Ever wonder how popular Ubuntu is starting to become? Take a look at some interesting statistics when looking at search popularity. If one looks at the trend of the search volume associated with the keyword "linux" and compares it to the trend associated with the search for keyword "ubuntu" we start to see some interesting results.

Forget OpenSolaris, and hello to Ubuntu. In a bold move Sun seems to be adopting Ubuntu Linux and leaving behind OpenSolaris as well as some of the other major linux distros like RedHat and Suse.

In an interview with Reuters on April 2, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth reinforced the "growing relations" between Sun and Ubuntu. This release comes just before the scheduled release of "Hardy Heron" Cononical's latest Ubuntu version due in late April.

Here is an innovative way of using your web browser to run a fully functional unix shell. If you go to http://cb.vu you will actually be logging in to a shell terminal on a web server. You can define which commands "www" users will have access to run. For those of you from the Windows world this is like having your windows desktop available over a web browser without the need of any special clients

I believe this site actually launches a shell within a bunch of java scripts. A very nice use of a web browsers capabilities. This type of utility may have some good practical uses.

Computing infrastructures are growing rapidly. Hardware has become less expensive and their form factors smaller and smaller. With the advent of grid technologies, virtualization,and other distributed computing methods we need to find better ways to manage the the sheer number of resources being created.

Microblogging seems to be all the rage nowadays. We recently wrote about a popular microblogging platform called twitter.

Wouldn't it be nice to send a twitter post from your Linux command line. It seems to be the perfect application for command line folks.

Here are some instructions on how to create your own twitter script.

Step 1)
Make sure you have curl installed. If not download it and install.

Step 2)
Create a file

Example:

vi /home/bin/twitter

#Add the following lines

Cfengine is an open source tool that allows system administrators to maintain 1 to thousands of unix based systems. It automates almost every aspect of system administration. Cfengine is a direct competitor to commercial software from Blade Logic and OPsware. Both of these commercial packages come with fancy GUIs and nice features, but they also come with hefty licensing fees (can get close to $1K per server managed + maintenance fees).

Grid computing has been around for over 12 years now and its advantages are many. Grid computing can be defined in many ways but for these discussions let's simply call it a way to execute compute jobs (e.g. perl scripts, database queries, etc.) across a distributed set of resources instead of one central resource. In the past most computing was done in silos or large SMP like boxes. Even today you'll still see companies perform calculations on large SMP boxes (e.g. E10K's, HP Superdomes).