Is Mandriva dieing?

Great question.  Whether you were spooked by the post on a bugreport or amazed to hear about the forking of the project it appears everyone agrees that it's not going well.  The company has been struggling for some time now.  To hear that it may not be able to recover is disapointing.  I do wonder though how many Corporate distrobutions of Linux can really be profitable?  I hope they can pull it out and make a go at it.

How many Companies do you think will be able to survive and be profitable?

Is Corporate America letting the Linux Desktop die on the vine?

This article over at Linuxinsder.com makes some great points about what we need to do to get Linux on the Desktop in most companies.  At the same time it tends to drift into some unrealistic rationale behind making the switch.  I would love to see Linux on every desktop.  The problem is getting your users to understand.  I am relatively sure that about 70% of most companies could be converted tomorrow.  The problem is that they are all going to have a different screen when they login.  For most of us Tech's our response to that is so what?  For most of the "normal" people however it can completely ruin their day.  To avoid this would require a considerable amount training.  So until companies are ready to bite the bullet and do the training we won't see a lot of movement on this front.

Harddrive speeds are the next big move in performance...

I found this article over at linux-mag.com talking about how performance might be boosted on mass storage devices or harddrives in the near future.  I say might becuase it's highly likely that something else will come out to leap frog what we know about today.  With the migration of Memory Managers/Controllers to the CPU die the next big leap in performance should be in disk technology.  This article and several others I have been reading lately seem to be pointing to hybrid SSD/Magnetic Disk media drives very soon.  Another strong contender is a what's old is new again idea of using volitale RAM as a storage media.  With the new lower power consuming memory and higher capacity capicitors the idea may be reaching a tipping point where it's both cost effective and safe to do.  We won't know for some time what companies like Western Digital and Seagate have been working on but they have been relatively quite for a while now and are due for something really big soon.  Faster disks always means faster Linux systems that can better meet the needs of business for the data intensive apps around Busness Intelligence and other data centric buzz words.

Episode 29 - How to get a job as a Linux Admin....

Check out our latest podcast here

Running Time: 44:03

1) Introduction

We talk about an E-Mail from Matt.  Matt wants to know how to get a job as a Jr. Linux Admin.  We discuss some things we think anyone looking to make this career choice should do.

2) News
Cyber Crime costs companies 3.8 million dollars a year?

Windows VS. Linux some real world Benchmarks

3) Conclusion

Recommendations for People to interview

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expect the unexpected when scripting with expect....

On of my favorite tools I never get enough time to use is expect.  What is expect?  Expect is a scripting language that let's you automate responses to scripts or daemons and pretend to be a users.  So you can write a script to say update the passwords on all your systems with just one command.  Another way I am planning to use this in the very near future is to do MD5 Check Sums on a file and compare them.  If the files aren't then it will the re-copy over the files that are missing.  Over at linux-mag.com they have a great gettings started document you should check out to see if it can make your life easier.