Canadian school district serves up lessons on the power of Linux, Apr 07, 2008

For two large school districts – in Canada and the U.S. – Linux and other open source software is the plat du jour on the education menu.

I’m actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can’t run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home.

Today all but a handful of the secretaries, lawyers and legal assistants use SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop

Linux-based and Unix-based apps are becoming commonplace in the enterprise, but some sectors are still holding out. IDC and Info-Tech explain why our financial institutions are reluctant to take the plunge. Also: a consultant tells us where they could be missing out

He calls himself a Luddite, but the executive director of Linux International has plenty to say about power consumption, the benefits of open source and an upgrade path for his parents

The trouble with most comparisons between desktop Linux distros and Windows is that they are written from the perspective of someone who is comfortable enough with a PC that they can undertake a feature-for-feature comparison in the first place.

Red Hat made a somewhat rare Canadian appearance Tuesday to show off its recently released RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 with Xen virtualization to a group of IT managers and decisionmakers.

The Linux Foundation has updated its Linux Standard Base (LSB) server specification to include new automated testing toolkits to make it easier to develop applications for different distributions of the open-source operating system.

More people are downloading Ubuntu open source operating system than both Red Hat and Novell products combined

A B.C. post-secondary institution said it intends to grow the number of Linux machines in its data centre as it replaces older hardware infrastructure with blade servers.

Teradata this week fleshed out its plans to offer support for Linux in its database and data warehousing products at its annual Partners user conference.

A Toronto high school teacher who had been running a Linux lab for five years was forced to close it down last week by the school’s administration following the implementation of a Microsoft-based, school board-wide computing initiative

It's one thing if all of your servers and desktops use the same operating system, but the situation gets more troublesome when team members choose their own environment. One set of users might choose to run their servers under Linux. Some might have a mix of desktop operating systems to contend with, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

The Bank of Canada is slowly moving off of Unix into an environment that will see its economic analysts using Windows PCs to create models running on a Linux-based cluster.

Companies are increasingly considering Linux, but persuading them to buy is a challenge. Resellers have to fight the perception that it's a risk

Canadian companies shouldn’t migrate from Windows-based mail servers to open source expecting a free ride, executives told the LinuxWorld Expo Wednesday morning.

A London, Ont.-based firm that had previously used a proprietary document storage system and ordinary filing cabinets has chosen open source software to provide document management capabilities to its salespersons, project managers and designers.

London Roof Truss, which produces pre-engineered roof and floor trusses for contractors, homebuilders and lumberyards, had been storing its documents on Microsoft Windows NT Server, but the absence of management tools had thwarted efforts to prevent documents from getting lost or being accidentally deleted, according to Wayne Bilger, the company's systems administrator. And while hard-copy documents were being stored in filing cabinets, the time spent searching for these documents hampered employee productivity and impeded customer service.

Linux distribution makers say it will be several months before an enterprise-ready operating system based on the 2.6 version of the Linux core will be released.

Chris Mason, a SuSE Linux software developer, confirmed the company will release Enterprise Server 9 by late spring – a few months before Red Hat Software Inc., the world’s largest Linux distributor.

Asked why SuSE plans to go to market ahead of Red Hat, Mason said: "As part of us getting the jump on Red Hat for release dates, it’s a burden on us to make sure that we have everything right."

"This is an irresponsible decision that the Royal Bank is making, both financially and morally," said Mike Gifford, co-founder of Ottawa-based Linux firm Open Concept Consulting. "I can't understand why any bank would decide it was a good decision to go off and invest in a failing company that's pursuing a very weak legal argument against a community of developers."