Oracle is now out with Oracle Enterprise Linux 5.5 (OEL)- a week after its base, Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 5.5 (RHEL) was released. That's pretty quick and in my view, one of the quickest turnarounds yet from Oracle with their version of RHEL. Oracle has been releasing its own version of Linux with OEL, based on RHEL since 2006 and they've been updating OEL as Red Hat updates RHEL.

Wolvix is a desktop oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware. It features the Xfce desktop environment and a comprehensive selection of development, graphics, multimedia, network and office applications. Using Wolvix does not require more than basic computer skills, but installing and administering the system might require more knowledge than some of the other GNU/Linux distributions.

This will be an ongoing series of articles highlighting lesser known applications for Linux. These articles will be a bit Ubuntu-centric, but these applications should run nicely on your distribution of choice.

Jolicloud 1.1 is the latest stable release of Jolicloud, the cloud-based, Ubuntu-based distribution. Other than being a cloud-based distribution, the most distinctive feature of Jolicloud is the netbook-optimzed interface, which is one of five netbook-optimized interfaces available on Linux and BSD distributions.

Oracle 11g database has been released just a few days ago, exclusively for Linux at this time. Here's a short review of it's installation, together with screenshots, on an unsupported Debian GNU/Linux distribution - to make it more interesting.

Although many Linux distributions can run on either a desktop or server platform, few provide by default a raft of applications aimed specifically at server usage. Server Optimized Linux is an exception -- a distribution aimed squarely at servers. That's an appealing prospect, but the reality is more underwhelming.

Recently my company had the opportunity to upgrade a server to Mandriva 2010 that was running an old version of the Mandriva GNU/Linux distribution. The system had been in place running along nicely for a few years and had not been upgraded to a new release in all that time except for some security patches. Then it started hanging mysteriously...

Linux as an Operating System, not just a specific distribution, but all of them. The collective. has been an institution in and of itself for several years now in the server world. Linux and FOSS server software together has developed a dominating presence in the business/server world.

Everytime I am surprised that people don't know that apt-get works on RPM-based distributions and works much better than the alternatives. Especially in a CentOS/RHEL environment where you have various distribution releases running, apt-rpm allows you to use the same apt version and the same apt features across CentOS/RHEL 2.1, 3, 4 and 5.