Stories by: Don Marti

Barracuda Networks is countersuing Trend Micro for infringement of three security patents that Barracuda acquired earlier this year from IBM, the company announced last Wednesday.

Qumranet has released its Solid ICE desktop virtualization product to general availability this week. The company claims responsiveness and administration advantages over thin client solutions based on the results of pilot projects for several large customers, and today's released version adds multi-monitor support, in demand in the financial industry.

Jon Corbet analyzes the 2.6.25 kernel, out last night.

Julie Bort talks with Jeremy White about Wine. 1.0 coming up.

You're now with Qumranet which is the company behind KVM. Can you briefly tell me about the design of KVM and how that differs from previous virtualization approaches such as Xen and VMware?

Event search firm Zvents is releasing a massively parallel database server, based on a published Google design, as an open source project. The new software, Hypertable, is designed to scale to 1000 nodes, all commodity PCs, said Doug Judd, principal search architect for Zvents.

With all the people out there willing to offer help on Linux, getting started should be pretty easy. But with many options in introductory books and easy-to-install distributions, choosing a place to start can be the hard part.

Sun just announced its acquisition of MySQL, but for several months the open-source database has been getting the performance tracing integration with the Solaris platform that it needs to follow through on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's committment to performance improvements.

PC vendors haven't been eager to know how many users run Linux when it's preloaded on their low-end PCs, and how many replace it with an infringing copy of Microsoft Windows. Everex, the latest company to introduce a low-priced desktop Linux system, will have the information, however, thanks to the software update system behind its Linux distribution.

Linux systems' power consumption is rapidly becoming a top concern for operators of large data centers. A University of California Berkeley study recently attributed 90 percent of the increase in data center power consumption to servers priced at less than US$25,000 each, the market where Linux is most important.

As the number of Linux kernel contributors continues to grow, core developers are finding themselves mostly managing and checking, not coding, said Greg Kroah-Hartman, maintainer of USB and PCI support in Linux and co-author of Linux Device Drivers, in a talk at the Linux Symposium in Ottawa last week.