LXer Weekly Roundup for 28-Sept-2008

LXer Feature: 28-Sept-2008 In this weeks Roundup we have Microsoft all over the place with articles on the advertising campaign and how Stanford and Harvard are teaching MS business tactics. Also, lists of cool desktops you may have not seen, alternative operating systems and the Linux Foundation says we should all support IBM. Sorry for the lateness in posting, had to fix my own darn links..

In this weeks Roundup we have Microsoft all over the place with articles on the advertising campaign and how Stanford and Harvard are teaching MS business tactics. Also, lists of cool desktops you may have not seen, alternative operating systems and the Linux Foundation says we should all support IBM. Sorry for the lateness in posting, had to fix my own darn links..

Attention Microsoft: I'm A PC (Running Ubuntu Linux): Microsoft's new "I'm a PC" ad campaign celebrates the fact that millions of people prefer PCs over Macs. But it overlooks the fact that many of those PC users are leaping from Windows to Linux. For me, "I'm a PC" means I've discovered the freedom of open source.

A Linux Bun in HP's Oven; Firefox and the EULA Hounds: If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the Linux community must be doing something right. Rumors abounded throughout the blogosphere last week that HP may be working on its own version of our favorite operating system. Specifically, employees within HP's PC division are reportedly working on a mass-market operating system that is based on Linux but easier to use.

Stanford and Harvard teach businesses how to squash open source: Having given in to gravity, America's elite graduate schools are taking on open source. In recent research published in Production and Operations Management, Deishin Lee (Harvard Business School) and Haim Mendelson (Stanford Graduate School of Business) teach would-be business executives how to "Divide and Conquer: Competing with Free Technology Under Network Effects."

A Linux zealot examines Microsoft Vista: I know, I know…you’re wondering why this is in the open source blog. The reason is simple: I have used open source operating systems for a long, long time now. I have championed against Microsoft for over ten years. But when Techrepublic liked the idea of me writing some Vista content for them, I couldn’t say no. Of course this meant me actually using Vista. So I thought it would be interesting for the open source crowd to get my initial reaction to my explorations with Windows Vista. You know, see how (or if) it stands up to Linux. It was a hard pill to swallow for me. It might be a equally as hard for you. Let’s find out. Shall we?

VDI: Very Disappointed Indeed: Virtualization vendors use VDI internally in their networks don't they? Maybe no one bothered to ask before. Find out for yourself.

Gentoo Cancels 2008.1, Plans New Future: There was no Gentoo 2007.1 release that made it out last year, and we now know for sure that there will be no Gentoo 2008.1 release this year. The Gentoo Release Engineering Team has canceled the Gentoo 2008.1 release that would have otherwise been expected in the next three months...

Is the honeymoon over for Google Chrome as market share plummets?: Within 48 hours of launching at the start of September, the Google Chrome open source browser managed to carve itself a pretty impressive one percent share of the global web browser market. That honeymoon period would appear to be over as we approach the end of the month and the market share starts to plummet...

Linux Foundation Calls for Support of IBM IT Policy: Yesterday, IBM announced a new "I.T.Standards Policy," calling for (among other things) more transparency, openness and inclusiveness in the standards development process, and for the use by standards organizations of fewer, clearer and more open-source friendly intellectual property rights policies. IBM also disclosed the wide-ranging, and in some cases radical, recommendations offered by 70 standards experts from around the world. These recommendations are intended to raise the bar in standards development. But will anyone fall in line behind it?

Five Reasons to Forego the G1: Everyone is all ga-ga this week over the G1, the new HTC phone from T-Mobile, which is the first phone powered by Google's Android phone OS. So to temper the excitement a bit and get back to reality, I came up with a list of 5 reasons not to get the G1.

Do-it-yourself Konqueror commands: KDE's Konqueror is as multifunctional as a Swiss Army knife. It works as both a file manager and a Web browser, and you can enhance it even further by adding new commands to its repertoire by means of service menus. The new commands appear in Konqueror's context menu when you right-click a file. Here's how to create service menus, and some specific commands that you might want to use in them.

Linux Where You'd Least Expect It: OK. You've heard of Linux. It's another operating system for a computer. But why use it when you can choose between Windows and Macs? Unless you run business-class servers, Linux isn't really something consumers really need to hear about, right? Well, if that's what you think Linux is, you couldn't be further from the truth. Look around you. Linux is everywhere, but you may not know it.

Richard Stallman looks back at 25 years of the GNU project: On September 27, 1983, Richard M. Stallman announced his intention to found the GNU project in order to build a free operating system. Now, 25 years later, the Free Software Foundation is marking the anniversary of the announcement with a month-long celebration. Looking back at the last quarter century, Stallman expresses some guarded satisfaction with the growth of the free software movement, but also some bemusement about how it has grown more complex as it has faced new challenges from within and without, and an awareness of how far it still has to go to reach its goals.

5 Things That Make Linux Great: Linux is all that and a bag o' chips. Find out why. 5 good reasons why you should consider Linux for yourself.

The five best desktop Linuxes you haven't tried: One of the pleasures of Linux is that you can try out different distributions to see which one works best for you. You like Ubuntu, but you want to fine tune the desktop engine? OK, try Kubuntu with its KDE desktop then. Some worthwhile distributions, however, don't get as much attention as they deserve. So, here's my list of five great distributions that you might want to try.

10 amazingly alternative operating systems and what they could mean for the future: This post is about the desktop operating systems that fly under the radar of most people. We are definitely not talking about Windows, Mac OS X or Linux, or even BSD or Solaris. There are much less mainstream options out there for the OS-curious. These alternative operating systems are usually developed either by enthusiasts or small companies (or both), and there are more of them than you might expect. There are even more than we have included in this article, though we think this is a good selection of the more interesting ones and we have focused specifically on desktop operating systems.

Sundown On Solaris?: Netcraft -- er, Jim Zemlin, confirms it: Solaris is dying. Customers are leaving it and legacy Unix behind for Linux, in his purview. Open sourcing the platform was too little, too late. Well, maybe not sundown, but it's getting mighty dark out. These are actually not new sentiments; I picked them up from Jim when I talked to him back at OSCON -- a place where, ironically enough, I had also talked to folks from Sun. They were and are smart guys, deeply proud of the work they're doing, but I hope they all understand they are never going to steal any of Linux's thunder. (The refrain I've heard from many different quarters about this issue has been expressed in almost the same exact words by all concerned: "If only they had done this [open sourced Solaris] three/five/ten years earlier...")

Even When Linux Fans Win, They Lose: I’m writing this from Ubuntu 8.04 in a live session (booted from USB stick). This *nix distribution runs well, does what I want it to do and runs just fine without complaint. Let’s forget the fact that it’s super-awesome-cool I can just pop in a USB stick, boot Ubuntu, run it, connect to a wireless network with no problems at all and do my work. You can’t do that with Windows or OS X. Let’s also forget the fact for a moment I’ve been using *nix distros off and on since Red Hat 5 (Apollo).