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Once again, Microsoft has a product that failed miserably. The Microsoft phone "KIN" has already been pulled from the US market, and will not be making its European launch as had been planned. The reality here is that Microsoft's only money maker is Office. Windows sells well only because of its being pre-installed on most PCs. Linux would likely do just as well were MS Office available for it. Likewise, if people did some research and found out that iWork and MS Office were available on Macintosh machines, I am willing to bet that Mac sales would escalate even higher. This isn't the first Microsoft product to fall flat on its face (the KIN sold, by some reports, only 500 devices).

I consistently find myself looking up statistics for OS market share around this time every year. Every year numbers change. Every website reports different numbers from the last, and the only thing that one can assuredly deduce is that it is impossible to accurately gauge how many systems are running a specific OS. With that said, market share does matter.

The Mutt MUA started in 1995 when Michael Elkins wrote the first version. It's powerful, light-weight, made for CLI, and tends to suck less than do other email clients. It's my MUA of choice, and if you've never used it (or haven't in a while), you may want to give it a try. For the purposes of this little tutorial, I am going to assume that you use Gmail (who doesn't these days?). Another thing, Mutt has many more configuration options than those I will present here, I encourage you to look through the reference and explore more.

It's rather strange, this thing called Linux. We hear of Linux powered devices proliferating the market while the users are completely unaware of what they are using. What a success. An operating system that is so simple people simply are unaware of what they are using. It's an overwhelming success story. Phones, tablets, eReaders, netbooks, DVRs, and so on are everywhere, and Linux powers many of them. On the desktop, things are a little different. Most people use Windows, and fewer but many use Macintosh, and then are those lunatic Linux people. I often wonder why Linux hasn't taken off and I personally believe that much of it is due to a lack of marketing. So, what is this post about? Distributions.

On my last post, I asked people about what open source applications they use. I received 22 responses, and I was a little shocked. Until now, I had always heard people say that they really don't have any applications in Linux that they miss in Windows/OSX. This has changed.

In all honesty, are there any open source applications that you prefer and would use in exclusion to others? For example, do you like OpenOffice.org more than Microsoft Office or iWork? If so, do you like it enough that you would install OpenOffice.org on any system that you were using (even if your OS were closed source, such as OSX or Windows)? I might could see someone using OpenOffice.org instead of Office 2k7 (as I've met no one who really likes the new ribbon interface), but what about audio programs? Would you use Exaile, Amarok, or Rhythmbox instead of iTunes, Foobar2000, or some other application?

I recently read through a post on "The Blog of Helios". The article was about the troubles of porting Osmos to Linux. There were apparently many struggles with audio and video support, due to the variety of platforms. This isn't surprising when we consider that variety is Linux's main selling point. Don't like [insert feature] in Ubuntu? Try Arch. Don't like [insert feature] in Arch? Try Slackware, ad infinitum. Yet, this hurts developers who are not part of the community and are writing software for a profit. Which distributions should they support? Which audio systems? Which DEs? Which WMs? Which graphics drivers? Which GUI toolkits? And these problems can be more serious than they at first appear. If you make the wrong choices with Linux, you may not just fail to sell the software, you could anger the Linux community and lose sales with other products as well (**cough** KDE4 **cough**).

Recently, I came into the possession of an Acer Aspire One (AOA150, ZG5). It's a modest netbook with a 160GB IDE, two card readers, 3 USB ports, 1GB of RAM, an Intel Atom N270 CPU, and a really awful touchpad layout. The system came to me with Windows XP Home Edition installed on it, which wasn't really to my liking. This started some massive Linux distribution hopping and operating system hopping. I was trying to find one OS that would be responsive, stable, energy conservative...

Ubuntu 10.04 [Lucid Lynx] was released a few days ago, and after seeing how well it was working on Ford's netbook, I decided I should try it out as well. My first impression of the system was a very promising one, as I saw how well polished and integrated Lucid's modified version of the GNOME 2 desktop and its default applications were.

Lately, there has been a lot of anti-Apple talk around the open source community. To a point, I can see why. Apple took a lot of software packages that those of us in the BSD and Linux communities have loved for quite some time, and they've bundled that software with their own graphics server, desktop environment, and accompanying software; none of which, is open source. What I think bothers people most is that Apple was very successful with their implementation, and none of us were. Heck, we even had a head start. We started off with our software in 1991, while Apple didn't really start using the same software until the 2000s were well under way.

As I look through DistroWatch's list, I see a trend. The top ten at the moment are: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mint, OpenSuSE, Mandriva, Debian, PCLinuxOS, Sabayon, Arch, and MEPIS. Strangely, we find two relatively non-n00b distributions in there: Arch, Debian. The other 8 distributions aim to be relatively easy to use, while Debian and Arch are not.

If you didn't already know, I am in the computer repair business. Normally, people come in with either PCs or Macs, and request repairs that are really rather simple. Occasionally, I'm called on to do large installations, or set up servers, but that's rare. What's even more rare is having a Linux client. I did just happen to get one though. The first I've ever had.

Lately, it seems as if quite a few people are concerned about the status of Android as a Linux fork. Their is quite a bit of talk about re-admitting the Android Linux kernel into the vanilla Linux kernel source.

Microsoft initially started this patent crusade about 3 years ago, and after the initial wave of accusations the Redmond giant seemed to slumber. All was well for a while. Sure, we all felt as though Novell, Xandros, and Linspire had sold their souls to Satan, but we didn't really care. There were no real effects of the deals seen. Microsoft claimed that 235 patents had been violated, but to date they have yet to say who violated those patents and in what way. To me, this seems like a massive FUD campaign. What has not yet been asked of Microsoft is this: who will you hold responsible should the Linux kernel itself contain the IP violations? Are you really going to go to tens of thousands of kernel contributors, take all of them to court, and then proceed to sue all of them? Such an action would completely destroy Microsoft's public image, and I don't think that's the type of blunder from which you could recover.

I was reading through some news on Google and came across this article on bild.de. The Commodore 64 is due to be rereleased with an Intel Core 2 Quad, 4GB RAM, a 500GB HDD, Intel chipset, and a bunch of other features. A peek at the Commodore website shows Ubuntu, Windows, OSX, Chrome, AROS, and Comodo OSs under the "OS" link at the top of the page.

As my readers have seen, my posts tend to focus more on market trends and such than they do on technical topics (though I have made posts regarding the latter a few times). Working in computer repair I meet a variety of people every day, and while I am ritualisticly astounded by the daftness of many, I do try to help those people figure out how to do what it is they wish to do. Often, this means that I simply remove viruses and the like from Microsoft systems. With Macintosh machines, it sometimes means simply installing packages that will add more functionality, and occasionally installing MacPorts and "port install"ing a few packages from the FOSS world. Sometimes I may have to replace hardware, but not frequently. The thing that gets me in a bind here is that Linux would work for most of these people.

I've been an avid Linux user for quite some time. In all that time, I have toyed with making my own distribution, and for me there were many problems. One of those problems was honestly wanting to maintain ownership and control of my code. I felt it would be bad policy to release an OpenSource system that contained a large amount of proprietary code... even if the software remained kostenlos. To that end, I use my code on my own machine, and simply do not release it. Others aren't quite as thoughtful. The distribution that is currently bringing this to mind is Igelle.

I was about five years old when my father showed me my first computer. It was an old 8086, and it had 5.25 floppy drive, a shiny new 3.5 floppy drive, and a 10MB hard drive. When he gave it to me, it ran nothing but MSDOS. As a starter machine, I didn't really care. I was just stoked to have a computer, and when my father showed me how to get to video games, and how to type a text document, I was thrilled. In 1993, my father got himself a Pentium machine, and I received his 486. The 486 also had DOS on it, but when I tried to play my old games everything went by too quickly. I asked my dad what was wrong, and he said that the games I had been playing relied on the CPUs clockspeed. At this point, he gave me a thin orange book, Understanding Microprocessors, which was published by Motorola. He also showed me a book on his shelf that taught me a bit about electricity. A month after this encounter, I went back and asked him if there were any operating systems that would run in protected mode. He told me, yes.

Well, I figured that I should take an opportunity to introduce a few opensource OSs that really haven't been in the lime light much. We all know about Linux and many of us also know about Darwin and BSD. Still some know about OpenSolaris. Which ever ones you know or don't here's a chance to get the scoop.

It seems as if most people are for OpenSource but against any other form of distribution/development. For example, Microsoft maintains ownership of the software that they sell on store shelves. No one owns a copy of Windows except for Microsoft. Well, good for them, but when Microsoft's products became dominant due to market demand people starting making noise because Microsoft wanted to put their own software on their own software (Internet Explorer on Windows)... so even though it's Microsoft's property on both accounts, they apparently did wrong by bundling the two together? Now, in the realm of current events we are seeing something similar with Google.