Unixster

Once upon a time HP and DEC computers were made by engineers for engineers. The biggest difference between them was that some HP customers wore ties. Having just taken delivery of a HP Mini 5101 pre-loaded with Suse Linux Enterprise Edition 11, it appears that HP still has some engineers left, hiding deep within, perhaps only coming out at night. Certainly the suits running HP don’t seem to want customers to know that Suse is an option. And Novell doesn’t seem all that keen on its adopted child, either.

In an interview with TechCrunch this week, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer goes out of his way to avoid naming Google instead calling them "the incumbent."

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2009.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Two traditionally proprietary companies made open source releases recently: Facebook released a Python-based web server and application framework called Tornado, and Apple released a thread-pool management system called Grand Central Dispatch. It is not the first open source code release for either company, but both projects are worth examining. Tornado is designed to suit specific types of web applications and is reportedly very fast, while Grand Central Dispatch may cause some developers to re-think task-parallelism.

This is a plea to all hardware manufacturers: Please create Linux drivers for your hardware. OK, so Linux isn’t the Stormin’ Norman of the Desktop arena but that doesn’t mean its users don’t want or need drivers for hardware. I don’t blame the kind volunteers that donate their time to program bits and pieces of the Linux kernel and associated programs but I do blame the hardware manufacturers for not supporting a huge user base of Linux users. I’m tired of it and it’s time for action.

It’s been no secret that NVIDIA has been working on an OpenCL Linux driver for their graphics processors just as AMD has been doing, but up until now their beta drivers were only available to registered NVIDIA developers. Today though — on the same day as NVIDIA’s OpenCL driver launch for Windows — they have made their OpenCL support publicly available.

Here’s a a list of the 10 most important developments for Linux. The Linux technology, development model, and community have all been game-changing influences on the IT industry, and all we can really do is stand back and look at it all, happy to have been along for the ride for developerWorks’ first 10 years. The Linux zone team has put together this greatly abbreviated collection of things that stand out in our minds as having rocked the world of Linux in a significant way.

Three days after Google told an independent developer to stop bundling proprietary applications with his alternative Android operating system, fans of the popular package have shot back with plans to work around the move. The developer, who goes by the name Cyanogen, said here that he plans to overhaul his CyanogenMod platform so it no longer includes GTalk, YouTube, and other Google-supplied apps that are widely regarded as essential to any Android OS. But in a clever work-around, he will include software with his bare-bones offering that will allow users to install those closed-source programs without molesting Google’s copyrights.