Selling businesses on the benefits of Linux has been a tough proposition for many years. Common reasons cited for not moving to the open-source operating system include system complexity, lack of in-house IT skills and a shortage of business applications.

Businesses, educational institutions, governmental agencies and other organizations around the world are converting1 their computer operating systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux at an increasing pace. They are likewise converting their application programs from commercial software to free software (also referred to as open source software). There are at least 25 reasons for this situation...

Businesses, educational institutions, governmental agencies and other organizations around the world are converting their computer operating systems from Microsoft Windows to Linux at an increasing pace. They are likewise converting their application programs from commercial software to free software (also referred to as open source software).

To outsiders, software whose source code is freely distributable is open source software. However, as soon as you become involved with the community that centers around such code, you quickly find that it is also called free software -- and that the two terms are far from synonymous. Which term you choose to use can quickly associate you with a whole spectrum of political and philosophical beliefs, and can make the difference between receiving cooperation and being ostracized. As a newcomer, you might easily imagine that you have stumbled out of the woods and into the target end of a rifle range, all because of your innocent choice of jargon.

For about four months now, I have been using the Ubuntu Linux operating system full-time on both my desktop and notebook computer. A few weeks into this experience, I wrote an article sharing some of my findings about the Windows to Linux migration process.

Linux comes in a wide variety of flavors, better known as distributions. Such an array can make choosing between them very difficult for both the experienced administrator as well as the new user migrating from a different operating system. Making a decision isn’t easy, but we will do our best to simplify the process of selecting the ideal Linux distribution for your needs.

The team behind the OpenVZ project will announce today the availability of its operating system virtualization software for the latest stable release of the Linux kernel. OpenVZ for Linux 2.6.22 now supports user ID namespaces for improved security, and has new process ID namespace code that makes live migration possible.

One of the biggest issues when moving away from Windows is software availability; what we do on a computer isn’t defined by the operating system, but the third party software we use on that operating system. Because most of the software written for Linux operating systems is open source, it may be difficult to find a replacement for the everyday software that you use on Windows or Mac OS X.

The use of Linux as an operating system (OS) in the server market has proliferated because of its modular extensibility, open source code community, vast libraries of existing applications, robustness and, not surprisingly, favorable licensing. The obvious benefits of these same features suggest that Linux will also become the dominant OS for wireless devices.