Linux in the news

Can Open Source Help the Economy? (PCWorld)

There have been a number of reports about the current economic downturn (meltdown, depression, what have you ...) with respect to free software. Over at PCWorld, former New York Stock Exchange CTO Roger Burkhardt, looks at the issue relative to the last downturn in 2001-2002 and sees good things for those turning to free software—not just from a cost perspective. "During the last economic downturn in 2001-2002, open-source usage and adoption was on an upward curve. Red Hat, for example, began winning large customer accounts that are now the backbone of their customer base. CIOs and CTOs were on the lookout for innovative ways to save costs both from a technology and people perspective, and open source was a great solution. Just like it is today."

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Small is beautiful (The Economist)

Interesting to see advice on choosing a netbook in a mainstream publication like The Economist. Perhaps even more interesting is their advice to stick with the Linux shipped on the device rather than try to run Windows. "Much advice on offer online suggests souping up the specification of a netbook so it can run Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system, rather than the free, open-source Linux system that is offered as standard on many netbooks. [...] Yet increasing the specification only makes sense for people who want to run (and to pay for) Windows and specific Windows-based applications. The extra hardware and software costs start to push the price of a netbook towards that of a standard laptop, which will invariably be better because it has a bigger processor and superior graphics. For many users, the basic, free software shipped with a netbook will be quite enough."

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HP puts Linux on business PCs (The Register)

The Register reports that HP has started selling Linux-based PCs. "With the economies of the globe heading south - and Linux getting its first real crack at newbie end users not familiar with open source thanks to the burgeoning netbook market, maybe now is the time to start rethinking the use of Linux on commercial desktops. That could be what Hewlett-Packard was thinking as it began shipping its Compaq dx2390 desktop PC with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 operating system preinstalled on the box."

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Jaspersoft Gets $12.5 Million, Red Hat An Investor (InformationWeek)

InformationWeek reports that Red Hat has joined the Chicago venture capital firm Adams Street Partners recently to invest in Jaspersoft, a company that produces reporting and business intelligence software. "In June Red Hat announced it was embedding Jaspersoft's Business Intelligence Suite into its Red Hat Network, which manages a business' Linux distributions, automatically provisioning end users, updating them or applying subscription renewals. The Jaspersoft suite will be used in the Satellite version of Red Hat Network, the one that's installed on premises and behind the firewall of a company using Red Hat Enterprise Linux."

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"Ubuntu has the strongest chance to take Linux mainstream" (TechRadar)

TechRadar has an interview with Samba hacker Jeremy Allison covering a few different topics, including some strong opinions about Ubuntu. While that opinion gets the headline, others, such as his take on Samba development, are also interesting. "We couldn't have done this if we'd tried to do it in a proprietary way — it simply wouldn't be what it is. You watch people who've tried to do stuff like Samba in a proprietary way, and all those products failed. Had we not invented Samba, somebody else would've invented it and they would've put us out of business."

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Interview with Sjoerd Simons of Empathy (GnomeDesktop)

GnomeDesktop presents the third interview in a series of interviews about open source multimedia. This interview is with Sjoerd Simons, who works on the Empathy client. "For those not familiar with Empathy, what type of application is it and what are its features? Empathy is an instant messaging client build on top of Telepathy. Currently it supports presence, chatting (both p2p and chatrooms), voice and video calling for a variety of protocols, including but not limited to XMPP, link-local XMPP, MSN, SIP, Yahoo, ICQ etc.."

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An interview with Warren Woodford

The "How Software Is Built" site has posted a lengthy interview with Warren Woodford, the founder of the Mepis distribution. "Some people call me a whiner about the GPL, while from my point of view they are the whiners. The GPL deserves to be scrutinized closely and to be debated, as does any legal document that restricts people’s rights. Calling a person a whiner because they care enough to challenge, question, or state positions about something is itself whining."

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The LTSP adds thin-client support to a Linux server (Heise)

Heise has a detailed look at the Linux Terminal Server Project. "Since 2005 the LTSP team has been working closely with the Ubuntu community, and is using Ubuntu as a basis for its future versions. The code has been completely rewritten so that LTSP can be simply integrated into any distribution. So far, there are implementations for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse and Gentoo. The motivation behind the redesign is to create a framework that allows simple and cost-effective thin client functions to be installed in every existing distribution, without interfering with its structures."

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Review: Shuttle X27D dual-core Atom desktop PC (The Register)

The Register reviews the small and quiet Shuttle X27D desktop PC. "With the launch of Atom 330, we’ve got our hands on a Shuttle X27D - D for 'dual core' - which is very similar to the Intel D945GCLF motherboard that we originally reviewed. The only significant difference is the move from the one cored Atom 320 to the two-core 330 and yes, we are aware that Atom uses Hyper Threading to double up the number of virtual cores. Shuttle has finished production of the X27 and has switched over to the X27D without changing the price from £199 for a barebones - which we think is jolly civil of it."

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Two articles from Dag Wieers

Dag Wieers finds problems in bug tracking systems. Dag was looking for bug reports in Launchpad, for tools he had written. What he found were a few bug reports for new issues for which he had not been informed. "Not only is this a lost opportunity, it is a bad service to both upstream and the user itself. Without a bugtracking system, users would directly contact upstream. Now with Launchpad users report their bugs and nothing is done with them. Not by the maintainer and not by (unaware) upstream. And they are not being send to Debian (their upstream) either. And this is not specific to Launchpad per se, I have similar remarks for Fedora's bugzilla or OpenSUSE." In a followup article he proposes a Google index for Red Hat bugzilla.

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