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The next version of Ubuntu will get multitouch interface abilities, catching the Linux operating system up to Windows and Mac OS X in at least one domain.

"Every single major PC manufacturer has been asking for a touch story on Linux. This has been one of the major missing points for Linux in the PC ecosystem," said Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the company called Canonical that develops and supports Ubuntu. But multitouch support will arrive in the next version of Ubuntu, 10.10, aka Maverick Meerkat.

Adding multitouch isn't easy, particularly in the open-source world of Linux … Read more

Some of the most highly trafficked interactive systems today are accessed through the Web: Amazon.com, Facebook, Google, Zynga just to name a few. These apps have to work flawlessly across any browser or risk losing eyeballs and audience consistency.

The browser wars after all, are still alive and well, and any serious Web application needs to work on the most popular browsers , such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome but don't forget others like Safari and Opera.

But for most companies, it is difficult and costly to maintain and update a test infrastructure on premise that keeps up … Read more

Last year, storage vendors were all about cloud. They saw major-league opportunities in the private, public, hybrid, and federated versions. No cloud was too big or too small. In fact, because clouds were "infinitely scalable," there was no limit to the number of yotta bytes they could sell.

Storage users and data center storage administrators in particular were decidedly more sanguine. You say cloud is a new services delivery model? Hey storage vendors, where have you been lately? We've been all about services delivery for some time now. Tell us something about cloud we don't know. … Read more

Not only is open-source software thriving in systems management but across businesses as a whole, according to a new survey released Tuesday. A nearly 4-year-long survey of open-source systems management usage compiled by open-source software developer Zenoss showed that 98 percent of the respondents said they used open-source software in their enterprises.

These latest statistics, along with survey results from consulting firm Accenture, are further testament to the inevitability of the pervasiveness of open-source software.

What's important to note about the survey results is how both the perception and reality of open-source software has changed--users believe the software is … Read more

Lately, you can't talk about business without talking about "big data," which, incidentally, is the focus of the latest package from Revolution Analytics. Revolution Analytics, which commercialized the open-source R statistics language, emphasizes expanding the use of R beyond its academic roots to business.

On Tuesday, Revolution is expected to release a new addition of big data analysis to its Revolution R Enterprise software. This is an add-on package called RevoScaleR that provides a framework for fast and efficient multicore processing of large data sets.

According to the company, the new package will allow users to process, … Read more

A few weeks back I attended venture firm Accel Partners' New Data Workshop event and learned quite a bit about the state of what we are now commonly referring to as "big data" and the challenges that await the vendors trying to target this new way of slicing and dicing vast amounts of information.

One of the big takeaways for me was the realization that even with all of the processing power available nowadays, the amount of data is growing at such a rapid pace that people are simply looking to cope with the problem, rather than facing it head on.

The issue of processing large amounts of data is not necessarily new--most developers and IT staff can tell you about having too much information to deal with--but, the big difference is that there are new approaches, tools and technologies that can help alleviate the difficult in processing.

Over the course of the last 30 years or so the way that machines process transactions has changed, but so too has the vast amount of data that is being processed and collected, now with an eye toward real-time analysis of information.

This has led to the advent of a number of technologies that allow for data processing to be offloaded and managed in both structured and unstructured ways--examples include open-source projects like Memcached and Hadoop as well as NoSQL data storage mechanisms like Cassandra.… Read more

A new start-up called Whamcloud is coming out of stealth mode Wednesday with $10 million in private funding and a notion to disrupt the often academic world of supercomputing by leveraging the Lustre open-source project.

According to CEO Brent Gorda, the company is targeting the need for high-performance storage solutions based on the popular combination of Linux and Lustre for application and data storage environments. The company plans to offer support and services initially, with an eye toward a turnkey supercomputing setup with hardware and software components, in the future.

For those less familiar with supercomputing technologies, Lustre is a … Read more

There's no killer feature update to TrueCrypt 7 as there was in version 6. Still, the latest revision to the popular open-source and free encryption program for Windows, Mac, and Linux debuts some new features and security enhancements that make it worth the upgrade.

Users whose computers have certain Intel chips are expected to see faster performance because of support for AES encryption. TrueCrypt says that AES is between four and eight times faster than encryption powered solely by software. The company has provided a list of supported Intel chips. At the time of writing, it includes six i5 … Read more

Symbian, the Nokia smartphone operating system that's been languishing outside the limelight hogged by Apple's iOS and Google's Android, announced a significant move on Monday to try to reclaim some of its lost relevance.

Specifically, the Symbian Foundation has embraced the idea of Web applications--those that bridge the differences among different computing devices by employing standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language for Web page description), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets for formatting), and JavaScript for processing.

To accomplish this, Symbian will integrate Nitobi's open-source PhoneGap tool with the Symbian^3 version of the software. This means … Read more