Unixster

The deal is done. Oracle now owns Sun. Oracle’s main message to Sun’s customers seems to be "Don’t worry, be happy." That’s not easy when Oracle is not explaining in any detail what it will be doing with open-source software offerings like MySQL, OpenOffice and OpenSolaris. In general, we know that Sun’s software product catalog will be cut back and that many Sun staffers will soon be laid off. Historically, when Oracle acquires a company, deep cuts are the rule. For example, Oracle fired about 5,000 workers after acquiring PeopleSoft. This time around, Oracle is saying that there will be only about a thousand layoffs. In particular, although no one is going on record, it’s feared that Sun’s open-source groups will take the brunt of these cuts.

While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps. Fortunately, for KDE fans, there is now the Korona distribution, which brings KDE 4.3 as the default desktop environment to an OpenSolaris stack.

British singer/songwriter Gary Go creates much of his musical accompaniment on his iPhone. His single, “Wonderful,” is available as a free download from iTunes. If you’re in New York, you can watch Go perform on his iPhone and Mac on Sunday, August 16 at the Apple Store SoHo. If you’re not, check out this video at keyboardmag.com.

Sun’s Glynn Foster has announced today on the OpenSolaris Forums that they will be discontinuing the Solaris Express Community Edition (SXCE) builds. For quite some time now, Sun has been providing bi-weekly updates of the latest (Open)Solaris code in the form of an ISO for those interested in testing out the latest work on this operating system.

For Sunbelt Rentals, the iPhone is as indispensable as hard hats. Sunbelt rents scissor lifts, cranes, backhoes and other heavy machinery to construction companies in 34 states. And its 1200-strong sales team depends on iPhone for real-time customer, business, and inventory information. The company even created its own iPhone app — Mobile SalesPro — to deliver that information to every member of its sales force.

On 15th July 2009, the Commission of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) began proceedings in a case against «Acer Inc.», «ASUSTeK Computer Inc.», «Toshiba Corporation», «Hewlett-Packard Company», « Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.» and «Dell Inc.» for the elements of violating the anti-monopoly legislation. In accordance with the Determination of 20th July 2009, the FAS Russia’s Commission, investigating the case, suspended the case until receiving additional evidence. The case will continue on 10th September 2009.

This tutorial shows how you can install Sun VirtualBox 3.0 (released on June 30, 2009) on a Fedora 11 desktop. With VirtualBox you can create and run guest operating systems ("virtual machines") such as Linux and Windows under a host operating system. There are two ways of installing VirtualBox: from precompiled binaries that are available for some distributions and come under the PUEL license, and from the sources that are released under the GPL. This article will show how to set up VirtualBox 3.0 from the precompiled binaries.

The Symbian Foundation has released its first open source software package, the first step in the organization’s plan to eventually open source the entire Symbian mobile operating system. The Symbian Foundation was set up by in June 2008 by Nokia, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG and AT&T to oversee the development of the Symbian OS as an open source platform, licensed under the Eclipse Public Licence (EPL). The OS had previously been developed as proprietary software by the Symbian Foundation.