For obvious reasons everyone is looking to make cost savings at the moment, and for inspiration you can look to the French Gendarmerie, who have saved millions of Euros as part of a transition to Linux.

 “A report published by the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory provides some details from a recent presentation given by Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who says that the Gendarmerie has been able to reduced its annual IT budget by 70 percent without having to reduce its capabilities.”

Read the full story over at Ars Technica.

gendarmerie, Linux, recession

One often overlooked issue with regards to calculating the total cost of ownership for an OS: power consumption.

These figures from  http://mjg59.livejournal.com/103511.html:

• Idle power draw of Fedora 10: 100W
• Idle power draw of Opensolaris 2008-11: 135W

Linux, power, solaris

A bit late to the party with this one, as he started whilst I was on holiday, but Linux create Linus Torvalds has started his own blog.

It’s interestingly entitled ‘Torvalds Family Blog’, although Linus being Linus I’m sure we’ll see some excellent highly controversial non-family posts, just like his mailing list postings.

blogosphere, linus torvalds, Linux

Some of you may have heard about the kerfuffle surrounding poor Perl performance on Red Hat 5/CentOS 5 – it got a bit of attention on reddit/digg.  Red Hat had been issuing hot fixes to people who complained, but now Karanbir Singh has created an updated Perl package.

This issue should be fixed in RHEL/CentOS 5.3, but until then, if you’re experiencing slowness I’d advise installing this – after appropriate testing on staging/UAT servers of course.

centos, Linux, redhat

Red Hat have released a security advisory detailing an intrusion on their servers. The attacker apparently managed to sign some compromised OpenSSH packages.

There is a parallel Fedora announcement, and although it seems that Fedora wasn’t affected they are issuing new package signing keys as a precaution.  Red Hat use a hardware device for signing their packages, so they can make sure no further compromised packages can be created without having to re-distribute new signing keys.

Red Hat Network wasn’t compromised, so although the signed packages were created, there is no risk to those whose only means of obtaining packages is via RHN (ie, most Red Hat users).

Whilst there certainly isn’t any need to panic, this is sure to cause concern amongst those running Red Hat.

Linux, redhat, security