How To Run Linux From A USB Flash Drive, May 21, 2008

Want to run Linux any time, any place? Here's what to do with popular distributions like Puppy Linux, Ubuntu, and Fedora, so you can boot up directly from your thumb drive.

Red Hat is announcing availability Wednesday of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, with enhancements in virtualization, clustering, and hardware support.

Sun Microsystems is stepping up efforts to boost Java usage in Linux shops by working to remove some final encumbrances in the open-source Java platform.

Some of the Linux developers' and business customers' jitters may have been settled on April 15th when, at the MySQL Conference in San Francisco, Sun announced the next version of MySQL: MySQL 5.1. This edition, which is now available as a release candidate, is still under the Linux-friendly GPLv2.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World. Zemlin met with InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill this week to talk about Linux topics ranging from overtures to Microsoft to the progress of Linux on the desktop.

PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) tools company Zend Technologies is announcing this week that its Zend Core product will run on the Windows Server 2008 platform, providing parity between Windows Server and Linux in running PHP.

With the Save XP campaign continuing to capture momentum, and signatures, and myriad XP users facing, in the words of one such reader, a choice between "an operating system that would soon be obsolete (XP) or one that was buggy and would break much existing hardware (Vista)," both Linux and Mac desktops could be appealing right about now.

Red Hat put some muscle behind its intention to make its JBoss middleware as ubiquitous in the enterprise as its Linux software on Wednesday, committing new sales, marketing, and technical resources to accelerating the adoption of JBoss among the largest corporations.

When Matthew Szulik left Red Hat abruptly for family health reasons in December, many people were scratching their heads over the company's new choice of CEO: a young executive from Delta Airlines, Jim Whitehurst.

Microsoft will deliver more than 1,000 support subscription certificates for Suse Linux Enterprise Server to French automaker Renault, under an agreement announced by Microsoft and Novell on Wednesday.

Sun is expected to announce next week that it will make the Sun SPOT (Small Programmable Object Technology) device platform available via open source, but a user expressed concerns about Sun's commitment to the technology.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds, in an interview being made public by the Linux Foundation Tuesday, stressed that version 2 of the GPL (GNU General Public License) still makes the most sense for the Linux kernel over the newer GPL version 3.

Officials in New York are nearing decision-making time about which XML-based office document format, ODF or OOXML, that state will use across the IT systems of its agencies as the debate over a universal file format continues.

The growing prominence of Linux in China is resulting in an industry event to take place there in February, co-sponsored by the Linux Foundation and Chinese OSS Promotion Union, the foundation announced Monday.

Users won't be booting up Vista PCs any time soon, according to a recent survey, which revealed a majority of IT professionals worry that migrating to Vista will reduce stability and introduce too much complexity into their environments.

With an incremental update to its Solaris 10 OS, Sun is extending the platform's virtualization capabilities to accommodate Linux and Solaris on the same computer.

Obviously this is one of those non-announcements announcements if you're a Linux and open source fan, as Novell has not yet created anything you could consider an installable package.

The battles for energy efficiency aren't just being fought by chipmakers, server and PC vendors, and other hardware companies out there. There's a similar battle heating up on the OS layer between Microsoft and Linux.

DesktopLinux.com, which is a Web site devoted to, obviously, desktop Linux, has finished a survey that found more than a doubling of Linux desktop users in the past year.

Ingres has delivered a business intelligence appliance of its Icebreaker database and Linux combination, after teaming up with JasperSoft for its open source business intelligence (BI) suite.