Linux Archive

HP will be establishing a laboratory at its Beijing facility for Red Flag Linux developers to work with HP engineers, and will be putting together packages of HP hardware running Red Flag for the Chinese market, and perhaps other markets in the future.

"Forget SCO & Microsoft. The single biggest thing keeping Linux from the desktop is Linux itself. It's time to stop adding new features, and finish what's there." Read the 3-page editorial at ExtremeTech. Our Take: While there is no such thing as "finished software", as software by definition can always be improved, it is true that Linux projects (especially desktop apps) need to outline and release full-featured, solid, well tested versions of their software and offer less smaller ones that require the user to constantly upgrade and be in a state of flactuation. What is needed in smaller projects are real release engineers that can outline goals and releases wisely (the Gnome project, PostgreSQL and Apache are good on that for example, smaller projects could learn a thing or two from these bigger projects).

"Without a doubt, Linux has become fully accepted as a powerful, scalable and stable platform for enterprise deployments. Somewhat surprisingly, however, the cost of deploying Linux is getting pretty close to the cost of deploying some other enterprise platforms." Read the editorial at eWEEK.

L.A.S. Linux is a 'live CD' distribution of Linux (based on Knoppix) with a CD-bootable toolkit for information security professionals and systems administrators. Its small footprint maks it able to fit on a 185MB mini-CD. Despite its small size, L.A.S. contains over 100 security tools including basic desktop applications, an array or forensic, penetration testing, intrusion detection, sniffers, and administrative utilities. Changes in this latest version include the addition of Ettercap-GTK, Clam Anti-Virus, MiniCOM, SpikeProxy, MRTG, and many of the Cisco-centric Open Source Exchange tools.

KernelTrap has a new story showing how to upgrade your GNU/Linux OS from the 2.4 stable kernel to the latest 2.6.0-test4 development kernel. Included among the the eight detailed steps are a number of screen shots.

As we all anxiously await the release of Linux 2.6, we hear speculations on the final date ranging from early September to late December. A fellow optimist from comhem.se has posted this graph showing predictions based on the kernel's current rate of progress. It was composed using the compile statistics from John Sherry of OSDL. This chart suggests a release date of the 12th of October.

Throngs of people flooded into the Moscone center in San Francisco to get a glimpse at what is new in the Linux world. Once again, the Linuxworld Expo came to the West Coast making a stop at the Moscone center in San Francisco August 5-7. The show floor was filled with a mix of software and hardware vendors. Somehow, I was not expecting to find so many hardware vendors at what is otherwise a show about simply an operating system. Editor's Note: Mr. Wread sumbitted this report the day after the expo, and it has been stuck in mailing list server purgatory.

Ernie Ball is a company that makes guitar strings. In 2000 the Business Software Alliance, supported by Microsoft and other proprietary software companies, raided their offices without warning and found a few unlicensed copies of software. They ended up paying $100,000 for their mistake. But CEO Sterling Ball vowed not to give another cent to Microsoft and within 6 months had the whole company switched to Red Hat Linux, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla, and other free software. In the C|Net News.com article he laughs when people call them "trendsetters" for doing what any company can do if it just decides to do it.

Damn Small Linux is a Linux distribution based on the Knoppix live CD, but reduced enough to fit on a 50MB business-card shape CD. Damn Small Linux is a general purpose distribution to carry around in one's wallet; it comes with XFree86 and the Fluxbox window manager, while other light-weight applications for email, web browsing, word processing, instant messaging and playing music are also included. Read an interview with the author of Damn Small Linux - John Andrews.

One of the world's largest IT companies is declaring that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within 5 years. Siemens Business Systems has done some extensive real-world testing with the Ximian desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red Hat Linux and found that it's ready enough to start taking some real share away from Microsoft Windows and Office.

German firm Relevantive has performed a formal usability test of Linux as a desktop OS (SuSE/KDE), with a control group using Windows XP. They found that user, who presumably had some familiarity with Windows, took slightly longer (almost equal) to perform an identical task in Linux and estimated that it would take a week for them to achieve familiarity with the new system. The study also identified several problems with Linux as a desktop system, mostly around the UI.

Tux Reports continues their look at RPM based distributions with Ark Linux 1.0 alpha8. This community project stands with a growing number of distributions attempting to build an environment for the desktop. The project's goals are to create a distribution which is easy for new Linux users to install, maintain, and update. Read More at TuxReports.

India is shaping up to be a big battleground in a Microsoft vs Linux fight. An estimated 10% of PCs in India shipped with Linux this year, and it Indian software development industry is important for many global companies. With a talented and educated, but still economically disadvantaged, workforce, India is fertile ground for Linux to gain prominence. Microsoft knows what's at stake, and even recently dispatched Bill Gates to India, though some think that the visit only drew attention to Linux.

CodeWeavers recently announced the second major update to their powerful Windows-to-Linux software adapter. Read all about it here.