Articles by Jack M. Germain

Enterprise IT decision makers have been exploring the potential of Internet of Things technologies, but they are not rushing IoT projects into development and are showing caution in their adoption commitments, according to survey results Red Hat released Wednesday Of the 215 participants in the company's survey, "Enterprise IoT in 2017: Steady as s...

Munich city officials turned lots of heads 10 years ago, when they voted to swap out Microsoft Windows with LiMux -- a custom desktop version of the Linux operating system, based on Ubuntu Linux. The current municipal government wants to dump LiMux and replace its 15,000 computers with Windows 10 The city's general council this week voted to inves...

The Lumina Desktop Environment desktop is a standout in the crowded field of Linux graphical user interface choices....

SalentOS is a Linux distro that easily can put a smile on your face. It is a flexible and accommodating desktop platform that balances demands on system resources with efficient performance....

The Document Foundation on Wednesday announced the general availability of LibreOffice 5.3, one of the office suite's most feature-rich upgrades since 2010, when it forked from OpenOffice at version 3.3. Dubbed "5.3 Fresh," this latest release takes the development of LibreOffice in a new direction with a focus on updating the user experience, acc...

Wine developers on Wednesday announced the release of stable version Wine 2.0. The release brings many fixes and some new functionality, along with a major change in future release schedules The devs have tweaked Wine's ability to run Windows programs within the Linux operating system in this release, which is the culmination of more than a year of...

FastComputer Linux is a disappointing experience that almost fails....

Red Hat on Wednesday announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 3.4 This latest version helps organizations better embrace new Linux container technologies that can deliver innovative business applications and services without sacrificing existing IT investments.

Min is a Web browser with a minimal design that provides speedy operation with simple features.

Google and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles this week showcased a new in-auto infotainment platform at CES in Las Vegas. The open source system combines Uconnect with Android Auto The companies demonstrated their concept design inside a Chrysler 300 sedan at the show. The new system is built around Android 7.0, or Nougat, and an 8.4-inch Uconnect system....

Absolute Linux is a distro that raises the question: Is it really worth the bother?...

Crate.io on Wednesday announced the general availability of the first non-beta release of CrateDB 1.0, an open source SQL database that enables real-time analytics for machine data applications. This release is an upgrade from version 0.57 CrateDB is an SQL database alternative to NOSQL machine data management solutions. It gives mainstream SQL dev...

The Android-x86 Project eventually may become a viable operating system alternative for your desktop and laptops computers, but it's not there yet. You will have to wait a while for the developers to fix a number of failures with the latest release upgrading Android-x86 to Marshmallow 6.0.1....

Refracta is a somewhat obscure Linux distribution that offers exceptional functionality and stability....

Docker and Canonical on Wednesday announced a commercial agreement to integrate support for Docker Engine The partnership gives Canonical customers a single path for support of the Ubuntu operating system and Commercially Supported (CS) Docker Engine in enterprise Docker operations. It provides a streamlined operations and support experience for jo...

AV Linux could be a music and video lover's dream come true.

The Juju cloud platform developed by Canonical integrates a wide variety of cloud services and servers on both public and private clouds using an innovative model-driven software approach That success has changed fundamentally the nature of software operations as organizations move to cloud-scale services, according to Mark Shuttleworth, founder of...

wattOS is a stunning example of really great things coming in small packages....

Canonical last week released Ubuntu Core 16 for the Internet of Things to provide enhanced security and app store support for connected devices The platform provides regular security updates and gives independent software vendors, manufacturers and enterprises control of system updates....

Q4OS is a lightweight Linux distro that offers some worthwhile alternatives to more established distros....