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Even as the global server market contracts by 14 percent, and Linux server sales decline 7 percent (Windows dropped 17.8 percent), according to IDC, Red Hat's Linux server business is swimming against the current. A February 11 Piper Jaffray report ("Red Hat Inc.: Buy. Survey Shows Red Hat Will Be a Top Share Gainer") says its "survey of 89 domestic Oracle applications customers indicates that Red Hat is gaining IT budget share."

LXer Feature: 02-Mar-2009

In this week's LXer Weekly Roundup DeviceGuru talks about how Lenny brightened up an old laptop, Linux has a marketing problem, how RMS may be looking at the internet the wrong way, Microsoft sues TomTom and all the rest of the previous week's big stories.

Microsoft got things seriously wrong when it released Vista and the company knows it. In the past, the absolute market dominance of Windows on the desktop has allowed Redmond to get away with such mistakes. That may no longer be the case now that Google has entered the operating system market with its Linux-based Android platform.

Eucalyptus is an open-source infrastructure for the implementation of cloud computing on computer clusters. Its name is an acronym for "Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems". The current interface is compatible with Amazon's EC2 cloud computing interface. Tom Callway speaks to Rich Wolski, the project's director, about how Eucalyptus can be leveraged by enterprises and where it sits along side proprietary alternatives like Windows Azure.

Pricing for open source software products remains a hotly debated topic of interest. Dave Rosenberg argues in a recent post on Negative Approach that there is consensus that the price of open source software should be 10 to 20 percent of the price of equivalent proprietary software. He does not attribute that to anyone, and in our echo chamber of technology bloggers and tweeters, such a statement will quickly come to be seen as a long-established fact. Initially, my intuition told me that Rosenberg's thesis was wrong, but I didn't want to dismiss it without doing my own research. I looked into it a bit more and uncovered some interesting facts that argue both for and against the 10-to-20 percent range put forward by Rosenberg.

Usually, there are topics of discussion galore to choose from in the open source blogosphere, but once Microsoft filed suit against TomTom, it seems you couldn't read about anything else. TomTom faces a patent challenge over its use of the FAT file system in its Linux-based GPS units. Some see the suit as an attack on Linux itself.

Linux shop Xandros is launching the Presto "instant-on" platform for PCs and laptops at the Demo 09 conference. When I saw my first PC with an alternate, quick-boot Linux operating system (DeviceVM), I was impressed. But I no longer think this is a viable market. I do not believe consumers want to run two operating systems on their computers--one fast to boot but limited, and one slow but capable. They want what they know, and for most of them, that means Windows. That's why Windows XP has become the popular operating system for low-spec Netbooks. And with computers on the whole getting more powerful, and Windows 7 getting such great reviews even on midrange PCs now (which will be low-end in months), I just don't see much of a market for two-OS computers.

Last week saw the release of SimplyMEPIS 8.0, a Debian-based desktop Linux distribution designed for both personal and business purposes. We take the live CD for a spin to see what it has to offer. In the news this past week, openSUSE develops Debian-like distribution upgrade functionality to their package manager, Red Hat looks set for a comeback to the desktop arena as it announces virtualisation plans that will centre around KVM technology, and Novell signs a virtualisation agreement with VMware over support for their products. Also in the news, the Linux Starter Kit from Linux Format magazine has been released for free and we link to interviews with lead developers of Linux Mint and Kongoni. Finally, we are pleased to announce that the DistroWatch.com February 2009 donation goes to Wolvix GNU/Linux, a Slackware-based desktop distribution and live CD.

This week we received a note from Matthias Dahl, a Phoronix reader, who wanted to remind us about current problems plaguing the NVIDIA 180.xx driver series. Using any of the newer NVIDIA Linux drivers can cause graphics corruption followed by the system locking up. These problems are certainly known by NVIDIA and are experienced by many users as can be seen from this NvNews Forum thread. Below is what Matthias had to share about the situation.

Just three days ago we shared that Nouveau will become the default NVIDIA driver in Fedora 11 to replace the obfuscated xf86-video-nv mess. Now proposed for Fedora 11 is to also integrate the Nouveau kernel mode-setting driver.

Zack Urlocker of MySQL fame was at the Stanford Accel Symposium earlier this week and, along with some other open-source heavyweights, participated on a panel that attempted to cull some lessons learned in building open-source businesses. If you didn't get to attend the event, don't panic. Urlocker has written up a few key principles.

The bad economy may be a boon to relatively inexpensive open-source IP PBXs, which one study says already account for nearly 18% of all PBXs installed last year in North American business networks. Because they are generally less expensive, open source products may become attractive to more corporate users as their budgets are cut, laying the groundwork for a growth spurt, according to the recent study by Eastern Management Group.

The Linux Foundation — the not-for-profit that keeps Linus in keyboards, and most recently, has been looking to glam things up a bit — earlier this month provided a first glimpse into its plans for the 2009 Collaboration Summit, to be held April 8-10 in San Francisco.

Novell officials cited declining fortunes across its business yesterday "due to the slowing economy" as it summarized its first-quarter results of 2009. CFO Dana Russell said net revenue for the quarter was $215 million, compared with net revenue of $231 million for the first quarter of 2008. Net income was $11 million, or 3 cents per share, compared with net income of $17 million, or 5 cents per share, for the same period the year before, Russell said in Novell's quarterly earnings report teleconference.

Recently we looked at networking your Linux receiver – and described how you can stream video from it to any PC on the same network. Now we'll take these networking aspirations further afield by going online. Although a few satellite receivers offer the Ethernet port that gives rise to such flexibility, only Linux-based receivers are capable of taking full advantage of such functionality.

Without much fanfare or self-congratulations, networking giant Cisco Systems has become one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel and an active contributor to the broader open source community. It's a message that Cisco isn't boasting about yet, but was willing to discuss with InternetNews.com. Cisco is the world's largest networking vendor and a technology juggernaut that is seeing the value in using and contributing to open source.

Exciting news from the LinuxDNA project, which earlier this month successfully compiled a recent Linux kernel with the Intel C/C++ compiler (ICC). This is not just a compile without errors, this is — for the most part — a fully bootable, compatible Linux kernel that can boot into a full Linux system. The full system is based on Gentoo Linux, and utilizes kernel version 2.6.22.

I was asked by the editor of OLPC News to comment on the sales of the Intel Classmate PC based on my experiences seeing its marketing while visiting Colombia this month. I have also seen its competition, the ASUS Eee PC being sold there the past 2 years. These events have happened while people asked me where they could purchase an OLPC XO that I had shown them. My basic response to those interested in the OLPC XO has been to say that they needed to purchase one via Ebay.com, since I had arrived in Colombia after the G1G1 program had ended the past 2 years. Just shipping an envelope via FedEx to Colombia costs $50, so most would not get the XO from my suggested source after paying the initial Ebay price.

Novell's $340 million lifeline from Microsoft appears to be losing its potency. Although Microsoft originally gifted Novell $240 million to help fight Red Hat, and later added another $100 million to the pile, it doesn't seem to be enough to revive Novell's fortunes, as the company reported disappointing first-quarter earnings and a slide even in its Linux business, which had been growing fairly well.

In a presentation at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE), GNOME Foundation executive director Stormy Peters discussed the differences between companies and communities and how to bridge the gap. This issue is becoming increasingly important for open source software projects that are trying to build close ties with corporate adopters and contributors.