Mandriva has a new man in charge....

Mandriva has appointed a new CEO/CTO/Directory of R&D all in one person.  That man is Arnaud Laprevote.  The Mandriva distribution is still actively developed even though it has fallen off most people's radar.  Since a former CEO fired the founder of the distribution the Mandrake/Mandriva Gael Duval they have been loosing momentum in the US at least.  If you are looking for a new distro to try take a look at Mandriva.

Novell, Novell, Novell....

You have to kind of wonder if the Red Hat CEO is starting to get jealous about all the press Novell is getting over this attempt to by them by the hedge fund.  So far I have found good articles on the net this week.  Their are several over on the var guy, linux-mag.com has a neat what if MS bought them proposal, and finally the nice folks over at h-online.com update us on the SCO battle. All in all I have to say it's been an exciting week for them. 

Check out the articles and let us know what you think.

Eps. 21 - The first ever interview...Matt and Mark from Zenoss

Running Time: 38:50

The episode can be found here.

In this episoe Brian and Joe do their first interview with two of the guys from Zenoss.  Mark R. Hinkle, VP Community, and Matt Ray, Community Manager, sat down with us this week and answered a lot of our open questions about Zenoss.  No news this week so enjoy the interview.

Contact Us:

linuxinstall - on Twitter.com and Identi.ca

E-Mail us podcast@linuxinstall.net

Call us by going to http://linuxinstall.net/podcast/ and clicking on the google voice button on that page.

Watch for our review of the product in a couple of weeks.

Monitoring and Tuning Tools....

While editing the latest podcast with our interview of Mark and Matt from Zenoss I came across these two articles.  The first is a list of five pretty cool tools for Tuning your machine over at Linux.com.  The tools they mention, even by their admission, is not complete but definitely helpful if you are new to Linux and want the most performance possible.

The second article I came across was an article about one of the packages we are not currently testing called Munin.  The article is over at HowToForge.  It gives you step by step instructions to get it up and running.

What are your favorite tools for troubleshoot performance issues with your servers or desktops?  What do you think of Munin?

Why Linux can never win with some penetration numbers....

There is an amazing rant over at Computer World by Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols that has some really intense data.  When having discussions with people about the penetration of any OS it's really hard to get good numbers.  In this article Mr. Vaughan-Nichols takes issue with the IDC numbers focused on sales of computers.  I agree with him that sales, especially when trying to compare Windows to Linux Sales, because the I have only once purchased a server with Linux on it.  Even that time I got Windows as a bonus.  That means that for the numbers reported in sales my purchase still counted as Windows servers.  For most of my clients I recommended purchasing the most cost effective server possible.  That normally meant that they purchased servers with Windows on them and we would then just reformat and install Linux on the machine.  In this article he points to a similar example of Weta, the company that made all of the AWESOME Avatar CGI.  They are reported to have used 35,000 cores on 4,000+ HP blades running Ubuntu.  What is interesting about that is that HP doesn't see any blade servers with Ubuntu installed so each of those machines counted as Windows machines. So the next time you are debating the installed base of Linux with your favorite Windows Geek remind them that your OS is able to be downloaded for FREE.