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For years, my friend Stephen J. Vaughan-Nichols has been trying to turn Linux into something it is not: A successful and popular desktop operating system. Everyone needs a reason to get up in the morning and I am glad he has found such a long lasting (and profitable) one. He is a smart guy, but I am still waiting for the Linux that will change my life. His latest foray into "Linux is the next big thing" is a discussion of Google's Android operating system running on future netbooks. Stephen then over-generalizes to call Android "Google's...own contender for desktop operating system king." And in a paragraph that starts by talking about Windows 7, no less. This is simply wrong.

[Note the disclaimer at the bottom: "David Coursey's closest brush with a desktop "ix" operating system is his Macintosh." - Sander]

Paper - don't you just hate it? We live in the 'information age', and yet the much promised era of the paperless office still seems decades away. Our desks are cluttered with notes, reminders and scraps of random information that desperately need to be sorted, but it's hard to find the time. You've probably tried the brute-force method of computerising your notes: keeping a plain text file (or word processor document) on your desktop, ready at hand to tap in phone numbers, reminders and other tidbits that you need to store in a hurry. This system works fairly well at first, but it soon becomes unwieldy. Sure, it's a slightly better system than playing 'hunt the Post-It Note', and it certainly saves on trees, but there has to be a more elegant solution...

An interesting physical security-focused Linux distribution was upgraded a couple of days ago. Tin Hat Linux reportedly takes a Vista-like five minutes to boot, because its whole filesystem is decrypted and loaded from an optical drive onto a RAMdisk (tmpfs). But after that, it's likely Puppy-fast!

Caustic Graphics, a brand-new company to the computer graphics scene that hopes to compete with AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA when it comes to ray-tracing power, announced the CausticRT on Monday. The CausticRT is "the world's first massively accelerated ray-tracing system" and can be found in CausticOne, which is their first product and it promises to deliver ray-tracing performance that's reportedly 20 times faster than the modern computer. While 20 times is great, by next year they hope their graphics/ray-tracing accelerator will be 200 times faster. For more on Caustic Graphics and what they hope to achieve when it comes to graphics and ray-tracing, visit Caustic.com.

CrunchBang Linux (#!) is a lightweight Ubuntu-based distribution featuring the OpenBox window manager and Conky system monitor. The distribution is essentially a minimal Ubuntu install with a custom set of installed packages, and it has been designed to offer a balance between speed and functionality. The light system requirements suggest that CrunchBang Linux is a perfect match for an outdated computer or a netbook. With this in mind, your author tested CrunchBang Linux 8.10.02 on an Acer Aspire One with a 8 GB SSD and 512 MB RAM. Since the RAM is on the low end, this puts to the test how lightweight CrunchBang Linux really is.

Our experience with France's Gendarmerie may be limited to Pepé Le Pew cartoons, but that won't stop us from applauding their efforts at locking up proprietary software. That might just be because the fabled maréchaussée is trimming its IT spending by 70% this year — without losing so much as a byte — thanks to the wonders of Open Source software.

This week I had the pleasure of taking some personal time to play around with Sun Microsystem’s VirtualBox. What else can I say but, “Wow.” I am impressed with this excellent application. I had downloaded (v2.1.4) and configured it for Fedora Linux on my laptop. It was extremely simple. It came as an rpm and the installation took care of everything, including adding the shortcut launchers in my GNOME menu.

One Laptop Per Child is set to dump x86 processors, instead opting to put low-power Arm-based processors in its next-generation XO-2 laptop with the aim of improving battery life. The nonprofit is "almost" committed to putting the Arm-based chip in the next-generation XO-2 laptop, which is due for release in 18 months, said Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of OLPC. The XO-1 laptop currently ships with Advanced Micro Devices' aging Geode chip, which is based on an x86 design.

[Well, so much for trying to run Windows on your OLPC :-) - Sander]

Linux is cram-full of all kinds of remote administration utilities, and even the oldtimers such as gdm and kdm are still good and useful. Juliet Kemp shows us how to use kdm and gmd to enable remote graphical desktops on KDE and GNome.

Two years after its last major release, the interesting PCLinuxOS project has quietly posted a major new release. The "pclinuxos-2009.1" download features a 2.6.28.8.tex3 kernel, KDE 3.5.10, and a host of other updates. It is currently difficult to get, however, possibly due to high demand.

Last year, I blogged about 35 Distros and how they got their names. Some of the distros out there have fascinating stories, while others are just too mundane. However make sure you read that blog, its a very interesting one (trust me). The natural extension of the “Etymology of a Distro” blog would be delving deeper into Open Source project’s etymologies. Indeed many readers already suggested that. Sadly I got sidetracked and put the whole idea on the back burner. Now I have put it off for way too long, here are 20 Open Source applications and the interesting (and not so interesting) stories behind their names:

I bought a notebook to be flexible, but when at home I use it with external monitor, keyboard and mouse to be comfortable. Now the problem was, that I couldn't tell Ubuntu that I want to just use the external monitor - but only if it's detected at boot time.

A survey completed by Talend shows that many companies are using more open source data integration to compliment their proprietary data integration solutions. The open source data integration specialist surveyed about 1,000 users through its website. Over half of the responses were from the US and another 35 per cent were from Europe.

Today, Pat Volkerding published a massive amount of package updates to the slackware-current tree. The entry in the Slackware ChangeLog.txt measures more than 200 lines, and is probably the largest update to the development tree ever.

One of the things that disappoints me is the lack of understanding of what's at stake with open source among some of the other open communities. For example, some in the world of open science seem to think it's OK to work with Microsoft, provided it furthers their own specific agenda.

Lest any think that this article is a endorsement for proprietary EMR software, and that requiring EMR purchases to be Affero general public licensed is far fetched, or wrong-headed, think again. The eClinical Works software is Linux-based. That's right. It is a LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). It has a proprietary layer. Its under-pinnings are all Free/Open Source licensed and created by those 'amateur, hippies' (sarcasm).

Cisco is venturing into new territory--or are they?

A bug report posted in the bug tracker for the next version of Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) describes a massive data loss problem when using Ext4, the future standard file system for Linux, available as an option when installing Ubuntu 9.04. The report describes a crash occurring shortly after the KDE 4 desktop files had been loaded, resulting in the loss of all of the data that had been created, including many KDE configuration files.

Google's Android operating system gave Linux-on-mobile sales a healthy boost in the fourth quarter of 2008. In its latest report on the state of smartphones, IT analysts Gartner said that Linux-based mobile sales increased from 2.7 million units in the fourth quarter of 2007 to 3.2 million units at the end of 2008. This was despite a general slowdown in growth for the entire smartphone sector over the same period.

Earlier this week the FFmpeg project reached version 0.5, which was quite significant considering no new FFmpeg release was made available in years. This release contained a plethora of new encoders and decoders, support for VDPAU, a variety of bug-fixes, and many other improvements. What is next for FFmpeg? When will we see proper Blu-ray support? Will there be a 1.0 release in the foreseeable future? To answer these questions plus others, I spoke with three of the main FFmpeg developers about this very popular -- and important -- open-source multimedia project.