Open Source: Reviews

For the forthcoming SLED (Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10, Novell went back to the drawing board to rethink what makes a good desktop. The result is extremely impressive.

Alcatel-owned company Right Vision has released an appliance to manage network and Internet services in a branch office environment.

If you are interested in developing an open source strategy but are daunted by the multitude of entry points, take a look at Open Source for the Enterprise by Woods and Guliani.

If you're looking for an alternative to the large, incumbent groupware packages but don't want to uproot anything, take a look at Scalix's Community Edition for Linux.

Much has been written and said about the latest book from the Pulitzer Prize-winner and New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman.

Small businesses looking to set up ship with e-mail, file and printer sharing, and a Web presence have options such as Microsoft's Small Business Server, or even Linux distributions that come with all the software you need (although setup and configuration isn't for the faint of heart).

System administrators looking for an open source alternative to expensive network management and monitoring application suites might find the Nagios software suite worthy of a test drive.

VMware, now owned by EMC, created its ESX Server virtualization product for businesses that need truly enterprise-class virtualization. ESX Server 2.1.1 implements the consolidation, dynamic provisioning, resource pooling, and all-bases-covered availability assurance of expensive system and storage hardware. But ESX Server does it with ordinary servers, modular SANs, and vanilla operating systems.

A variety of open source projects allow developers to experiment with virtual hardware configurations.

You've got a smooth running Windows network. Now some exec decides that a Unix/Linux application has to be brought in as a business-critical platform. Not that they know it's a Unix/Linux app, just that they went to a conference and someone told them (or they saw a presentation) and it was just the application your organization needs to achieve some corporate goal. It just happens to only run on Solaris or Red Hat or SuSE or AIX. You know that it's fruitless to argue that introducing a non-Windows box will create some management issues, some technical issues and, possibly, some security issues. The only answer you'd get would be a directive to solve the issues.

With the newest release of The SCO Group's UnixWare, it could be said that this variety of Unix is starting to look a lot more like Linux -- even if SCO lawyers pulled the Linux Kernel Personality modules from the operating system during the course of our testing last month.