Choosing a Linux Distribution for Your Business, Mar 08, 2007

If you're confused about the different flavors of Vista in the store, then the varieties of Linux available will leave you gasping like a fish on a dock. Distrowatch, a site which tracks Linux's different versions (or distributions, as they are called in the community), has well over four hundred listings. Faced with so many choices, how do you know what distribution is right for your business?

Hewlett-Packard is closing custom deals for thousands of desktop PCs running Linux, which has the company assessing the possibility of offering factory-loaded Linux systems, an HP executive said.

Dell's latest launch has really taken off. Unfortunately for Dell's crumbling profitability, it's a website called IdeaStorm, not a new PC. IdeaStorm is designed to get ideas and feedback from Dell users, and the mechanism is much the same as Digg: people make suggestions and everybody votes for the ones they like best.

Oracle Corp. promised to take the Linux software world by storm last October, but the major expansion by one of the world's largest software companies so far has failed to show momentum.

Unless something goes badly wrong, Red Hat Inc. will be releasing the next version of its flagship operating system, RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), on March 14.

Taiwan-based phone designer and manufacturer Accton Technology Corp. is marketing a Linux-based dual-mode phone design said to support both quad-band GSM and 802.11b/g networks. The VM3228T offers rich multimedia capabilities, and features seamless cellular/WiFi switch-over based on 3GPP standards, according to the company.

Australia's future economic prosperity will depend on it embracing the principles of community-driven technologies such as Linux and Second Life, according to Glen Boreham.

Even if it fails, 'One Laptop per Child' will have an enormous impact on the computing landscape.

In Samuel Beckett's masterpiece, Waiting for Godot, Godot never arrives, and the play ends with our characters still waiting. I sometimes think Linux users are also stuck in a barren landscape endlessly waiting for Dell, HP, Lenovo, or another major vendor to finally deliver a mass-market Linux desktop.

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