OStatic

LogMeIn offers a wide array of products to remotely access and administer systems -- as long as the system is running Windows, Mac OS, or certain smartphone platforms. According to TechWorld (Australia), this could change later this year.

The reasons that LogMeIn's Asia Pacific General Manager, Seth Shaw, gives for reaching out towards the Linux platform are intriguing -- and heartening.

Last October, Sam introduced us to Cloudera, a company founded by highly-decorated industry veterans hoping to bring Hadoop's data processing power to a variety of businesses. Though Cloudera came into existence just last summer, it has already closed a $5 million round of Series A funding led by Accel Partners.

Cloudera has started offering commercial support for its Hadoop distribution along with a free, community-supported edition.

While certainly the names and resumes of Cloudera's founders -- Oracle and Sleepycat's Mike Olson, Google's Christophe Bisciglia, Yahoo!'s Amr Awadallah, and Facebook's Jeff Hammerbacher -- helped the fledging company secure attention and funding, don't discount that Cloudera also fills a market need.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 now available. It has an improved Private Browsing Mode, the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, and more. Get it here.

Mozilla contemplates a future without Google. Could it get more millions from another search partner than it currently gets from Google?

T-Mobile G1 fire sale. Get an Android phone for under $80.

Adium gets its Twitter on in version 1.4. The great open source, multiprotocol Mac instant-messaging app is tackling solid Twitter functionality.

6 ways to connect Linux to the outside world that are not wireless, Bluetooth, or Ethernet. It can be done.

The ABC's of PHP. How to get started with it.

By way of Heise Online comes more detailed information about what's causing some to lose data in systems using the new ext4 file system. The ext4 file system, which is slated to eventually replace ext3 as the default file system of choice in many Linux distributions, can experience significant data loss after system crashes or unclean shutdowns.

Ted Ts'o, Linux Foundation's CTO and maintainer of the ext4 file system, says that the loss is due to how ext4 writes to disk. He says ext4, and newer file systems such as XFS and Btrfs, use delayed allocation. This means that writing data to disk can take up to a minute (compared to ext3's write time of about five seconds). The longer write time improves system performance and organization of data on the hard drive. Ts'o says that the ext4 team is working out a solution, but it's an issue that would benefit from being addressed from all angles.

Sun CEO: Open source equals free advertising. By being freely distributed, our products build their own audiences, says Jonathan Schwartz.

Another 100,000+ week for Fedora 10. It's been gaining users at impressive rates.

How to install Google Earth 5.0 on Ubuntu. It's not available by default in the Ubuntu repositories, but here's how to manually get it going.

Round two of a long-time Windows user's switch to Linux. The second installment is here, and the first here.

Every Linux user has at least one -- a distribution that's near and dear to their hearts, even if it isn't installed on many (or any) of their machines at a given time. I've found Zenwalk, which I've talked about before, is one of those distributions. In anthropomorphic terms, it's Slackware's younger brother, a hip, handsome sibling with a strong family resemblance. Zenwalk brings the solid, stoic, server-oriented Slackware to the desktop user.

Zenwalk officially released its 6.0 version this weekend, featuring the newly released Xfce 4.6 desktop, the 2.6.28.7 kernel configured with gspca for better USB webcam support, and Netpkg enhancements.

I stumbled across a light, but thoughtful post by David Williams over at ITWire. Williams recounts a situation where he used a Linux distribution on a liveCD (Ubuntu in this case, but there are countless others that can do the job) to rescue files from an ancient machine that was fading fast.

Using live Linux distributions to rescue and reset machines is nothing new, of course. Take KNOPPIX, for instance. The Debian based distribution got its (well-deserved) name by developing a user-friendly way to carry around a robust Linux desktop. While that's a great use for a live Linux distro, nothing garners appreciation from tech users of all walks of life quite like using a live distribution to rescue data from an errant machine does.

Late last year I broke down and picked up Rock Band for the resident game console, a Nintendo Wii. From this statement, astute readers can safely make the assumption that neither I, nor other members of my household, are big into gaming. I am, however, better with balance boards and nunchuks than I am any musical instrument, be it a stylized controller or the real deal.

Given the humbling experience Rock Band (continues) to be for me, I wasn't exactly eager to try out the open source rhythm game, Frets on Fire. However, the open source aspect and the advantages that brings to the game's genre, the Guitar Hero-esque focus on one instrument, and the project being chosen as SourceForge's March Project of the Month, I figured my ego might benefit from a slight bruising.

My fingertips aren't raw, but this confirms I won't be joining a band, real or virtual, any time soon. Frets on Fire on an easy setting makes me long for the simplicity of kernel recompiles and the soft whir of a rebooting system.

Yesterday, the openSUSE Project announced that it will move to a fixed release schedule after November's release of openSUSE 11.2.

openSUSE developer Stephan Kulow said that the developers are considering an eight month release cycle at the moment, as they feel successfully producing an up-to-date and solid release in this time frame is more realistic than a six month cycle. However, the development team invites feedback on the openSUSE-Project mailing list.

It's been a long, drawn out, brutal battle on the IT frontlines. Skirmishes can happen anywhere, at random -- in the server room, the board room, the cafeteria, or even, tragically, in civilian populated areas like pubs, restaurants, homes and big box electronics stores. The Mac and Windows battlefront consumes the resources of many foot soldiers, but the biggest, bloodiest conflicts involve the elite, highly trained IT commandos, who must be diplomats as well as fighters, and integrate a number of platforms across a single network.

Overly dramatic? Perhaps, but depending on your work environment and how quirky your mixed network is to configure, maybe not by much. There are several utilities available to promote diplomacy and peaceful interaction between machines in a mixed network. Likewise Software offers its open source Likewise integration applications to keep the peace -- and preserve platform equality and rights -- in a mixed network setting.

The OS Wars are frustrating and costly, but can be resolved with less heartache and far fewer casualties than other conflicts. This is why Likewise is promoting platform peace through t-shirt sales, with the proceeds going to charities supporting the civilian and military casualties of real wars.