Virtual Machines (VM)

What is a VM?

Simply put, a VM is software. Even though its name often leads some people to think about hardware or something physical, it doesn't have nothing to do with it. So it's software and what you can do with it is to run another operating system "inside" the one you're currently using. For example if you are using an Apple® computer you could run also Windows® without having another computer. Everything in the same machine. You could also run your favorite flavor of Linux®, Open Solaris and many others if you will. So you have a Host and a Guest. The Guest is the one you are emulating and the Host is your "real" physical computer. One important aspect of this technology is that if something goes wrong (say, a fatal crash or maybe the ultimate virus is destroying your guest system) you could trash the virtual machine and create another machine. Another interesting aspect is that you can have several systems in your computer to do tests (for programmers, Web site creators, designers, etc). Now, there are several programs that give you this magic. These programs are the virtualizers -that is the ones with which you create a virtual machine with the operating system you want. We're going to name a number of them, for the sake of giving you a complete information, but we'll only talk about those that are free and open. Here they are (as you can guess our list isn't complete) : Bochs, VirtualBox (from Sun®), Xen, Boot Camp (from Apple®, it's a solution to run Windows® on Mac OS X ), Parallels, Virtual Machine Manager, VMWare, Microsoft Virtual PC - from Microsoft :-).

Xen - Released under the GPL license, Xen runs on Linux, NetBSD and Solaris® to virtualize various flavors of Linux, Solaris®, a number of versions of BSD (NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc), Windows (XP, 2003, etc). As far as we know, Xen integrates better with Linux and Open Solaris. The Xen community has developed a number of products and solutions; among them you can find a solution for cloud computing called Xen Cloud Platform. Xen is mainly used by companies on large servers when it comes to provide private servers.

Bochs - This virtualizer runs very good on Linux, DOS, Windows® 95/98 and Windows® NT/2000/XP and lately even Windows Vista®. As you can read in its Home Page: " Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms (...) The 'typical' use of bochs is to provide complete x86 PC emulation, including the x86 processor, hardware devices, and memory (...) For instance, let's say your workstation is a Unix/X11 workstation, but you want to run Win'95 applications. Bochs will allow you to run Win 95 and associated software on your Unix/X11 workstation, displaying a window on your workstation, simulating a monitor on a PC. " Bochs run on most popular operating systems, like Windows, Windows Mobile (!!), Linux and Mac OS X. If you are a curious person, let me tell you that the word "bochs" comes from "box" (because some people called computers "boxes") and the primary author of Bochs is Kevin Lawton.

VirtualBox >see also Sun.com, its current father. It's original developer was innotek® (Germany) and it's complete name is VirtualBox Open Source Edition (OSE) >this is due to the fact that there is a commercial version - This virtualizer, released under GPL2 license, runs on Mac OS®, Windows® (including Windows 7), Solaris (so Open Solaris®) and Linux. VirtualBox is a complete feature rich general-purpose virtualizer. It's open and flexible, for enterprise and home use as well. This package is one of the most popular solutions on Linux lately but is gaining it's own territory on Window and Mac OS also due to the fact that, as soon as you start to know its features you'll also start to love it; it appears so mature and complete -note that all this is true if you recall that VirtualBox is free.

Gallery - " Gallery is a web based software product that lets you manage your photos on your own web site. You must have your own web site with PHP and database support in order to install and use it. With Gallery you can easily create and maintain albums of photos via an intuitive interface. Photo management includes automatic thumbnail creation, image resizing, rotation, ordering, captioning, searching and more. Albums and photos can have view, edit, delete and other permissions per individual authenticated user for an additional level of privacy. It's great for communities - give accounts to your friends and family and let them upload and manage their own photos on your web site! "

Miro - " The free open-source video platform" - "If just a few companies dominate online video, creativity will be restricted. If the most popular video tools rely on closed, proprietary distribution systems, free speech will suffer. Miro is specifically designed to give video creators and viewers more freedom. We've built Miro to work with as many video hosting sites and video search engines as possible. We believe that the future of media depends on creators being able to choose the publishing services that work best for them, rather than being forced to use a few monopolistic services "

For Mac, Windows, Linux - "Miro works beautifully on all three major operating systems. We make this effort because a new model for internet television has to be accessible to everyone."

"Miro can search and download from the biggest video sites including YouTube, Yahoo!, Google Video, Blip, and more."

Content Management Systems (CMS)

What's a CMS?

Is software that keeps track of all content on your Web site be it text, any type of images, music, video and any other file you think you can play with to build you site. CMS should let you do all this without having too much technical knowledge. Here you have just some of them (two very popular by these days) -there are a lot of CMSs.

Joomla - " Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone. "

Drupal - " Although Drupal is often described as a "content management system" (CMS) it is also a "content management framework" (CMF). In other words, unlike a typical CMS, it is geared more towards configurability and customization." "Drupal’s purpose is to (....) create a sort of “builder’s kit” made up of pre-designed components that can be used as-is or can be extensively reconfigured to suit your needs. Its design provides incredible flexibility while still allowing people who aren't programmers to make powerful web sites. "

Plone - " Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.""Supports Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris. The installers get you up and running within minutes. No complex set-up procedures. "

Mambo - " Mambo is a full-featured, award-winning content management system that can be used for everything from simple web sites to complex corporate applications. It is used all over the world to power government portals, corporate intranets and extranets, ecommerce sites, nonprofit outreach, schools, church, and community sites. Mambo's "power in simplicity " also makes it the CMS of choice for many small businesses and personal sites." Mambo works on Supports Linux, Windows IIS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD.

FileZilla - is a free and complete FTP solution for all your transfer needs. FileZilla is open source software distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License and is available for all major operating systems. It's fast and it's written in many languages to make it universal. It's has a very intuitive interface. This is the software of choice for Yaop!. Some of its features: drag and drop support, Network configuration wizard, resume and transfer of large files, Filename filters, etc.

MOSIX- in simple and understandable words: this is a piece software that distribute tasks though many linked computers, making them work together as if they were one big computer with multiple processors. As it is explained in the official web site : " MOSIX is a management system targeted for High Performance Computing (HPC) on x86 based Linux clusters and organizational grids with multiple clusters. MOSIX incorporates dynamic resource discovery and automatic workload distribution, commonly found on single computers with multiple processors. (...) In MOSIX there is no need to modify or link applications with any library, copy files or login to remote nodes, or even assign processes to different nodes. It is all done automatically, similar to a single computer with multiple processors (...) " MOSIX stands for a Multicomputer Operating System for UNIX.