Tux Watch

The results of Linuxquestion.org’s Voting for its Members Choice Awards [here] have finally been announced [here] with Ubuntu taking the lead again on the Linux Distribution of the Year Choice by the website’s users with KDE being the dominant Desktop Environment. Knoppix still leads the show for Live Distros and Firefox continues to be the king of web browsers. Mysql continues to the bag Mr. Favorite choice while GIMP is the best Graphics App of the year. Cheers to Linuxquestion.org users, great going!

Here are the official results for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards:

• Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (26.44%)
• Live Distribution of the Year - Knoppix (26.22%)
• Browser of the Year - Firefox (74.61%)
• Database of the Year - MySQL (61.68%)
• Office Suite of the Year - OpenOffice.org (89.79%)
• Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (56.58%)
• Video Media Player Application of the Year - mplayer (41.93%)
• Video Authoring Application of the Year - Kino (27.81%)
• Audio Media Player Application of the Year - amaroK (57.07%)
• Audio Authoring Application of the Year - Audacity (67.07%)
• Multimedia Utility of the Year - K3b (69.51%)
• Messaging Application of the Year - Gaim (51.52%)
• Window Manager of the Year - Fluxbox (21.44%)
• IDE of the Year - Eclipse (34.47%)
• Mail Client of the Year - Thunderbird (52.74%)
• Text Editor of the Year - vi/vim (38.42%)
• Graphics Application of the Year - GIMP (65.60%)
• Security Application of the Year - nmap (20.94%)
• Windows on Linux Application of the Year - Wine (50.10%)
• Web Development Editor of the Year - Quanta (36.34%)
• Shell of the Year - bash (89.45%)

Thanks to our friends from the UNDP-APDIP-IOSN International Open Source Network’s ASEAN+3 Node in the Philippines [here] who only recently organized the Asia Source 2 FOSS Camp in Indonesia [here] have produced a CD Package, filled with useful FOSS based free business applications titled SME-in-a-Box. I was lucky enough to be there and recieve a copy of the CD the content of which I will now be sharing through TuxWatch.org exclusively for our readers.

“SME-in-a-Box� is a toolkit designed to meet the specialized needs of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) based on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). The aim is to provide a selection of peer-reviewed software and material, which help businesses to grow. SME-in-a-Box leverages the power of FOSS for social and economic development. The collection comprises of software and manuals for general use of SMEs in their daily operations and management. Online links for each application will be conveniently included on this website directing the end-user to relevant websites and thus, gaining quick access to both downloades and advanced technical documentations and case studies.

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According to the Red Hat Website [here], the Swedish Armed Forces have made the decision to migrate their servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux thus replacing Windows NT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its core IT infrastructure. The decision by Swedish authorities is driven by security considerations.

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Asterisk [here] is a complete IP PBX in software created by Mark Spencer of Digium, Inc in 1999. Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris providing all the features of a PBX advanced features of high end/cost proprietary PBXs. It supports Voice over IP and is interoperable with almost all standards-based telephony equipment and the best part of it, it uses relatively inexpensive hardware.

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Alright guys, the Linux 2.6.20 Kernel has been released after two months of development and includes two different virtualization implementations. KVM gives full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Additionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 micro optimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared page tables for hugetbl, and many other things. For more information on the list of changes, visit [here].

Jim Finkle reports [here] from Boston (Reuters) that the Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell Inc.’s right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft Corp. According to Eben Moglen, FSF’s General Counsel, “The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft”. The foundation controls intellectual property rights to key parts of the open-source Linux operating system.

I would also definitely agree with the FSF since on one side, Novell took the contributions of the FOSS community to build its Operating System offerings and on the other side opted to bring on Microsoft that in originality has always taken Linux as a threat, to protect those contributions which in its own is a pretty silly way to manage IPR.

An interesting article from the IBM Website [here] that a lack of physical memory can severely hamper Linux performance. In this article, learn how to accurately measure the amount of memory your Linux system uses. You also get practical advice on reducing your memory requirements using an Ubuntu system as an example. A much-touted benefit of Linux is that it is more efficient than Microsoft® Windows®, and will therefore perform better on less than cutting-edge hardware. This performance makes Linux a very attractive upgrade for the many people who have old Windows 98-era boxes still sitting around that are no longer being treated to the latest and greatest software (particularly security patches).

The article walks readers through the basics of memory, choosing the right desktop environment with appropriate applications, removing unwanted services and settings, appropriate planning and then how to optimize your system.

The news of the month is that the Linux kernel community is offering end users and in particular companies free Linux driver development services says Greg on the Linux Kernel Monkey Blog [here]. The objective is to reduce the issues and sufferings of searching for a suitable device driver for Linux thus no need to search Linux Device Driver Kits and browse through tens of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree.

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According to the Guardian Digital-EnGarde Secure Linux website [here], the EnGarde Secure Community is a secure distribution of Linux engineered from the ground-up to provide organizations with security required for creating a corporate Web presence and conducting e-business online. EnGarde can be used as a Web, DNS, E-mail, Database, E-commerce and general Internet Server platform with security as a primary concern. I call it “Linux Truly Secure By Design” since it complies to SELinux security audit measures as well as follows the principle of Linux application design, that is, “Secure By Design” though many may disagree.

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FreedomHEC is the hardware conference [here] where you’ll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more.

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The Linux Professional Institute has launched [here] the LPIC-3 Certification Program representing the culmination of LPI’s Certification Program. LPIC-3 is designed for the “enterprise-level” Linux professional and represents the highest level of professional, distribution-neutral Linux certification within the industry. The LPIC-3 program consists of a single exam for LPIC-3 “Core” designation. A number of “specialty” exams are proposed as additional designations on top of the LPIC-3 “Core” certification. Proposed specialties include the following: Mixed Environment, Security, High Availability and Virtualization, Web and Intranet, and Mail and Messaging. The first such “specialty” designation, “Mixed Environment” has been made available in January 2007.

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Do we really have to explain every time something that is very open and proven worldwide. The context of this question is actually Linux in the enterprise and the best examples we already have are enterprises of the Internet era including giants like Google and Yahoo. These organizations have long reaped the benefits improved efficiency, reliability and cost savings for years with their online. I believe “YES” we will have to continuously advocate the benefits of FOSS and Linux continuously as more and more people turn towards exploring the FOSS option.

Being biased to the fact that people should now know it because its all out there is not an appropriate perception. If this would have always been the case then why do we have to educate people to become Doctors, Engineers, Computer Scientists, Astronauts, Policemen etc.

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The Microsoft launch of its new operating system Vista could possibly loose its previously held Window’s market share due to the fact that Vista carries a whole new set of Graphical User Interface features and enhancements that will require the new end-users of Vista to first receive a significant amount of training to manage the new interfaces. Secondly, Vista may be trying to copy a number of features from products developed by the FOSS community including the Firefox browser.

Third, Vista will not be living up to its promise of including new ground breaking enhancements such as a new file system so people will be getting more of a resource hungry eater than a full of new features operating system. Fourth Vista is going to be one of the most resource hungry Operating Systems ever and you can say goodbye to all your old low-performing hardware equipment like Pentium-4 and below whereas Linux has the capability to even make such low-performance hardware become effectively useful.

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Part- 4. India Plays “IT” Big

Further adding to local FOSS Ecosystem development initiatives in India, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has been making headlines [here ] the world over as the state goes for FOSS due to concerns over security and the high costs that Microsoft offers for Windows. The Indian state is not new to FOSS as the local government been running Red Hat Linux on various backend servers coupled with JBoss application server and PostgreSQL databases.

Mr. C.Umashankar the Managing Director, Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot is a state-owned IT supplier) has clearly announced that

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Part- 3. India Plays “IT” Open

India has been very prominent on the FOSS world news bulletins due to the fact that with one of the largest populations in the world, the country has been on preference list for Information Technology and Software Business Process Outsourcing for the western or developed world. Adding to this, almost every major FOSS development corporation has either Research and Development center in India as well as country operations including giant brand names like Red Hat, Novell, IBM etc. In India, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) [here ] has been leading FOSS initiatives in the country.

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