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I was reading this article earlier this week and thought that it was interesting. It announced the Windows Vista release as being delayed. I thought that this was just par for the course and something Microsoft always has done and will always do...delay. However, what does this mean for the Linux desktop? Does it mean anything at all? Probably not on the scale most are hoping.

I was getting a bit tired of saying the same things over and over to friends on the net. I was getting tired of repetitiously posting in forums the same sentiment over and over. Yet, just like getting a second wind in a long and tiring race...my tiredness melts away and I find myself feeling refreshed and anew. What the subject of this rant has to say and what I have to say in the paragraphs below are NOT written to start a flame war. I am a user of Ubuntu and a strong supporter of all Debian based distros. Nay, this article is written to allow insight into where I believe Linux needs to go to succeed.

MEPIS, one of the more popular Debian-derived distributions, may be moving in a new direction soon. MEPIS founder Warren Woodford is considering building future MEPIS releases from Ubuntu sources rather than from Debian.

I've had troubles as of late in my household. I had a motherboard go bad that was powering my Media Center PC. This PC is the center of the entire family entertainment with 30 GB of music, 50 GB of movies, and the ability to watch live TV. That immediately ceased when the BIOS chip failed on the mobo. I had to send in for a replacement. In the meantime, I've had to shift all of my computers around to compromise for this loss. This means that I lost my normal Linux (PCLinuxOS .92) computer (an old Celeron 900 Emachines). I now have the old PII 350 MHz. While I know it likes Slackware and Vector Linux the most...I have to try other distros out on it just to see what happens. After all, even Windows XP can install and run on this computer...so I'd like to see how some of the better Linux desktops will run on it. To give a quick rundown, here are the specs:

I always hate it when a Linux "news" website publishes things that aren't news. It would be like having a hosting website that doesn't do hosting...what's the point really?

"Klipper is the KDE clipboard utility. It stores clipboard history, and allows you to link clipboard contents to application actions." That's the common explanation you get from most people and online manuals when seeking information about Klipper. But what else can Klipper do? Is that ALL it does? Can we empower it to be what cut and past is in Windows? (ducks the possible flames) Perhaps. Grab a pen and paper Klip...let's see what this thing can do. Please note that this article is written with the assumption that you are using KDE 3.4 or higher.

This article is a small letter to Stephen Harpster's most recent blog entry which chastises Lxer's Tom Adelstein for his look at the JDS. "Sorry Stephen, but Tom Adelstein was right...JDS is a throw away desktop...that's what you do to old Linux distros that stop their development.

What's with Ubuntu's naming convention? With Knoppix at least they named the distros differently. With KDE and Gnome, taking the first letter of the names was good enough. But Ubuntu and those using it have developed a silly idea and are trying desperately to make it 'cool'.

My first Linux experiences came through Knoppix and Mandrake, which send you to the KDE desktop by default. I used KDE at first, but I wanted to experiment with other less Windowsesque environments. The first one I installed was Enlightenment 16, which I must confess I had first heard of in Neal Stephenson's essay "In The Beginning There Was the Command Line.”

In the beginning of things, open source was about open everything. I remember joining an irc channel # on efnet back in 1993 and chatting with people who could make things happen with computers...really make things happen. Coders, managers, hackers...they were all there and a tight nit core of about 6 of us stayed in touch for about 7 years until we went our separate ways and began to use irc less and less. The thing that I remember the most is the fact that when I joined their little group, I was a complete and total n00b. Not just a n00b to Open Source...but to computers altogether.

Over the course of 5 months, I've taken my wife who knew nothing of Linux and put her through a handful of desktop oriented distros to see if we could shake the Windows bug. The results are contained on Yet Another Linux Blog. If you want to know what a new user thinks about distros such as SimplyMEPIS, PCLinuxOS, Mandrake (Mandriva), Ubuntu, and Fedora Core... you may want to give the experiment a read:

"Linuxblog Introduction: We took an average windows user, gave her a handful of distributions of Linux, and forced her to use each distro for one week. We gave her alsaconf, email servers, and mounted her windows partition to the fresh install. Then, we faded away and quietly watched her in her new environment. You too can join us by reading on...

It seems that MEPIS is having trouble again. Some of you may recall a few bumps in the road in the past for MEPIS and the MEPIS community. Dotmepis.org however, set out to fill a niche for the MEPIS community by providing community developed packages and kernels for advanced users.

I've had it! I've been locked in for the last time. No longer will I sit idle and allow choices to be made FOR me. I make the choices around here. When I'm in the market for a printer, I don't want to have to think about which one to get. I want to be able to just go out, browse, pick one, and bring it home. Everything should just work right out of the box right? Wrong! You have to check the Linuxprinting.org Printer Database just to list out printers that you're allowed to buy...that is, if you want them to work with Linux. I say this is a crock. I say it is a sham. There are more than one operating system on the market, and it is high time that companies...large companies...start to understand this.

Following Friday's release of Ubuntu Linux 5.04, Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian project, told internetnews.com: 'Ubuntu's popularity is a net negative for Debian.' He explained: 'It's diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don't work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare.' Ian suggests a method for averting crisis on his blog."

We talk to German insurance company LVM about its 8,500-machine decision.

"One country . . . one ideology, one system is not sufficient. It is helpful to have a variety of different approaches . . . We can then make a joint effort to solve the problems of the whole of humankind." Dalai Lama Open source and Linux is currently at the forefront of the new OSI Licensing Process and the GPL version 3. This usually would boil down to nothing for me and most likely boils down to nothing for most end users. However, in the cases of both of these 'improvements,' there are alternative motives. Don't fool yourself into believing that all intentions of the OSI is to make Joe Common and his laptop full of Linux happy. While they may have Joe's best interests in mind...they have his pot on the backburner while the new Teflon coated enterprise pot is heating up nicely on the front one.

An analyst who has been savaged for her views on open source software has hit back, denying that her work is biased

Alexis Boulva writes "Tonight, Ole André Vadla Ravnås of the Farsight project (LGPL), which 'is an audio/video conferencing framework specifically designed for Instant Messengers' for the GNU Linux operating system, finished coding a release candidate of libmimic, 'an open source video encoding/decoding library for Mimic V2.x-encoded content (fourCC: ML20), which is the encoding used by MSN Messenger for webcam conversations.'

The SGI Altix 3700 supercomputer presented NASA with a significant performance boost. The system relies on industry standard 64-bit Linux microprocessors, and each node scales up to support 256 processors with 3 terabytes of memory.

"The interest in Solaris 10 has exceeded our highest expectations – this is a significant milestone for Sun," said Tom Goguen, vice president, Operating Platforms Group, Sun Microsystems. "We're seeing approximately one download per second and our Solaris 10 customers and partners are achieving huge performance gains when leveraging powerful new features like Dynamic Tracing and Containers."