You have perhaps heard that while we were on vacation Linux file system ace and convicted wife killer Hans Reiser took the cops to where he had buried her body. Two days later when Reiser was supposed to be sentenced to 25 years to life for first decree murder the judge disclosed that Reiser could have pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for three years in jail and - given the time served while awaiting trial - could have been out next spring, which would have saved his little boy from testifying.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

One of the beauties of Linux from a business point of view is that it doesn't require the 'latest and greatest' hardware to run properly. This means you can increase the return on investments (ROI) for legacy hardware. As I'll show in this article, as in the case with virtualization, the 'latest and greatest' software is not required either.

In order to describe itself as an 'open source' company, need a company merely be 'a company that will help you make the switch to open source in your company' - or does it have to be one that lets users feely download, compile, and use the software in question? Where is the dividing line? How open is 'open'? At Enterprise Open Source Magazine we contacted a range of FOSS luminaries for their take on the issue.

Symantec has announced an agreement with IBM that provides for the delivery of Symantec high availability, storage management, and backup products for the Linux on POWER platform by the end of 2006. These solutions will help clients consolidate Linux applications on the IBM System p platform.

Multidimensional tagging, a key component in social sharing sites, can potentially help enterprises manage large stores of information. In this article, I'll examine the ways that multidimensional tagging will be implemented using Open Source tools.

Linux and other Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) enjoy a reputation for ubiquitous use in educational settings. While FOSS openness and low acquisition costs resonate with the approach and needs of academia, it's proving difficult to establish a clear adoption trend. Certainly there exists ample anecdotal evidence of adoption, school-by-school, department-by-department. Certainly a range of Open Source projects arise from and also target education. However, close investigation reveals a mixed reality for Linux and FOSS in education: perusing college course listings, at least in the United States, doesn't support the notion of near-universal Linux/FOSS use across curricula - either in computer science or as a platform across other disciplines. It's even more difficult to measure Linux and FOSS adoption in K-12 settings where course catalogs don't exist and where classroom IT closely tracks home computing use.

Absoft Corporation announced the new Absoft Roll with IntelR Software Products for Platform Rocks. The new Absoft Roll provides software developers with the best compilers, debuggers, math and message passing libraries, and advanced performance tuning and optimization tools for compiling, debugging, running, and optimizing high performance computing applications for clusters and grids.

There are some computing systems that require high availability. Telecommunication systems are a good example. They require 24 hours a day and 365 days a year service availability and their downtime should not exceed five minutes per year and that includes hardware and software upgrades. These systems require carrier-grade reliability that guarantees high service availability, 99.999% uptime or higher.

After building a number of clusters from the ground up -including one that made it to the Top500 Supercomputer list - I decided to try a service that many vendors now offer - having a system racked and stacked at the factory then shipped to us. Such a service saves a huge amount of time, not to mention my back, not having to build the cluster and cable all the equipment together. I've been a fan of well-cabled systems and have found the quality control to be acceptable. The key component is the pre-build requirements and verification before the system is built. This will ensure the system shipped is what is expected when it arrives at your front door. There can still be a fair amount of cabling that has to be done once it arrives, if you have a multi-rack configuration, but it's usually limited to plugging in the system's power and public network.

The global mobile phone market is enjoying explosive growth. With annual unit sales in the hundreds of millions, Gartner analysts estimate that by 2009 the worldwide installed based will top 2.6 billion mobile handsets. For the Linux and Open Source segment of the IT industry, such numbers are tantalizing, orders of magnitude beyond shipments and even the installed base for servers, and far greater in volume than the worldwide desktop market. For the Linux software and related hardware markets, mobile phones are an opportunity to 'break out' and enjoy greater market share in client devices, complementing the already important presence of Linux in the voice and data communications infrastructure.

In a market that is defined by today's tight IT budgets, saving on software licenses can mean the difference between financial failure and success for a software development project. While our corporate clients use commercial-grade application servers, we sometimes find ourselves in a situation where there are no funds for developer licenses of these commercial application servers. Out of necessity, we developed and implemented a process that allows for development on top of an open source stack, while production delivery relies on a commercial application server.

Albert Einstein defined success as 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration. Although he had no inkling about the emergence of Linux Clusters for High Performance Computing (HPC), his words ring true for designing, building, and managing compute clusters.

Enterprise IT departments face significant challenges in building applications that tie together heterogeneous business functions and data from a range of existing systems and applications. Existing portal applications are too rigid and inflexible to adapt to changing business requirements. Existing Java and J2EE application development tools are complex and sophisticated, requiring the commitment of expensive resources and long development cycles.

At first glance, you might think accounting systems are the main type of software that keep you using Windows systems. QuickBooks, Peachtree, Microsoft Money, and Quicken all run on Windows, and not directly in Linux. These programs have certainly captured the market for financial software for small businesses. Slightly larger businesses opt for expensive enterprise accounting systems such as Great Plains, MAS 90, and Lawson. These programs require extensive customization to make them work for a particular business. A few open source systems have emerged to provide compelling alternatives to proprietary accounting software. These systems are beginning to surpass the proprietary offerings in terms of features, customizability, and flexibility.

Most organizations provide their users with the ability to print, store, and access files on network servers. Accessing and saving files to network drives and printing to shared network printers is probably something administrators don't spend much time thinking about unless it's to help users install print drivers or assist them in accessing shared network directories. If your organization has moved to Linux in the data center (or in some of your business workgroups), migrating Windows file and print services to Linux is a good next step. Obviously, before embarking on a migration, you'll want to make sure your technical staff has the necessary skills to implement and maintain file and print services in a Linux environment. For any migration, consider professional consulting and training options. Oftentimes, the money spent on consulting and training outweighs the man-hours and productivity costs of a migration gone to hell. As a preamble, let's briefly make a case for migrating file and print services to Linux. According to a PC Magazine lab test, Linux print serving provides up to 60% better throughput than printing under Windows and that, from a performance perspective, Linux has more than 100% better average response time than printing under Windows.

In Part 1 ('Why Are You Waiting?', Vol. 2, issue 9), I discussed the business and technical considerations in migrating Microsoft IIS Web servers to Apache on Linux. Now, I'll address those who've decided that migrating to Apache on Linux is the way to go for their organization and show how to make that decision a reality.

Linux has come a long way, quite quickly over the past couple of years. It has moved from a system usable only by those willing and able to spend time installing, configuring, and re-configuring again to systems that are sold by a wide variety of distributors, some of which have specialized desktop distributions. The list includes distributions such as Red Hat, Novell, Mandrake, Debian, and several others for specific geographies. They all install about as easily as any other OS that doesn't come pre-installed from a machine maker.

In the past 18 months, mobile phone manufacturers in Asia and elsewhere have introduced over a dozen handset models based on Linux, and before the end of 2005, you can expect to see a dozen more smart and feature phones announced and shipping. While it's easy to gush over this emerging trend, and to wax eloquent over the technical particulars of these intelligent mobile devices, it may be more interesting to examine the drivers behind this wave of adoption.

When blade servers burst on the computing scene several years ago, they were hailed as a replacement for traditional rack-mount solutions and a catalyst for the continuing shift away from proprietary Unix servers and mainframes and toward systems leveraging the x86 architecture and Linux. Fueled by promises of lower cost, higher density, and easier manageability, 1,000-node blade deployments were expected to address enterprise server hardware consolidation needs.

Trade publications, news magazines, and blogs are filled with secrets and solutions for easily and cost-effectively building Web sites, intranets, and the like. Recipes like these are great but, in reality, how do we make it happen?

The Network File System (NFS) is an important mechanism for sharing files among end users on a broad range of platforms. End users have relied on NFS to support mission-critical applications for several decades. However, in recent years, other shared file systems have been developed to provide features that earlier versions of NFS lacked. To compete and address real end-user needs, the new rev 4 of NFS was developed.

Linux PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) is a wonderful authentication application library that's used by essential programs like 'login' and 'passwd', and, so, is included in virtually every Linux distribution. Still, for most beginning Linux users and even a few veterans, PAM is a big unknown, its powers left dormant awaiting a brave user to venture in and become empowered.

A transformation is taking place in telecommunications to meet the demands of new voice and data technologies. These technologies include Voice-over-IP (VoIP), the packet-switched alternative to old-fashioned circuit-switched telephony. To enable VoIP traffic, application servers must provide carrier-grade reliability that guarantees high service availability (99.999% uptime or better).

Corporate migration to a Linux desktop requires rigorous premigration planning to succeed. The goal of migration is to finish with a Linux desktop that is cost-effective and responsive to the organization's needs. Without proper data center planning, the migration won't meet this goal and can become a technical and organizational challenge.

The year 2004 began auspiciously with the introduction of the 2.6 Linux kernel and advanced rapidly for the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), its membership and the communities it represents and serves. Let us reflect on OSDL's achievements over the last year. This article will introduce readers unfamiliar with OSDL to its activities, update long-time OSDL watchers and offer a glimpse into new activities envisioned for the next 12 months.

The battle with spam can easily be compared to an arms race. Spammers will learn about and start exploiting a certain method to send their garbage messages. E-mail administrators (with the help of open source developers and vendors) will respond with anti-spam tools battling the latest and 'greatest' spammer methodologies. This seems to be an endless cycle, having yet to reach an end point.

Blue Gene/L (BG/L) is a massively parallel supercomputer with low cost-to-performance ratios for speed, power, cooling, and floor space. It's designed and built by IBM in partnership with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

Here's a scenario. Among the systems administrators (SAs) in your company, you're the exception, not the rule. You cut your teeth on Unix, you keep up your Unix skills, and you still favor Unix in many respects.

As a person who is running a young company that develops open source software as a primary activity, I'm frequently asked to comment on the business models that are at play in the industry.

Martin Fink's book on the business side of Linux and open source was one of the first books that looked at Linux and open source from the perspective of corporate managers and executives. In this extremely influential book, he explained in business terms why Linux and open source are here to stay and why companies everywhere should be aggressively moving to develop strategies for their adoption. He now speaks at conferences around the world delivering this same message.

The use of Linux as an enterprise computing environment is growing rapidly, and there are strong business reasons behind this trend. Commercial Linux operating systems give companies a robust OS with powerful capabilities.

OpenGL (the open standard graphics library originally developed by SGI, pioneers in computer visualization) is fully supported under Linux, meaning that accelerated viewport previews, such as rotating around a textured and shaded model, and real-time or near real-time playback of scenes (as opposed to choppy, three-frames-per-second animation) is possible. These are important factors in making Linux the choice of film, effects, and gaming studios.

Penguinistas have long loved to ruminate over a beer about the potential reversal of market share between Microsoft and companies offering open source solutions. But such ruminations were often left to discussions at the pub or the local LUG meeting because in a corporate business setting, even the most die-hard Penguinistas might be cautious about being thought of as wacko - at least in North American and European business settings.

While many paranoid system administrators and users still consider any WLAN to be a gaping hole, these networks can be successfully secured against snooping and unauthorized access with a little thought and effort. Fortunately for us, Linux provides some flexibility when it comes to choosing a wireless safeguard.

Not long ago, Epson America had a problem that many companies would love to have - a very successful corporate Web site. Let us explain.

As Linux continues its ascent in enterprise computing, major vendor support for business-critical applications is evolving to keep pace. Among the challenges enterprises and vendors face is the need for advanced security and accountability for root account users, application administration accounts, and nonprivileged users as well.

When companies purchase a significant number of machines and cluster them together to solve their computing needs, their site environment often drives specific requirements for their clusters.

Since its beginning in 1982, Orbital Sciences has become a pioneer in developing smaller rockets and satellite systems for such diverse purposes as intercepting hostile missiles launched against the U.S. or launching satellites for better cellular phone reception. With a range of space and satellite systems, plus the added responsibility of supporting virtually all of the country's major missile defense programs, Orbital relies on massive amounts of computing power to continually optimize and simulate launch vehicles for reliability and accuracy.