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My wife and I have been using (and collecting) computers for years. Now my household now has four physical computers, one of them dual boot. All are on a single internal local area network with five real users plus sundry administrative ones on each. Some of the computers are also running services. I also have two computers sitting in a box, which will probably be added to this mess soon, plus my wife plans to get a laptop. I now manage a network bigger than many small businesses! But I can’t afford to pay a system administrator, and the tedium of “network plumbing” is my least favorite part of computer technology. Surely, there must be a way to automate this mess? Enter Zenoss.

Back in the good old days, there was an operating system that didn't seem to think NAME and name were different. The result was that sometimes when you transferred files from a floppy disk (remember them?) created on that Dumb Old System, you would clutter your directory with uppercase filenames. As us Unix old-timers learned a nifty trick to get directory names to sort before filenames in the output of the ls command (namely, start directory names with an uppercase letter), having filenames with uppercase letters was irritating. So I wrote this script ...

Analyst Jack Gold of J.Gold Associates says the open Symbian and open Android operating systems should combine into a single open-source operating system for mobile devices. He predicts that such a combination will occur in three to six months. Gold said he based his comments on conditions in the market and not on information that officials in either movement told him.

Once again, Microsoft has used the O'Reilly Open Source Convention as a venue to make a key announcement about the company's involvement with open-source initiatives. This year Microsoft is unveiling moves in three areas, including becoming a sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation.

Since everybody seems to be having fun building new filesystems these days, I thought I should join the party. Tux3 is the spiritual and moral successor of Tux2, the most famous filesystem that was never released. In the ten years since Tux2 was prototyped on Linux 2.2.13 we have all learned a thing or two about filesystem design.

Linux rarely needs to be rebooted, but when it does, it’s often slow to boot. Fortunately, there are ways to speed things up. Some of these methods are not terribly difficult (although some, unfortunately, are).

So you've been the IBM AIX guru on your team for years now and your bosses have determined that they want to try Linux on System p. The purpose of this article is to introduce Linux to AIX administrators. It will show you what you need to know to make the transition to Linux simpler.

Dell was the first of the major computer manufacturers to support preinstalled Linux, but it's not just preinstalling Linux. The Austin, Texas, company is also adding functionality to Ubuntu Linux on its desktops and laptops.

This article presents a simple VoIP solution using Asterisk, an open source private branch exchange (PBX) product. It shows you how to install Asterisk, configure it using its LDAP backend, and connect to it using the Ekiga software VoIP client and a Cisco 7900 Series VoIP telephone to make calls.

The market for open source databases is booming due to new workloads such as RFID projects, rich Web applications and small portals, despite the unwillingness of enterprises to replace their Oracle, DB2 or SQL Server systems with open source, according to new figures from Forrester Research.

I posted some of the shots I took at OSCON earlier in the week. One of the elements I wanted to capture was the spontaneous opportunities that occur at OSCON when you might find yourself chatting with any number of open source gurus.

For every person who has said, "Let's network these two computers" there are many more asking "Why is the network running so slow?" Yet, the ethereal nature of Ethernet has long made computer networks hard to decipher and many a business or home user has longed to peek into the data stream to see just what is going on. You could pay tens of thousands of dollars for the answer -- but we'll do it using freely available tools for Linux.

A coalition of individuals and corporate backers are creating the Open Web Foundation, an attempt to create a home for community-driven specifications following the open source model, similar to the Apache Software Foundation.

Listen is a not so widely known audio player written in Python and using the GTK toolkit, with an interface similar to the one of Rhythmbox, and including features like a music library, podcasts support, lyrics fetching, Wikipedia integration, and Last.fm song submission.

A group of researchers from the University of Colorado and University of Washington could face both civil and criminal penalties for a research project in which they snooped on users of the Tor anonymous proxy network. Should federal prosecutors take interest in the project, the researchers could also face up to 5 years in jail for violating the Wiretap Act.

In the first annual survey of its membership and other open source software and services companies, the Open Solutions Alliance found much optimism, despite a murky economy, with 83 percent of participants saying they would see a year-over-year increase in revenue in 2008 of open source related software and services.

This version gets significant cleanups since NimbleX 2008RC.

Squid is a caching proxy server that can provide enhanced performance for HTTP and FTP. Squid will cache commonly accessed sites so that it can improve performance by 10-20% for Internet connections.

Today we released the seventh update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, marking the point where Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 enters the autumn of its life cycle. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 is now marching toward the Production 2 life cycle phase — formerly known as the “Transition” or “Deployment” phase. From this point forward, the amount of change introduced for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 minor releases is decreasing constantly as Red Hat focuses its efforts on addressing continued stabilization of the release.

Winners of the SourceForge Community Choice Awards were announced at OSCON -- we have the list.