Enterprise: Reviews

There are many good video editors on the market and many of you no doubt have your favorite. If you're a Macintosh user you probably are familiar with i-Movie and it's a great product. It ships with every new Macintosh. On the Microsoft Windows side of the house there is Windows Movie Maker. What about the Linux user?

As the window to the Internet, the Web browser is arguably the most important application ever developed, and it will only become more important in the coming years, as applications continue their retreat from the local system and into Web frameworks built on Apache, IIS, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, and countless other languages and tools. Against this backdrop, today's official introduction of Firefox 3 may in fact be a watershed event in the history of computing.

Open source observers can argue until the end of time over the validity of developing and enhancing free software for Windows, but the fact remains OpenOffice.org is thoroughly committed to the platform and continues to produce a top-notch, cross-platform office productivity suite that work perfectly well on Windows. In this article, we take a look at getting the latest OpenOffice.org 3.0 developer build up-and-running for Windows XP.

It might be heresy to try to manage a Linux server from a Microsoft platform . But that is what QCD Microsystems has attempted with its InterStructures Microsoft Management Console (MMC)-based series of applets. With these plug-ins, Linux services such as DHCP, DNS, SAMBA and Squid Web proxy (and soon Apache 2.0), are managed from the familiar look and feel offered by the MMC. Our tests showed that the InterStructures modules are simple to install, and provide a single, convenient, drag-and-drop interface to manage a combined Windows/Linux infrastructure.

It wasn't that long ago that Linux made for a decent server and a geek's workstation. Now, Linux makes for an enterprise-class server.

Do any of these situations describe your company?

System administrators looking for an open source alternative to expensive network management and monitoring application suites might find the Nagios software suite worthy of a test drive.

VMware, now owned by EMC, created its ESX Server virtualization product for businesses that need truly enterprise-class virtualization. ESX Server 2.1.1 implements the consolidation, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling, and all-bases-covered availability assurance of expensive system and storage hardware. But ESX Server does it with ordinary servers, modular SANs, and vanilla operating systems.

A variety of open source projects allow developers to experiment with virtual hardware configurations.

You've got a smooth running Windows network. Now some exec decides that a Unix/Linux application has to be brought in as a business-critical platform. Not that they know it's a Unix/Linux app, just that they went to a conference and someone told them (or they saw a presentation) and it was just the application your organization needs to achieve some corporate goal. It just happens to only run on Solaris or Red Hat or SuSE or AIX. You know that it's fruitless to argue that introducing a non-Windows box will create some management issues, some technical issues and, possibly, some security issues. The only answer you'd get would be a directive to solve the issues.

With the newest release of The SCO Group's UnixWare, it could be said that this variety of Unix is starting to look a lot more like Linux -- even if SCO lawyers pulled the Linux Kernel Personality modules from the operating system during the course of our testing last month.