LXer Weekly Roundup for 04-Jan-2009

LXer Feature: 04-Jan-2009 Welcome to the first LXer Roundup of 2009, I hope your new year was a good one. ChannelWeb has a list of what they think are the 10 Coolest Open Source products of 2008 and Phoronix has their take on the great Linux innovations of 2008. Bruce Byfield gives us his list of the seven most influential Linux distributions. I like the list overall but I think it should include Damn Small Linux.

Welcome to the first LXer Roundup of 2009, I hope your new year was a good one. ChannelWeb has a list of what they think are the 10 Coolest Open Source products of 2008 and Phoronix has their take on the great Linux innovations of 2008. Bruce Byfield gives us his list of the seven most influential Linux distributions. I like the list overall but I think it should include Damn Small Linux.

At around midnight Pacific Time all the 30GB Zunes froze. Why? Because 2009 has an extra leap second. Not a whole day, but just one second. TG Daily talks about Internet Explorer's continued market share decline and how Mozilla is picking up roughly 2 out of every 3 people who switch away from it. With Google saying IE6 is not secure and actively pushing Chrome, it is making even the casual computer user ask themselves what else they can use to surf the Internet with.

In some somber news Caitlyn Martin reports that MadTux has closed its doors for good. Its sad that the small Linux vendors that actually provide worthwhile support are feeling the pinch of the major vendors now offering Linux on some of their models. I am sure that the effects of recent economic events was a factor as well. It seems that someone has ported Google's Android to the EEE PC and it wasn't very hard either. So Android is the Linux OS they 'haven't' been working on all this time, interesting.

The Debian Developers have decided to release Debian 5 with proprietary firmware in order to get Lenny out in a timely manner. I thought that Lenny was supposed to be completely free of any non GPL'd code? Andrew Min talks about why games are the key to Linux adoption how the big names in FOSS could be doing more about it.

To finish things up we have Dana Dana Blankenhorn's most recent article about the biggest threat to open source in 2009. Dana has been on a roll lately but with a statement like "..but most open source lacks update services", I am left asking myself if he has ever run Linux on anything or used any FOSS software ever. You smell what I smell?