Issue #150 / May 2013

Like any self-respecting Linux journalist, I’m often predisposed to take Microsoft to task. For the record, I do manage to spread it around, with occasional reflections on Apple and Google, because I truly believe our universe has room for more than one evil empire. But Microsoft is still the easiest mark. It used to be easy to make fun of Microsoft because they were so formidable and vast. Now it is easy to make fun of them because they get it wrong so often, and it is downright amusing to see so much hype and media attention going to such inelegant products.

This month, Rasp Pi becomes a multimedia system, then we look at three great tools to create, manage, and monitor your virtual environments.

If you’re new to this magazine, take a tour and let’s get acquainted. If you’re a long-time reader, now is your chance to find that issue or article you missed. The DVD attached to this issue comes with the latest edition of the Linux Magazine archive – 149 issues of technical Linux, spanning a history of more than 12 years. All the tips, all the apps, all the hacks …. If it matters to the open source community, chances are we’ve documented it somewhere. You’ll find in-depth articles on important tools such as Drupal, Apache, Nagios, Tripwire, and Samba. Or discover a lesser known tool that might be just what you need for a problem you’re facing right now. Build a deeper understanding of Linux by reading the complete history of Klaus Knopper’s troubleshooting advice, and chart the story of the Linux kernel through Zack’s Kernel News.

Jailbreak Spat

• White House goes on record in support of freedom to jailbreak cell phones
• News Bites

10 RHEL 6.4 Released

• Yahoo ends telecommuting,
• Canonical UDS
• LG purchases WebOS from HP

11 Passwords Passé

• FIDO alliance seeks new authentication methods
• Largest Mersenne prime discovered

• Zend Studio 10 Announced
• Django 1.5 Released
• Tizen 2.0 Now Available
• Ruby 2.0 Released

Tired of that big clunky media center unit taking up shelf space in your living room? We'll show you how to put together a tiny multimedia system with the versatile and ever-popular Raspberry Pi.

The Proxmox Virtual Environment has developed from an insider’s tip to a free VMware ESXi/ vSphere clone. We show you how to get started setting up a PVE high-availability cluster.

Putting all virtualization tasks on a separate server saves significant resources on the client. phpVirtualBox makes it possible to create, configure, manage, and use remote VMs in a browser window.

Dynamic resource allocation and migration of virtual machines between hosts mean that VMware environments pose new monitoring challenges. A new version of the free OpenNMS network management tool now includes an option for monitoring VMware-based infrastructures.