit of FOSS lies everywhere in what ever we do for humanity. Read on…

Chapter-I

It has been days since I have looked down into my past, reconciled with my consciousness that in turn is very fuzzy indeed, blurred in an atmosphere of personal desires opposed to the purpose for which I am in this world. Retrospective in movement, shallow in the heart, as I ponder through my thoughts, am lost to my conviction. Is this really because of a sublime conviction that has given me the strength to pursue the unachievable? Or is it simply confusion in parallel to a worldly existence? Maybe, it is something that (more…)

Yeup, if you haven’t visited the Songbird’s Nest, now is time since Songbird has been the talk of Linux Town back since mid this year. Songbird is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox, it is built from Mozilla, cross-platform and open source. I am really impressed with its Graphical User Interface and tool layouts. Songbird is a Cross Platform player supporting Windows, Mac, Linux available in 30+ languages as well as providing 64-bit support. So if you want to get the divine tast of entertainment, why not visit the Songbird website to tryout the player to Play music and to Play the Web.

If you have been exploring ways to deploy low-cost hardware and Local Area Networks with minimum hardware requirements, then you have to explore LTSP or the Linux Terminal Server Project. According to Wikipedia, LTSP is an add-on package for Linux that allows many people to simultaneously use the same computer. Applications run on the server with a terminal known as a thin client handling input and output. These thin clients are also known as X terminals. Generally, they are low-powered, lack a hard disk and are quieter than desktop computers. This is because they do not have any moving parts. (more…)