by Fouad Bajwa
For those who don’t know, Second Life [here] is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents made open to the public in 2003 and today is inhabited by a total of 2,466,151 people from around the world. This virtual world is comprises of digital content including people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity where one can find land to build their house or business as well as surrounded by the creations of fellow residents. All the residents retain the rights to their digital creations thus they can buy, sell and trade with other residents through a Marketplace supporting millions of US dollars in monthly transactions handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, that can also be converted to US dollars at various online currency exchanges. Linden comes from the creator of the Second Life software, Linden Labs [here] that has now released a viewer software for Second Life under the General Public License (GPL).
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by Fouad Bajwa
The USC, Simi/Conejo, and UCLA Linux User Groups will be holding “SCALE 5X: The Fifth Annual Southern California Linux Expo” from February 10-11, 2007. The event will bring together Linux and Open Source Software companies, developers, and users. The event will be covering the growing technological Linux community and its future directions. The Expo’s educational focus is composed of (but not limited to) technical seminars and booths where, among other things, both commercial software and hardware vendors, and local non-profit groups (for example, Linux Users Groups), participate in product display, and software demonstrations and tutorials, respectively. The event will be bringing together a blend of business leaders and technical experts.
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by Fouad Bajwa
Enterprise Resource Planning software integrates departments and functions across a company into one computer system, conceptually running off a single database, enabling various departments to share information and communicate with each other. ERP systems comprise of function-specific modules designed to interact with the other modules, eg Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Purchasing, HRMS, Sales and Marketing, Distribution etc. Business Intelligence software is used to mine data from large information system repositories such as Data Warehouses and the web.
The LinuxInsider reports [here] that IDC estimates that overall market for non-proprietary ERP applications will hit about US$36 billion by 2008 with FOSS ERP systems like Compiere ERP, ERP5, OpenMFG and Fisterra taking it there. Organizations worldwide are now looking towards as the possibility of mission-critical Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions as FOSS is making its way into a number of “niche” markets. Another interesting fact is that Oracle and SAP are also making a major shift towards the Linux platform proving that FOSS is receiving adequate support by the global business and industry.
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by Fouad Bajwa
If you have been searching for a cool and non-commercial/free Firewall tool for Linux, Shoreline Firewall also known as “Shorewall� may be a good choice. Shorewall uses iptables for configuring Netfilter in Linux and for experienced users, all that an administrator has to do is describe the firewall or gateway requirements using entries in a set of configuration files and Shorewall reads these files. Shorewall, with the help of the iptables utility, configures Netfilter to match user defined requirements. Administrators or even simple Linux users can build dedicated firewall systems, multi-function gateways, routers or servers.
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by Fouad Bajwa
The debate about how operating systems manage security has been the talk of the Tech Industry since long. If I was to answer this question that how secure is Linux or any other OS in the market today, it would be simply the Software Architecture and Design of that particular OS environment. From my experience with Windows after DOS, it gradually moved up the security ladder but today exists as a very unsecure platform that requires many applications to secure it.
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by Fouad Bajwa
DistroWatch’s statistics on how the various favorite Linux Distributions have performed during 2006 are available [here]. A list of the top 25 distributions that are ranked by page hit figures in the past 12 months of 2006, compared with the same period in 2005 is available.
According to the list, Ubuntu Linux maintained its top spot for both 2005 as well as 2006. OpenSUSE stands second in 2006. Mandriva, KNOPPIX and Xandros have been loosing fans where as “geek” distributions like Slackware and Gentoo, swapped places in the table. New in the top 25 are SabayonLinux, Xubuntu and Freespire, replacing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Linspire and VLOS. And the biggest climbers? Zenwalk shot up 8 and PCLinuxOS went up 5 places. Good show Linux world!
by Fouad Bajwa
Search engine giant Google Inc., is extending its corporate social responsibility to the developing world community through making significant grants for computer hardware equipped with Linux and various other FOSS applications. According to a post on Google’s official coding Blog [here], Google has made a grant that enables notebook computers running Linux and a variety of FOSS to be rolled out at rural schools in Fiji.
Google’s Open Source Program Office has extended the donation via the Imara Project at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The project aims to
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by Fouad Bajwa
The LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit will be taking place from the Feb. 14-15 2007, at the Marriott Marquis in New York. The LinuxWorld event [here] will be bringing on stage successful Linux and FOSS projects including feature presentations by leading IT executives who will share best practices. The summit carries various interesting breakout tracks on Security, Network Management, Interoperability, Applications and Best Practices, Virtualization, Vendor Tracks, Linux on the Desktop, Legal
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by Fouad Bajwa
I really have no intentions of boring my readers but this FUD (fear-uncertainty-doubt) being injected by Oracle as means for self-promotion is getting worse. Recently, I found this Gartner Report offer in my mailbox. Really, why would Gartner even do a research on the comparison of Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Programme and Red Hat Linux when Oracle is using Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the first place? My possible hunch, Oracle is paying Gartner to these FUD reports, a common attribute of the closed source/proprietary source world member corporations. Remember that Microsoft was very active in using a similar strategy trying to defame the up rise of Linux on the Server side.
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by Fouad Bajwa
TuxWatch.com Exclusive: I have been continuously analysing the various deals, new product launches and set backs of the Proprietary and FOSS industries globally and from my standpoint, the largest blooper for the year 2006 in corporate deals was the Microvell (Microsoft and Novell) deal whereas the grand winners of the corporate world deals are both Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux Support Programme and RedHat Linux.
Microvell Deal: The Microsoft and Novell deal has done a couple of things for both the Proprietary and FOSS worlds. First it shocked both the
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by Fouad Bajwa
I have found Ohloh to be a very interesting tool for supporting my FOSS research activities. Ohloh [here] is an online service that accumulates an enormous database of Free and Open Source Software development facts indexing a well over 3,000 projects and 220 million lines of source code and most amazingly, Ohloh has followed the history of these lines of code, to identify when and by whom all of this code was written. Recently an
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by Fouad Bajwa
My earlier predications about Linux for year 2007 [here] seem to be catching on quickly (grinning). It may seem a bit unbelievable but according to thisTechworld news article [here], nearly half of all enterprises will be running mission-critical business applications on Linux in five years’ time. That’s according to survey of IT directors, VPs and CIOs carried out by Saugatuck Research, which questioned 133 businesses worldwide.
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by Fouad Bajwa
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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by Fouad Bajwa
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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by Fouad Bajwa
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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