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The up-and-coming Ubuntu Linux distro is now regarded by Redmond as a serious innovator with features worth ripping off. Microsoft just started by copying Ubuntu's human circle logo for their MSN Spaces logo - see this MS page and this Ubuntu page and this ubuntu screenshot - of course stylizing the image to a cold blue, instead of Ubuntu's warm human.

A relief to some, hardly suprising to anyone: GeNToo, the Portage spinoff for the NT kernel, was nothing but an April Fool's joke -- albeit a very well thought-out one. The various pranks played on users and fellow developers open this week's Gentoo Weekly Newsletter! Other features this week include developer portraits, news from the community, a walk through publications who picked up last week's release of 2005.0, and developers moves and additions, and the regular bugzilla statistics and security alert sections. Happy reading!

Most top-tier hardware vendors are selling AMD64 workstation and server systems these days, including Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, and, more recently, IBM. Oddly enough, most of them are shipping with 32-bit operating systems installed by default. While the AMD64 architecture can comfortably handle both 64-bit and 32-bit software -- even concurrently -- it seems a waste of its potential to disregard the best features of the architecture. While the theoretical speed advantage and expanded resources of 64-bit computing are enticing to those in need of maximum performance, the road to a perfect AMD64 desktop, workstation or server machine is long and treacherous. What operating system will you use? Is there enough 64-bit software available? In this article we'll explore some of the advantages and pitfalls of going totally 64-bit in a 32-bit world.

The future is mobile. That much we know for sure. But it seems that the operating system world in this market is being rapidly taken over by --again-- Microsoft. The new smart phones are are using WinCE, Symbian or Palm. Linux has barely 1% of this new, smartphone market.

Some breaking news "leaked" into the libervis blog by Charles Schulz from OpenOffice.org LANG Confederation saying that "Sun would put its JRE (not Java!) under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL)" This well goes with another news story published by SapInfo.net, on this page saying that "Sun Microsystems intends to make Java Enterprise System available as an open source product that will define the company as truly committed to open source, according to a report."

Vendors used to bond with enterprise buyers by avoiding the words 'Linux support'. In 2005, buyers request Linux support. Database vendors are returning that interest with the double wallop of the Linux kernel matched with POWER processor-based servers.

rebron wrote in to tell us that Forbes.com has selected Mozilla Firefox as favorite in its Best of the Web series. Four of the Five Browsers selected as 'Best of the Web pick' are Gecko based. [LXer editor's note: one of our own sites is also listed in this directory, and we are aware that it is a big honour.]

An update of "Why Open Source Software / Free Software (OSS/FS)? Look at the Numbers!" is now available; among other things, it adds lots of Firefox market share information.

For many a GNU/Linux user, the command line is supreme. But can you manipulate images without switching to the GUI and using the resource-hungry GIMP? You can, using the fantastic ImageMagick suite.

Let there be no doubt that Red Hat the company has become a monster success story. We'll get to Red Hat the investment in a bit, but all the folks who doubted that an essentially free product could be repackaged with services and sold at a premium must feel a bit silly now. I never publicly said so, but you can count me among one of the former doubters. I always thought Linux the product would do well, but I had my doubts about Red Hat making much on it.

The Mozilla Foundation is testing a patch to its Firefox browser that puts the kibosh on popup ads which have been slipping through the open-source browser's blocker.

Opinion:Finally, finally, someone is withdrawing an open-source license. Now, if only about a few dozen other companies and groups get the idea, we'll all be better off.

The impression I gathered from last week's BrainShare is that Novell's current thrust is going to be all about the packaging and the marketing.

Open source solutions have clearly moved beyond the initial “free, as in beer”, appeal. According to IDC predictions for 2005, Linux shipments will account for more than 20 per cent of server volume shipments, growing at twice the rate of Windows. Most interestingly, IDC notes that within the manufacturing, financial services, telecom, and government verticals, organisations are clearly moving towards enterprise-grade, commercially supported Linux distributions — that means “paid”. I, too, am now willing to pay for the functionality I have enjoyed at little cost for years now.

Continued growth in its enterprise subscription revenue helps the company's total revenue for fiscal year 2005 jumps to $196.5 million, an increase of 58 percent from 2004.

Less than half of those selected to the project's governance board are expected to be Sun staff members; the majority are thought to be from the company's customer base, the industry and the open-source community.

IN our Clear Choice test of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0, (we tested RHEL 4.0 Advanced Server, Red Hat’s most robust Linux distribution), we found huge performance gains over previous editions, beefed up security options and vastly improved hardware detection mechanisms.

OSDir.com Weekly Screenshot Tours for March 31, 2005. We had another great week in the screenie department at OSDir, grabbing nice shots of Linspire 5.0, SkyOS 5.0 Beta 8.4, Foresight Desktop Linux 0.6, Conectiva Linux 10 and Turkix 10.0 Alpha

Gentoo is happy to announce the first experimental release of Gentoo for the NT kernel! Away from mainstream Gentoo a group of developers has managed to push the flexibility of our distribution to new heights and getting it to run natively on the well-known NT kernel!

Every year thelkml sees a handful of April 1'st gags, and this year was no exception.