Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Netscape, the Web browser that opened up not only the Web, but the entire Internet to mass use, is dead. It died after a long decline caused by its murderer, Microsofts Internet Explorer. It was only 15 years ago that only a handful of nerds knew about the Internet and the Web. Even after CIX […]

No operating system, no not even Linux, is ever completely secure. So it is that the Debian Project released on Dec. 27 its second update to Debian 4.0, Etch, with an eye to improved security. While not a new release as such, Debians core features and functionality remain unchanged, this new security rollup includes multiple […]

In the almost five years since SCO launched its attack on Linux and IBM, open-source and legal experts have predicted that SCO would fail and the company would collapse with its lawsuits. That day is one day closer at hand. On Dec. 27, SCO was delisted from the Nasdaq. There’s no surprise here. After several […]

On Dec. 20, the Samba Group and the Software Freedom Law Center announced a deal with Microsoft that places all of Microsoft’s network protocols needed for programs to work with Windows Server into the hands of the newly formed Protocol Freedom Information Foundation. The PFIF is a U.S.-based nonprofit corporation. It will make Microsoft’s server […]

Red Hat announced outstanding financial results for its third fiscal quarter, which ended Nov. 30. How outstanding? The Linux company’s revenue for the quarter jumped to $135.4 million. That is an increase of 28 percent from the equivalent 2006 quarter and 6 percent from the second quarter of this year. Drilling down, Red Hat Enterprise […]

Sometimes putting together a best-of-the-year list is like pulling teeth. There simply isn’t enough big news to fill the list out. That was not a problem for desktop Linux in 2007. This year was one of the most eventful years in desktop Linux’s short history. While Mac OS X remains the most successful of all […]

I was sure that Microsoft would find some way to wiggle out of the European Union deal to reveal its trade secrets. At the very least, I thought the company would find a way to keep its intellectual property goodies away from open-source groups such as Samba. I was wrong. The Samba Group and the […]

In a move that caught even Red Hat senior staffers by surprise, the Linux company announced on Dec. 20 that long-time president and CEO Matthew Szulik is resigning. He will be replaced by James M. Whitehurst, a former Delta chief operating officer, as of the first of next year. Prior to the announcement there was […]

Odds are most of us will never need the network throughput speeds of 2GB Fibre Channel or iSCSI or 10GB Ethernet. But, if you’re working at a data center with hundreds to thousands of servers, clusters and terabyte-sized databases, then every millisecond matters. This is why Intel is promoting a new, fast way of transporting […]

During the last several months, the Software Freedom Law Center has gone on the warpath to defend the GPL. On Dec. 17, the SFLC announced its second win in its four lawsuits against companies it says have violated the General Public License, as Xterasys, a Wi-Fi OEM, has agreed to settle. The SFLC had filed […]

Dell has told DesktopLinux.com that it will be announcing Dec. 19 that it will be releasing PCs with Ubuntu 7.10 (aka Gutsy Gibbon) as part of its Dell Consumer Linux lineup along with the ability to legally play DVDs. According to Dell spokesperson Anne B. Camden, the “Dell Inspiron 530N desktop and Inspiron 1420N notebook […]

Even before I picked up Unix, I worked on networks. While networking has gotten simpler, it’s almost all TCP/IP now instead of Arcnet, Token-Ring and a half dozen dusty wiring and protocol schemes. The services that use networking have gotten ever more powerful and more complicated. That’s why a book like Carla Schroder’s Linux Networking […]