"Linspire reached a deal earlier this year with Mirus Innovations to offer a line of OEM computers with Linux preinstalled, under the brand name Koobox. We're all in favor of the concept of desktop PCs with Linux preinstalled, but how does the Koobox measure up in practice? The end result is less than stellar."

An often-heard complaint when it comes to Solaris is that its installation takes a long time. Apparantly, work is under way to fix it. "While in a chatroom this morning I learned the reason why Solaris installs are so slow. It turns out that pkgadd is really slow on installing small packages, well it turns out that Solaris installs about 10000 little packages in a full install."

A US federal judge has ruled against antitrust claims that the General Public Licence promotes unfair competition, and in doing so has promoted its cause. On Monday, US Federal Judge John Daniel Tinder, dismissed the Sherman Act antitrust claims brought against the Free Software Foundation. The claims made by Plaintiff Daniel Wallace included: that the General Public License constituted a contract, combination or conspiracy; that it created an unreasonable restraint of trade; and that the FSF conspired with IBM, Red Hat, Novell and other individuals to pool and cross-license their copyrighted intellectual property in a predatory price fixing scheme.

Sun's Grid network was hit by a denial-of-service attack on its first day. "To let people try out the Sun Grid, the company made a text-to-speech translation service publicly accessible for, for example, turning blog entries into podcasts. 'It became the focus of a denial of service attack,' said Aisling MacRunnels, Sun's senior director of utility computing said in an interview." However, the attack was easily delt with: "Sun moved the service to be within the regular Sun Grid, which requires authorisation to use. The attacks didn't disturb the regular grid, Sun said.

It's been more than a year that Novell open sourced their collaboration product Netmail, under the name Hula. This was quickly hailed as a major step forwards for Linux-based groupware. Of late, however, things've been awfully quiet around Hula. The only explanation given on the Hula mailing list is that construction work is going on behind the scenes. At Brainshare 2006, finally some light was shed on exactly what Novells plans are for Hula and Netmail.

"I'm an art professor, and last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place. I began seriously planning this change last school year, when I realized how fully the current feature sets of free software programs could satisfy the technical needs of the students in my classes. I decided that the time had come to teach our undergraduate art students about free software programs such as the GIMP, Scribus, and Quanta Plus, instead of proprietary programs such as Photoshop, QuarkXpress, and Dreamweaver."

Dell has announced it has acquired Alienware, a well-known digital solitaire machines maker. "Dell said Alienware will operate as a wholly owned subsidiary following completion of the transaction and will maintain its own product development, product marketing, sales, technical support and other operations as well as brand. The management and founders of Alienware will continue to operate the company as a standalone unit of Dell."