Free Republic

Use of the Linux operating system on desktop machines is continuing to grow with small and medium business showing the most enthusiasm for the open source software. The Linux Foundation annual survey really runs till the end of the month but entries are drying up, and they've already received 20,000 responses, so they've started crunching the numbers.

York Capital Management's proposed Asset Purchase Agreement and its associated credit agreement for SCO make it clear that if the bankruptcy court lets York buy SCO, that York will be bankrolling SCO's continued lawsuits against Novell, IBM and other Linux-using companies.

A recent column on Zdnet, by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, discussed the reasons why people won't change from a retail operating system to a free one. The implication is that Linux can't even give away their software. That sounds pretty dire. Windows retails for around 200 US dollars, give or take depending on which version and where you buy. If the above statement by Mr Kingsley-Hughes was true, it means that Linux is so bad that people would gladly pay 200 dollars to avoid it. Do users really think Linux is that lame? This article is not to defend Linux and counter...

Wal-Mart officials said Wednesday that the retailer plans to re-stock a hot selling, Linux-based PC that is currently sold out on its Web site. The Everex TC2502 Green gPC will again be available at Walmart.com "in the coming weeks," said a spokesman for the company. Wal-Mart began selling the Everex gPC online for $199 earlier this month, but it's currently listed as "Sold Out". Wal-Mart's spokesman wouldn't disclose precise sales figures, but said the gPC "has been one of the top performing desktop computers on Wal-Mart.com over the last few weeks."

About two weeks ago, Wal-Mart began selling $200 Linux-based PC.  The initial run was around 10,000 units.  Now Wal-Mart is sold out.  Has Linux now found a niche?The system sold by Wal-Mart was an Everex’s TC2502 gPC and is the first mass-market $200 desktop PC.  The spec of the system is very low - 1.5 GHz VIA C7 CPU embedded onto a Mini-ITX motherboard, 512MB of RAM and an 80GB Maybe a more relevant question is not whether Linux has found a niche, but whether Windows has outgrown the average user?hard drive - but this doesn’t matter because the system...

Duke Nukem Forever and Linux on the desktop...To understand the markets you have to know something about magicians, and how they work.The magician will typically flourish something or gesture expansively with his right hand, while surreptitiously moving his left hand inside his jacket to remove or hide the next object to be palmed, so the trick with magicians is never look at what they want you to look at, and all of a sudden everything becomes quite clear, it is not magic, it is pop psychology, body language and misdirection. You have to do the same thing with Linux on...

A little over a week ago, reviews of Asus's Eee PC 701 started to trickle out onto the Internet. Some of the larger publications, like CNet and LAPTOP Magazine got their hands on the unit first, but as it has become more widely available sites like HotHardware and PC Perspective have now put out their own reviews of the Eee PC. The overall verdict is fairly unanimous: the device's keyboard is a bit cramped, but in terms of price, performance, and features the Eee PC hits the trifecta. Indeed, Asus appears to have gotten so many things right with the...

Linux, the free operating system that's a perpetual underdog in the desktop market, will get another chance this holiday season at Wal-Mart Stores Inc. The chain was taking orders online Wednesday for a computer called the "Green gPC" that is made by Everex of Taiwan, costs $199 and runs Linux. It will be available in about 600 stores, as well as online, Wal-Mart said. A comparable Everex PC that comes with Windows Vista Home Basic and more memory costs $99 more, or $298, partly because the manufacturer has to pay Microsoft Corp. for a software license. Both computers come with...

My boss has asked me to find the version of Linux/Unix that Samba is developed and tested on, in that we might find the most reliable Samba platform. I'm guessing it's developed on Fedora, and tested on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), which would mean www.centos.org would qualify, but I'd like to hear what knowledgeable FRiends ... know. Thank you.

Linux users from around the world are filling out the Linux Foundation's desktop survey. But what John Cherry, the foundation's director of global Linux workgroups, wants to know is, "Where are the responses from the North America?"

The part that I find interesting is the “Grandma’s linux is called Mac OS X” bit. Not because it’s likely to be controversial but because I’ve come to the same conclusion over the past few months too. I have the belief that there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all OS. For the most part Windows continues to dominate, although it’s hard to say how much of that is due to the fact that it fits most of the people most of the time and how much of it is down to people assuming that Windows is something that comes with...

The SCO Group, working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hopes to sell its Unix assets to York Capital Management for up to $36 million, the company said this week in regulatory and bankruptcy court filings. Through the deal, York would provide SCO with $10 million in cash; up to $10 million in credit to fund its Linux-related legal fight and to get 20 percent of revenue from that action; $10 million for a 20 percent stake in the company; and $6 million to license the Hipcheck products from SCO's Me mobile device software effort and to share revenue...

The KDE Community is happy to release the third Beta for KDE 4.0. This Beta is aimed at further polishing of the KDE codebase and also marks the freeze of the KDE Development Platform. We are joined in this release by the KOffice project which releases its 4th alpha release, bringing many improvements in OpenDocument support, a KChart Flake shape and much more to those willing to test. Since the last Beta, most of KDE has been frozen for new features, instead receiving the necessary polish and bugfixing. The components which were exempt from this freeze saw significant improvements as...

Novell's long journey from NetWare to Linux is finally complete. On Oct. 8, Novell released Open Enterprise Server 2 to its customers worldwide. Shortly after acquiring SUSE and its enterprise-focused Linux distribution, Novell announced that its follow-on to NetWare 6.5 would ship as a set of network services that could run atop the NetWare and the Linux kernel, OES (Open Enterprise Server) 1.0. OES, which began shipping in April 2005, was the first major step in Novell moving NetWare's services from its native operating system to Linux. Now, with OES 2.0, the NetWare operating system kernel, NetWare 6.5 SP7, is...

The head of the Open Invention Network (OIN) has dismissed Microsoft's claims that Linux violates over 200 of its patents. OIN chief executive Jerry Rosenthal said that Microsoft's assertions are simply an attempt to undermine the open source movement. Rosenthal added that it is time for Microsoft to reveal the patents that are supposedly being infringed, or to drop the claims. "The FUD is clear. If you have a patent that you are proud of, then disclose it," he said. "If your patent is a good patent then you are not worried about revealing it before going to court because...

When it comes to launching online attacks, criminals are getting more organised and branching out from the Windows operating system, says eBay's security chief. eBay recently did an in-depth analysis of its threat situation, and while the company is not releasing the results of this analysis, it did uncover a huge number of hacked, botnet computers, said Dave Cullinane, eBay's chief information and security officer, speaking at a Microsoft-sponsored security symposium at Santa Clara University. Cullinane, who one year ago downplayed the role of organised crime in phishing ("It's not the Sopranos," he said), believes that online attackers are indeed...

LINUX runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices. But why would anyone want to use Linux, an open-source operating system, to run a PC? “For a lot of people,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, “Linux is a political idea — an idea of freedom. They don’t want to be tied to Microsoft or Apple. They want choice. To them it’s a greater cause.” That’s not the most compelling reason for consumers. There is the price:...

If the corporate Grim Reaper is truly knocking on the door of The SCO Group Inc., no one apparently told the company's CEO and president, Darl C. McBride. Despite SCO's a major court loss last month in its legal case against Novell Inc., its bankruptcy reorganization filing and an ominous-sounding quarterly U.S Securities and Exchange Commission filing last week in which SCO said there is "substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern," McBride insists that no one should be lining up yet for his company's funeral parade. On the heels of all of that news,...

Losing in court, vilified on blogs and in bankruptcy proceedings, SCO Group CEO Darl McBride still says pronouncements of the death of the Utah software company are premature, if not greatly exaggerated. Within weeks, McBride said, the Lindon company that filed lawsuits against IBM and then Novell in celebrated battles over ownership and use of software code will have announcements about reorganization plans. He refused to provide details. "I can tell you that other parties are very interested in our business," McBride said in an interview this week. "We are in discussions. Again, I think our enemies who have pronounced...

Jesper Johansson--a former senior program manager for security policy at Microsoft who moved to Amazon in September last year--wrote in his blog on Monday that he may drop Windows Media Center for LinuxMCE, a free open-source add-on to the Kubuntu desktop operating system, because problems caused by Microsoft's digital-rights management (DRM) software have proven so difficult to fix. After Johansson's 5-year-old child complained that cable network Comcast's On Demand video system was not working with Windows Media Center, Johansson wrote, he attempted to resolve the problem. "Upon inspecting the problem I found that the video would turn on, the screen...