Operating systems on supercomputers used to be custom-made affairs, but this has changed. These days, Linux has become a popular choice for supercomputers. But how popular? You may be surprised.

Top500.org maintains a list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list was published yesterday (it happens twice a year), so we took the opportunity to go through the list and find out what OS the top 20 supercomputers are using.

It took some work, but the results are interesting.

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All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month.

And since it is a question we can’t resist asking: how do they compare to the homepages of corporate OS giants like Microsoft and Apple? We included those in this survey so that we could answer that question as well.

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Early on Friday (Oct 10) a power outage hit the Novell office and data center in Nürnberg, Germany, effectively taking down several services used by the popular Linux distribution OpenSUSE, including the download redirector (used for downloads and software updates if we understand it correctly) and the mailing lists.

Though the building had two power lines, both failed, and the power company had to dig up the cables to repair them.

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To say that there were some noise on the Web when Sun recently bought MySQL for $1 billion would be an understatement, to say the least. It’s the largest open source deal ever, and the latest in a series of large open source acquisitions. We kind of understand why Sun thought MySQL was worth a [...]

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