An anonymous reader writes "The Linux kernel power bug that caused high power usage for many Intel Linux systems has finally been addressed. Matthew Garrett of Red Hat has devised a solution for the ASPM Linux power problem by mimicking Microsoft Windows' power behavior in the Linux kernel. A patch is on LKML for this solution to finally restore the battery life under Linux."

Karrde712 writes "Fedora 16 has just been released, bringing with it Gnome 3.2, KDE 4.7, GRUB2 and more!" Here are the full release notes; most users will probably want to jump to the list of changes for desktop users.

An anonymous reader writes "The GNOME 3.0 Shell with the Mutter window manager no longer requires GPU acceleration to work, while still retaining the compositing window manager and OpenGL support. GNOME Shell can now work entirely on the CPU using the LLVM compiler via the Gallium3D LLVMpipe driver. This will be another change to Fedora 17 to no longer depend upon the GNOME3 fall-back, which is expected to eventually be deprecated and further anger GNOME2 fans."

jfruhlinger writes "Even Linux's most passionate partisans will admit that its filesystem, which stashes vital files in a variety of arcane directories, can be baffling to users. The developers at the Fedora project want to cut the Gordian knot and consolidate all executables into /usr/bin and all libraries into /usr/lib or /usr/lib64. One downside: this system would conflict with the standards developed by the Linux Standard Base, or the (rarely used) Filesystem Hierarchy Standard."

Bocaj writes "I recently spec'd out a large project for our company that included software from Red Hat. It came back from the CIO with everything approved except I have to use CentOS. Why? Because 'it's free Red Hat.' Personally I really like the CentOS project because it puts enterprise class software in the hands of people who might not otherwise afford it. We are not those people. We have money. In fact, I questioned the decision by asking why the CIO was willing to spend money on another very similar project and not this one. The answer was 'because there is no free alternative.' I know this has come up before and I don't want to beat a dead horse, but this is still a very persistent issue. Our CIO is convinced that technical support for any product is worthless. He's willing to spend money on 'one-time' software purchases, but nothing that is an annual subscription. There is data to support that the Red Hat subscription is cheaper that many other up-front paid software products but not CentOS. The only thing it lacks is support, which the CIO doesn't want. Help?"

Julie188 writes "One of the more interesting aspects of Red Hat's acquisition of virtual storage vendor Gluster on Tuesday is how it drags Red Hat into bed with its cloud competitor OpenStack. Red Hat made waves over the summer in the open source community when one of its executives threw punches at OpenStack's community, saying the community amounted to not much more than a bunch of press releases. In July, Gluster contributed its Connector for OpenStack. It enables features such as live migration of VMs, instant boot of VMs, and movement of VMs between clouds on a GlusterFS environment. While Fedora has already said that its upcoming Fedora 16 would support OpenStack, Fedora is a community distro and not beholden to Red Hat. However, Red Hat today promised that it would continue to support and maintain Gluster's contribution to OpenStack. It didn't, however, to promise to quit the smack talk."

head_dunce writes "Red Hat is doing very well in this economy. Total revenue and subscription revenue for this quarter is up 28% year-over-year. Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat said, 'Based on the strong first half results, we believe Red Hat remains well positioned to finish fiscal 2012 as the first billion dollar open source software vendor.'"

First time accepted submitter EponymousCustard writes "On a day of big resignations, we also hear that Troy Dawson of the Scientific Linux project is joining Red Hat, and will no longer be working on Scientific Linux. It will be a big loss. thanks to Troy for all the great work!"

AdamWill writes "Fedora 16 Alpha is released today, featuring GNOME 3.1.4 with a unified input indicator for keyboard layouts and input methods, KDE 4.7, GRUB 2 on new installations (with GPT disk labels) and several other major changes. You can download it now. Remember to read the important information in the release notes and common bugs page."

drspliff writes "Oracle today announced it's completed the acquisition of K-Splice, dropping support for Redhat, CentOS, and SUSE, and closing doors to new customers. Unless of course you want to become an Oracle Linux Premier Support subscriber — then it comes as standard."

dkd903 writes "The CentOS team just announced the availability of CentOS Linux version 6.0 for both i386 and x86_64 architectures. CentOS 6.0 is based on the upstream release of RHEL 6.0 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and includes packages from all variants."

dkd903 writes "According to proposals for Fedora 16, Btrfs will be the default filesystem used in that release. The proposal has been approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee. In Fedora 16, the switch from EXT4 to Btrfs will be a 'simple switch' — it means that major Btrfs features such as RAID and LVM capabilities will not be forced onto users."

DrKnark writes "I am not an IT professional, even so I am one of the more knowledgeable in such matters at my department. We are now planning to build a new cluster (smallish, ~128 cores). The old cluster (built before my time) used Redhat Fedora, and this is also used in the larger centralized clusters around here. As such, most people here have some experience using that. My question is, are there better choices? Why are they better? What would be recommended if we need it to fairly user friendly? It has to have an X-windows server since we use that remotely from our Windows (yeah, yeah, I know) workstations."

dotancohen writes "Sharing users between Fedora and Debian-based distros just got a little easier. Beginning with Fedora 16, the Red-Hat based distro will number its human user UIDs starting from 1000, as opposed to the old 500. Though this change is intended to facilitate interoperability with other distros, it risks breaking backward compatibility with older Fedora releases including the newly released Fedora 15."

halfline writes "Fedora 15 was released today. It features GNOME 3 (with its substantially redone UI) and the systemd init system by default." The release also brings the latest KDE and XFCE versions, improved Btrfs support, amd a switch from OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice. Installation images are available from the usual sources.

darthcamaro writes "Linux users have long relied on iptables for in-distro firewall setup. The upcoming Fedora 15 release changes that and introduces us to new dynamic firewall technology. 'Most Linux systems use IP tables type firewalls and the problem is that if you want to make a change to the firewall, it's hard to modify on the fly without reloading the entire firewall,' Fedora Project Leader Jared Smith said. 'Fedora 15 is really the first mainstream operating system to have a dynamic firewall where you can add or change rules and keep the firewall up and responding while you're making changes.'"

wiredmikey writes "Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the platform since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 back in November 2010. The latest version brings improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, and support for upcoming system hardware. The latest version also delivers patches and security updates as well as enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource management and high availability." The Register, too, outlines the new release.

jbrodkin writes "Although Red Hat fights patent lawsuits when it deems it necessary, CEO Jim Whitehurst says it's often just better to pay the trolls to make them go away. 'When it's so little money, at some point, bluntly, it's better to settle than fight these things out,' Whitehurst said. Red Hat has been forced to pay out claims to the likes of FireStar Software and Acacia, and Whitehurst indicated Red Hat has paid off various other companies behind closed doors. 'Some of them are [public] but we often seal them in settlement,' he said."

talawahdotnet writes "Gavin King of Red Hat/Hibernate/Seam fame recently unveiled the top secret project that he has been working on over the past two years, a new language and SDK designed to replace Java in the enterprise. The project came out of hiding without much fanfare or publicity at QCon Beijing in a keynote titled 'The Ceylon Project — the next generation of Java language?'"

darthcamaro writes "Red Hat is almost at its goal of being the first pure-play open source vendor to hit $1 billion in Revenues. Red Hat reported its fiscal 2011 revenues this week which hit $909 million. Going forward, Red Hat has already taken steps to protect its business by changing the way it packages the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 kernel, making it harder for Oracle to clone. 'We are the top commercial contributor to most of the components of the Linux kernel and we think we have a lot of value and we want to make sure that, that value is recognized,' Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said. 'In terms of competition, I don't think we necessarily saw anything different from before but I'd say better to close the barn door before the horses leave than afterwards.'"