A few weeks ago, I stubbed my toe on my old Sun Ultra 5 as it sat there lifeless and unused in my apartment. Once my primary desktop, the envy of my geek friends, and a way to woo the ladies, its glory days have long since passed. As much as I would like to let it live out its days looking sexy and taking up space, I live on the island of Manhattan, where space is a premium. Since I can't charge it rent, I decided I'd better use it or lose it. But what to use it for? What operating system would I run on it? Solaris? What about Linux? FreeBSD? NetBSD? OpenBSD? They all run on the SPARC platform, so I thought why not do a quick review.

Red Hat is doing its part to truly make 2004 the year of the Linux desktop with plans to bring an enterprise Linux desktop to market before the year ends.

In this month's "The Linux Line" issue: Bill Zeitler, Senior Vice President and Group Executive, IBM Systems Group, tells how Linux is changing the way that governments and companies operate; Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik talks about the continued expansion of Red Hat into the global marketplace;

I've been using laptops for a long time now. Not exclusively, but I've got plenty of experience with them. When it comes to hardware, laptops are nothing like any other systems. They use different motherboards, different graphics cards. Sometimes they use desktop components for things like memory, processors and network cards, but often those are specialized too. Laptops can be broken down into two major catagories: ultra-portable systems, designed for minimal weight and maximum battery life, and "desknotes", often using desktop components, large screens, and powerful graphics systems. I personally prefer desknotes because I like having a lot of power under the hood.

"If we had to define Xandros 2.0 with one word, we'd pick "usable." This time around, the folks at Xandros have refined their product significantly and come up with something that makes Linux quite comfortable and easy to use, even if you're a total newbie to the OS." Read the article at ExtremeTech.

"For us, all of a sudden, music is the No. 1 priority of the company," Rob Schoeben, Apple's vice president of applications marketing, told Reuters. "We're trying to be a part of the music evolution overall" he said. Our Take: I wonder where that leaves Apple's Mac OS X. While Apple always was and remains a hardware company, MacOS was always at the core of the whole deal. Is the Mac OS X and Macs of the future going to serve merely as the platform to do the "music stuff that sell" instead of being the main focus of the product line? This reminds me a whole lot of Be, Inc.'s focus shift to Internet Appliances and the grandual demise of BeOS.

The Sun Microsystems Inc. has decided that the best way to compete against the growing use of commodity hardware and open-source software is to expand its own offerings in those very lines.

One of the three main German languaged Amiga print magazines has made available an AmigaOS4 preview article which includes many AmigaOS4 screenshots. Also Q&A session 26 with Amiga's CTO is now available and it was announced that IBM will hold a seminar at the upcoming AmiGBG Amiga fair in Gothenburg, Sweden.

OSDL: it's not just for data centers and carrier-grade Linux anymore. Not as of this morning, that is, when OSDL issued a press release to announce the formation of a third initiative: the Linux desktop. Newsforge article, press release, Q & A. Trolltech has also joined OSDL and will participate in the Lab's new Desktop Linux Working Group.

A Melbourne-based software outfit has come up with a tool for getting rid of the bloat on Windows systems and literally cutting one's system down to size. LitePC has developed software which it markets as XPLite and 2000lite, which users can use to remove practically any component of Windows.

Here is a quick Linux articles round up: "Analysis: Linux looks for new worlds to conquer" says ComputerWorld.au. "From back office to desktop, Linux is spreading" says ComputerWorld.au. "Novell at LinuxWorld: Ready To Rock" says Enterprise Linux IT. "Showtime for Linux" says LinuxWorld.au. "Big vendors lead leap to Linux" says ComputerWorld.au.

This major revamp of Mac OS X swaps eye-candy for speed and a compelling feature-set, says APCMag in their review.

Those who like .NET may find themselves lamenting, "I still have to deploy applications on the Windows operating system. I am still locked to one vendor - Microsoft." If this sounds like you, Ximian's Mono project might be the answer. The Mono project was started in July 2001 by Miguel de Icaza, cofounder of Ximian, with the aim of bringing the Common Language Infrastructure platform to free systems.

There's no question that the open source community has a lot going for it. Besides a staggering amount of developer power that can be turned against important problems, the open source movement also has a passion and commitment that the commercial software world often envies.