blog.q8lug.org

Red Hat Inc. reported second-quarter revenues of $164.4 million, an increase of 29% in  quarterly revenue compared with a year ago, at $127.2 million. Deferred revenue rose somewhat faster, climbing 32% to $496.9 million. Quarterly profits also rose, but by a slimmer margin, rising 11% from $18.2 million for the second fiscal quarter of 2007 to $21.1 million for the second fiscal quarter of 2008.

The quarter’s revenues included two one-year sales of $5 million apiece.

Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company, said the higher-than-expected revenue growth was achieved against economic headwinds. The healthy earnings reflected strong renewals from the existing customer base, with old and new accounts alike responsive to an opportunity for cost savings, he said.

Sales of JBoss, Red Hat’s middleware product, grew twice as fast as those for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), with rising sales as an embedded product to independent service vendors (ISVs) targeting the service-oriented architecture (SOA) market, Whitehurst said.

Red Hat’s recent $107 million purchase of Qumranet Inc. broadens its leadership in open source virtualization, which began with RHEL 5, continued with the Libvert virtualization layer and other tools to create a comprehensive virtualization portfolio, he said. Qumranet also gives Red Hat an entry into the early-stage virtual desktop market, he said.

CFO Charles Peters downplayed the potential adverse impact on future sales from the current turmoil in the financial sector. That vertical is now only 10% of the business, due to faster growing sales in government and telecommunications, he said. In addition, many of the financial customers are on multiyear contracts, he said.

Like RHEL, JBoss sales benefit from tighter economic times because corporations still need to deploy new functionality but have less money, Peters said.

Red Hat quarterly earnings up 29% to $164.4 million

Today we will look at some of the common ways to search for files in Linux using the Terminal.

1) find

2) locate

3) whereis

4) which

5) type

5 Ways To Search For Files Using The Terminal | LinuxHaxor.net.

One of the pleasures of Linux is that you can try out different distributions to see which one works best for you. You like Ubuntu, but you want to fine tune the desktop engine? OK, try Kubuntu with its KDE desktop then. Some worthwhile distributions, however, don’t get as much attention as they deserve. So, here’s my list of five great distributions that you might want to try.

The five best desktop Linuxes you haven’t tried | Computerworld Blogs.

The Netherlands Patent Office is the first government authority to implement the ‘Nederland Open in Connection’ action plan and to switch a large number of its ICT systems to what is known as open source software. As the first step, Frank Heemskerk, minister of Foreign Trade launched the new website of the Netherlands Patent Office today, which is based on open source software. By the end of 2009, the entire office environment, including desktop computer systems and the relationship management system will be running on the basis of open source software.

Open source software allows free access to its source code which means that it can be freely edited by users and there are no licensing costs. The open source pilot project at the Netherlands Patent Office is part of Heemskerk’s action plan ‘Nederland in Open Connection’, in which a number of specific measures are put forward to encourage the use of open standards and open source software in government authorities. “Wider use of open source software offers greater opportunities for new software companies. It also reduces the government’s dependency on fixed suppliers and ensures lower costs”, explains Heemskerk. According to the minister, the Netherlands Patent Office is an important front runner with its plans and serves as a good example to other government authorities that have yet to implement the action plan.

The Netherlands Patent Office changes to open source software.

At the Linux Plumbers Conference Thursday, Arjan van de Ven, Linux developer at Intel and author of PowerTOP, and Auke Kok, another Linux developer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, demonstrated a Linux system booting in five seconds. The hardware was an Asus EEE PC, which has solid-state storage, and the two developers beat the five second mark with two software loads: one modified Fedora and one modified Moblin. They had to hold up the EEE PC for the audience, since the time required to finish booting was less than the time needed for the projector to sync.

How did they do it? Arjan said it starts with the right attitude. “It’s not about booting faster, it’s about booting in 5 seconds.” Instead of saving a second here and there, set a time budget for the whole system, and make each step of the boot finish in its allotted time. And no cheating. “Done booting means CPU and disk idle,” Arjan said. No fair putting up the desktop while still starting services behind the scenes. (An audience member pointed out that Microsoft does this.) The “done booting” time did not include bringing up the network, but did include starting NetworkManager. A system with a conventional hard disk will have to take longer to start up: Arjan said he has run the same load on a ThinkPad and achieved a 10-second boot time.

LPC: Booting Linux in five seconds [LWN.net].