Two traditionally proprietary companies made open source releases recently: Facebook released a Python-based web server and application framework called Tornado, and Apple released a thread-pool management system called Grand Central Dispatch. It is not the first open source code release for either company, but both projects are worth examining.

Vietnam has just made ODF a national standard whilst other new gains are noted

I figured I could do a little benchmarking myself to see if my choice of lightweight Linux distribution could be substantiated by hard figures.

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2009.1 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

The only problem I see with it is, which one are you gonna choose for THE distribution? Will it be SUSE, Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, or Slackware? Since it has to be a top-level distribution and not a derivative, it will have to be one of those. Let's examine those choices.

This tutorial shows how you can boot Linux over HTTP with netboot.me. All that users need is Internet connectivity and a small program (gpxe) to boot the machine. This gpxe program provides network booting facility. netboot.me allows you to boot into the following distributions: Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu.

Think you can make a better fast-booting, Chrome-focused OS than Google? Want to craft a custom Linux system that boots from a USB stick? SUSE Studio gives you 15 GB to do exactly that, and you do it all online.