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Linux in the newsRecommended Reading What Does 2004 Hold in Store for Linux? (LinuxWorld) LinuxWorld asks others to predict what 2004 holds for Linux and has responses from Eric Raymond and John Terpstra. "I predict that during 2004 at least one significant USA government body will adopt Linux on the desktop. This adoption will make head-lines and will radically change the face of the Linux battle. We will see a number of government bodies adopt Linux, and by September 2004 there will be a rush of announcements of software applications finally being ported to Linux. At least two major accounting packages will announce support for Linux. PS: I could name one, but that would spoil the fun!" (John Terpstra)
Major vendors to push Linux to the desktop (InfoWorld) InfoWorld says 2004 may be the year of the Linux desktop. "Sources said that once the acquisition [of SUSE] is finalized early next year, [Novell] will tightly stitch the Ximian Desktop with an enhanced version of SuSE 9.0, which would enable smooth connections to Novell's GroupWise collaboration server, ZENworks resource manager, and security and integration products. The company also claimed that it will more than double the number of engineers working on the Ximian Desktop and will focus on improving the Gnome desktop environment, the OpenOffice suite, and Mozilla browser."
Linus & the Lunatics, Part I (Linux Journal) Doc Searls and Linux Journal present the first of three transcriptions of talks by Linus and friends during the latest Linux Lunacy Geek Cruise. "I am firmly convinced that if your source control doesn't support random people making their own branches, and then being able to merge as they do development with anybody else's branch, the source control is not worth bothering with. And if BitKeeper ever goes away, I will not go to Subversion or something like that. I will go back to tarballs and patches. Because at least that one doesn't have merge problems that most other projects have. Which is kind of strange, but.... It has been very productive. It has helped enormously having something that is truly distributed. But I did want to mention that."
Trade Shows and Conferences Linux Lunacy 2003: Cruising the Big Picture, Part III (Linux Journal) Linux Journal has posted part 3 of Doc Searls' "Linux Lunacy" travelogue. "Several microseconds after Linux Journal announced the itinerary for this cruise, we heard from VLUG, the Victoria Linux Users Group. We harvested the fruits of their labors as soon as we got off the boat in Victoria, British Columbia. Our visit to Victoria was about the shortest of the trip, as we arrived not long before sundown. But it also was one of the most fun, both for VLUG and for the lunatics on the cruise."
Report: KDE at Comdex Here's a report from the KDE booth at Comdex. "Among the visitors to the KDE booth were CIOs, CEOs, VPs and Presidents of major companies and smaller businesses, students, hobbyists, journalists, and professionals. I was stunned to see executives from Fortune 500 companies coming by for a demo of KDE, saying that it was their favorite desktop and that they hope that we continue to do such a good job so they can adopt KDE for desktop deployments in the future. I was most, and least, surprised by one class of visitor though. We had regular visits from Microsoft employees! They wanted demos of KDE, to see how it works and what we have. What an interesting situation. I soon discovered that this was not the only place that Microsoft people were doing investigations."
The SCO Problem Did SCO Really Reveal the Code to IBM, as Darl Claims? (Groklaw) Groklaw has reverse engineered the process by which the SCO Group came up with its list of files for the IBM case. "Essentially, that SCO searched for any reference in the Linux kernel source for SMP, JFS, RCU, and NUMA, and claimed all of those files as possibly infringing. They included the entire JFS source code, but, perhaps realizing that it would look really bad to claim a file that implicated SCO or Caldera by showing the names of their employees, removed those files."
A Heads Up to the Media (Groklaw) Groklaw fills out recent reporting on a couple of SCO events. "Guess how many people went to hear Darl McBride's keynote address at CDXPO? No, really. Guess. According to Todd Weiss of ComputerWorld, there were only 80 people. Count them. 80." The article also looks at the "death threats" issue and comes to the same conclusion we had: just more SCO nonsense.
Interviews Linux veteran tries again (News.com) News.com talks with Ransom Love, former CEO of the company now called The SCO Group. "It's so ironic, the turn of events. (Caldera began discussing) what we can do through UnitedLinux to indemnify people who had used both Unix and Linux. Apparently Darl took that in a little different direction than we intended."
Interview with Sun Java Desktop Group (OSNews) OSNews has an interview with the Sun Java Desktop Group. "[T]he Java Desktop System is envisioned as a set of applications that reside above the OS layer. While the first version of JDS is built on top of SuSE Linux Desktop 1.0, that does not mean that in the future there will not be versions of JDS running on other OSes (for instance, Solaris, Red Hat, etc are all possibilities). Therefore JDS 2003 -is- a version of SuSE. However, what we have done is add a desktop layer to the SuSE distribution which is uniquely Sun's desktop. If ported to Solaris, for instance, these same application versions and UI would still be available."
Interview with GNUstep Developer Nicola Pero (GNU-Friends) GNU-Friends talks with Nicola Pero about the GNUstep project. "I still feel a big missing gap in the free software product set -- or in the available software in general -- which is that the "definitive" development environment is still missing. Producing such a definitive product is a great challenge. By "definitive" development environment I mean the "dream" development environment -- which would be based on some sort of simple and excellent compiled OO language with introspection and dynamical capabilities, and consist of a set of carefully designed libraries, build system and tools. All this available cross-platform." (Thanks to Ciaran O'Riordan)
Interview with freedesktop.org Members (OSNews) OSNews interviews the main members of freedesktop.org: founder Havoc Pennington, Keith Packard, Jim Gettys, Waldo Bastian and David Zeuthen. "David Zeuthen: First of all it might be good to give an overview of the direction HAL ("Hardware Abstraction Layer") is going post the 0.1 release since a few key things have changed. One major change is that HAL will not (initially at least, if ever) go into device configuration such as mounting a disk or loading a kernel driver."
Reviews Dropline GNOME review (Linux Universe) Linux Universe reviews Dropline GNOME 2.4.x, a desktop replacement for the standard Slackware environment. "Aside from these improvements, Dropline developers focus on desktop applications and their integration with Gnome 2.4. - currently at Gnome 2.4.1. The application suite added to the desktop is the real reason for deploying Dropline Gnome. Dropline supplies many packages that do not come with Slackware and these packages are well integrated with the desktop." (Found on Footnotes)
Introduction to Mozilla Firebird Series continues (Nidelven-IT) Kay Frode adds two more articles in the introductory series on the Mozilla Firebird browser. Part 8 covers Bookmarks and Part 9 looks at Flash player plug-ins.
Page editor: Forrest Cook |
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