Google has been slowly, but surely, displacing Microsoft as the number one PC technology company. Google has done it by misdirection. Instead of taking Microsoft head-on in desktops, Google first consolidated their hold on Web search and only then started moving into Web-based desktop applications. Then, in 2008, they made their first direct strike at the desktop with the release of their own Web browser: Google Chrome. Now, Matthaus Krzykowski and Daniel Hartmann, founders of the stealth startup Mobile-facts, have found that you can take Google’s smartphone operating system, Android, and use it as a desktop operating system.

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When you’re talking Linux, three big names always pop up: Canonical’s Ubuntu, Novell’s openSUSE and Red Hat’s Fedora. Ubuntu has ridden a groundswell of both consumer and commercial support to its current ranking as the most popular Linux distribution. OpenSUSE, with its business underpinnings, has always been popular in Europe and has been making inroads in the U.S. And it is largely thanks to Fedora that Red Hat has become the biggest Linux company with a major role in community Linux.

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I can do many things with the greatest of ease on the Linux desktop. But, as I discovered while doing my community Linux overview, recording a Linux desktop video isn’t one of them. Oh, boy, is it ever not one of them. My first problem was that I’d never done screen video recording before on any platform. I’d heard about Windows screen recorders such as TechSmith’s Camtasia Studio and Blueberry Software’s BB FlashBack, but I hadn’t heard of an equivalent program for Linux.

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There’s a long standing argument over the differences between “open-source” software and “free” software. But, a more common error outside of software ideology circles is that you can use open-source software anyway you please. Nope. Wrong. It’s never been that way. Cisco, the networking giant, should know better than this, but they’ve worn out the FSF’s (Free Software Foundation) patience. So, Cisco is now being sued by the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) on behalf of the FSF for Linux and other GPL copyright violations.

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For years now, HP has been slowly edging towards releasing a pre-installed Linux for general users. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that today, December 10th, HP finally took the big plunge.

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There are a host of Linux certifications, such as the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Novell’s Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE), and the Linux Professional Institute’s entry-level LPIC-1. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols looks for the answer to the question, How much help are they for turning your Linux expertise into a Linux job?

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I have a confession to make. There’s no software on earth I can’t make dance and sing… except for photography programs. Whether it’s Adobe Photoshop CS4 on a Mac or GIMP 2.6.3 on Linux, I’m a klutz. So, when I need to make my holiday photos look halfway decent, I try my best with easy to use photo programs like Photoshop Elements 7 or Google Picasa. While I’d like to see more Adobe programs, on Linux with Google’s new release of Picasa 3 for Linux now here, I’m in no hurry to see Photoshop Elements on Linux.

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There are fast computers, and then there are Linux fast computers. Every six months, the Top 500 organization announces “its ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications.” In other words, supercomputers. And, as has been the case for years now, the fastest of the fast are Linux computers.

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Once upon a time, there was a little company named SCO that lived in the town of Unix. Now, one day SCO went into the woods. And, horrors, it ran back into town shouting that that the big, bad wolves–IBM, Red Hat, and Novell–had attacked it with their big nasty Linux penguin buddy, Tux the Destroyer! And-oh no!–they had stolen SCO’s picnic basket of Unix intellectual property goodies.

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Nowadays, everyone uses Ubuntu, most people have used Fedora, and many folks have tried openSUSE. SimplyMEPIS … not so many. That’s a shame, because this relatively obscure Debian-based desktop distribution from Morgantown, WV, is an outstanding desktop operating system. With SimplyMEPIS 8 at beta 5 and closing in on release, I tested the distribution and found it to be a keeper. I downloaded SimplyMEPIS from one of its mirror sites and burned the ISO file to a CD, then installed it on a Dell Inspiron 530s, powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 Graphics Media Accelerator.

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I like Linux netbooks. I like them a lot. They’re lightweight, they’re solid performers, they’re cheap, and it looks like they’re soon going to be cheaper than ever. According to Mike Elgan, starting on Black Friday, the Friday after Thanksgiving, you’ll see new, solid brand-name netbooks going for as little as $199. We’re already seeing Best Buy offering the Asus Eee PC 900a for $299. Will we see the Asus Eee PC 1000, which I like, for $399? We just might.

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Outsourcing and open-source development may at first appear to be about as far apart as baseball and football. Both use a ball in a game, but that’s about it. Yet a closer look from open-source software developers and industry analysts reveals that enterprises using outsourcing for their programming needs could stand to learn some management and process techniques from the open-source community.

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My former colleague, Joe Wilcox, observes that he doesn’t think it’s a big deal that Microsoft handed out laptops to bloggers, analysts and reviewers loaded with the Windows 7 alpha. He adds that “All week, I have watched for someone to raise a fuss and hoped that no one would.” Wilcox then added that, last time around when Microsoft did this with Vista, that Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols “joined the chorus of critics calling the laptops bribes,” while he had defended Microsoft’s practice.

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Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols reports that it’s not easy for a Linux company to let go the reins of control over its community Linux distribution. Just ask Red Hat, which started to let go of Fedora and then decided to keep managing it. But, now Novell is loosening its apron strings on its community Linux openSUSE.

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If you write software for the Mac, you must obey Apple’s rules. Period. End of statement. If you write software for Windows, you have more leeway, but Microsoft pretty much calls the shots. If you write software for Linux though you can pretty much do whatever you want, except, of course, you shouldn’t. Because if you do re-invent the wheel every time you write for Linux, we end up with software that doesn’t work or play well with other Linux software. That’s where the LSB (Linux Standard Base) comes in.

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Bad standards and standard wars are an all too common part of modern information technology. Now, IBM has announced that it’s not going to put up with them anymore. And, yes, Microsoft, IBM is looking at you. In a statement, Ari Fishkind, public affairs manager for IBM Research’s Development and Intellectual Property section, says that “IBM is announcing a new corporate policy governing its participation in the technology standards community. As members of that community, we are formalizing a commitment to behave in a progressive and transparent way as we promote open, high quality standards.”

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Sun has released the first update to its recently purchased desktop virtualization program, now called Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0. While not a major update, it does bring improved performance and 64-bit operating system support to the popular open source virtualization program. VirtualBox, now part of Sun’s xVM series, runs on a wide variety of host operating systems, including 32- and 64-bit versions of Linux, Mac OS X, OpenSolaris, Solaris, and Windows. However, while the manual claims that it supports 64-bit Mac OS X, the program doesn’t actually support it yet. That said, VirtualBox runs a remarkable number of operating systems on any of these platforms, from MS-DOS and Windows 98 to OpenBSD and OS/2.

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Desktop Linux reported that Lenovo seems to have quietly exited the desktop Linux business. Unfortunately for desktop Linux users, that news has turned out to be correct. Lenovo, in a note to Practical Technology, confirmed that it was exiting the pre-installed desktop Linux business.

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So what really happened? I doubt we’ll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and… Well, let me just make the following points about TradElec. First, TradElec runs on more than a 100 HP ProLiant servers in several locations in London. These servers are running Windows Server 2003. On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times. In short, it’s meant to be a real-time system.

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On a superficial level, Novell’s third quarter, which ended July 31, 2008, didn’t look that good. A closer look reveals though that Novell did quite well in general and extremely well with its Linux business. According to the company press release, “For the quarter, Novell reported net revenue of $245 million.” This was up from Novell’s net revenue of $237 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. “Income from operations for the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $1 million, compared to a loss from operations of $10 million for the third fiscal quarter 2007. Loss from continuing operations in the third fiscal quarter 2008 was $15 million, or $0.04 loss per share, due to a $15 million impairment charge related to our auction-rate securities.”

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Open source projects and vendors are trying a variety of technical approaches to replacing the expensive but ubiquitous Microsoft Exchange. While none is yet a drop-in replacement, some administrators can get a TCO advantage by switching.

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No one saw this coming. Cisco, the networking giant, announced today it was buying PostPath, maker of the Linux-based Exchange server replacement PostPath Server. PostPath is best known as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. Unlike other would-be Exchange competitors Scalix and Lotus Domino/Notes, which use a Outlook-compatible Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI) on the client PC, PostPath actually reverse-engineered Microsoft’s MAPI and Active Directory (AD) protocols. This means that, from the network and Windows PC’s viewpoint, PostPath actually appears to be an Exchange server.

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The Kindle, Amazon’s Linux-powered electronic paper book will have at least one new version out for the 2008 holiday season. The new Kindle, however, may be marketed more for college students returning to school in January rather than for finding a place under the Christmas tree. According to a report by Andreas James, Amazon will be marketing the revised “e-book reader to college students.”

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Unlike a lot of open-source supporters, I don’t turn red with anger at the very thought of Novell working with Microsoft. Like it or not, getting Linux and Windows to work better together makes good, hard business sense. What I do find annoying is that Novell is continuing to feed Microsoft’s FUD machine about Linux. In an e-mail interview with Ian Bruce, Novell’s public relations director, Bruce wrote me that customers wanted the Novell/Microsoft package, in part, because it “provides IP (intellectual property) peace of mind for organizations operating in mixed source environments.” It does? Since when?

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When I was a kid, I used to make crude little animated cartoons in my notebooks using the flipbook technique. Walt Disney had nothing to worry about. I was awful even by the 3rd grade standards of White Pine elementary. Today, I could be great, because almost all top animation and special effects artists are Linux users.

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Ubuntu is well known in user circles as the cool kids’ Linux. It’s available preinstalled on PCs and laptops from Dell Inc. and from numerous smaller computer vendors. What Ubuntu hasn’t been known as is a Linux distribution that matters to CIOs and IT managers. Things are changing. Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu’s parent company, is finally taking serious action on its long-announced plans to become a serious enterprise Linux player. The Isle of Man-based Linux distributor isn’t just targeting data center servers, although that’s on its list.

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Would you believe a major software vendor released a patch for their flagship program that made it impossible to run their software? Believe it. That’s exactly what happened with VMware. On August 12th, users throughout the U.S. tried to turn on their ESX 3.5 Update 2 and ESXi Server 3.5 Update 2 hypervisors and … were told that their VMware licenses had expired. That’s always a great way to win friends and influence software license sales.

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Who says you have to give up your must-have Windows applications when you migrate to Linux? If you can’t leave some crucial Windows program behind, you can run it using CodeWeavers’ latest version of CrossOver Linux. Though today there are many great Linux end-user applications, some people still have “must-have” Windows applications — Quicken instead of GnuCash, for instance, or Photoshop instead of the GIMP. That’s where CrossOver Linux 7 comes in.

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Ask any independent software vendor what he hates most about developing for Linux and he’ll tell you that it’s having to develop for SUSE and for Red Hat and for Ubuntu and … you get the idea. The Linux Foundation has just released a beta of a new program, Linux Application Checker (AppChecker), that’s going to make ISVs and other programmers start to love developing for Linux.

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Xandros, the Linux desktop company that supplies Asus with its UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) Linux,, announced that the next generation of Xandros community-driven Linux Freespire 5 will be based on the Debian Linux 5″Lenny” release. Lenny is due to arrive in September. Freespire will follow sometime in the fourth quarter of 2008. After the release of Freespire 5, Xandros will release its commercial Linux distribution, Xandros Desktop Professional 5. This will be built on the Freespire 5 code base with additional commercial software. These commercial programs will be be primarily for enterprise customers.

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