Success with Linux on the Home Desktop, Apr 14, 2003

With installation completed, I started Linux for first time, and... no mouse pointer! The buttons get highlighted when the imaginary pointer goes over them and the mouse works just fine but is quite frustrating to use if you cannot see the pointer. An install of nVidia X drivers made the mouse pointer appear. The great thing about Mandrake is the gorgeous fonts right out of the box.

Sun Microsystems has changed its mind on Linux more often than a 16-year-old flipping through outfits. Yet another shoe dropped at Sun with its announcement at the end of last month that it will be killing its Sun Linux 5.0 distribution.

Getting Fortune 500 companies to adopt open source would be a lot easier if open-source advocates put their business hats on.

That was the message from some Sun Microsystems and MySQL executives at the MySQL users conference here. Swedish company MySQL develops open-source database software and is making inroads into markets primarily dominated by companies such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

Norwegian web browser developer Opera has released version 7.10 Beta of its product for both Linux and Windows.

There are apparent paradoxes for all major vendors in the Linux market. Microsoft, of course, has no interest and will only port to Linux in the event that it sees its applications market dissolving. By championing Linux, both Oracle and IBM have the effect of marginalising Microsoft's SQL Server database and many of its other products. However, there are several open source databases - the most prominent product being MySQL. One day the customers are going to ask "If an open source OS is so good, why not an open source database?"

The Swedish company boasts 4 million installations of its product worldwide, many of which are at small businesses and government agencies that have downloaded the software for free. It claims to have 4,000 paying customers, including such names as Google, Yahoo and Cisco Systems, which has embedded MySQL in some of its networking products.

IBM next month will extend the reach of its Directory Server and Directory Integrator across additional Linux hardware platforms when it adds versions for the IBM i-Series and p-Series servers.

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