Showing headlines posted by sjvn

There's a story going around that Microsoft might be porting Office to Linux. If you believe this story, I have a wonderful, lightly used bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you for a mere million dollars cash. You can run MS-Office on Linux today with WINE or Crossover, but running it natively on Linux is a pipe-dream. Is this technically possible? Sure. In fact, you can run Microsoft Office on Linux today by using WINE or its commercial big brother, CodeWeavers' Crossover Linux. I've done it myself. WINE and Crossover runs Office, and other Windows applications, on Linux by providing an implementation of the Windows API (application programming interface) on top of Linux.

Thanks to Microsoft's Windows 8 UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot there was no easy way to boot Linux, or any other operating system, on Windows 8 PCs. Now, there are two ways, the recently released Linux Foundation (LF) UEFI secure boot system and Matthew Garrett's shim system to boot Linux on these PCs. Soon, there will be only one unified way.

At long last, the Linux Foundation fix to Windows 8 Secure Boot lock-in is out, but it's not ready for ordinary users yet and not all Linux desktop fans are happy about it.

LibreOffice 4 has just arrived and, at first glance, this popular open-source office suite looks really good.

While Android and Apple's iOS continue to rise, the arrival of Windows Phone 8 actually saw Microsoft's share of the smartphone market fall. The race for the number three smartphone operating system is wide-open.

LinuxQuestions, a leading Linux fan and user support site, has just completed its annual members choice survey to see which Linux distributions and open-source programs are the most popular and the results may surprise you.

Say hello to Chromebook in the corporate office as multi-billion dollar technology services company CDW offers Chromebooks and Chromebook support and management to its corporate customers.

With Windows 8 stumbling out of the gate and Google's Linux-powered Chromebooks gaining steam, Microsoft needs to dump Windows 8 for Windows 7 on PCs and the sooner the better.

Some Samsung laptops with UEFI will brick when you try to install Linux on them, others have problems, and the Linux Foundation is continuing to try to bring its fix for Windows 8 UEFI Secure Boot out.

Both Fedora and openSUSE will be replacing Oracle's MySQL with its open-source fork MariaDB.

After only a few months Acer's Chromebook already accounts for 5 to 10% of Acer's US shipments and HP will soon be launching its own Chromebook. In the meantime, Windows 8 PC sales remain anemic.

MariaDB, the MySQL fork, continues to pick up steam as openSUSE is also considering using it as the Linux distribution's default database management system.

Fedora Linux's developers are considering replacing MySQL with MariaDB. That, in turn, might lead to Red Hat abandoning MySQL for MariaDB.

Red Hat recently acquired ManageIQ, an enterprise cloud management company, and now the Raleigh, NC-based company is integrating its administative services with its Linux-based cloud systems.

OpenSUSE Linux is on track for an on-time, March 13th delivery of the next version of its operating system.

As Windows 8 and RT devices stumble out of the starting gate, Google's Linux-based, Chrome OS-powered Chromebooks are gaining in popularity.

It took its own sweet time, but the latest version of Red Hat's community Linux distribution, Fedora 18, is finally here and ready for you to use.

Today, open-source software is everywhere but many peple still think of it as being relatively new. It's not. Open-source software actually goes back decades.

According to Amazon, the number one selling laptop isn't a Windows PC or a Mac, it's the Samsung Chromebook, which runs Google's Linux-based Chrome OS.

The Free Software Foundation Europe is claiming that recent changes to the Google's Android Software Development Kit licensing terms has made the SDK into proprietary software. But if you look closely, that doesn't appear to be the case.