2007: A good year for geeks, Dec 27, 2007

The $299 Eee PC subnotebook, Wal-Mart's $199 Everex Green PC, and even the $99 Zonbu desktop aren't ideal Volkscomputers, but they are precisely the kicks in the pants that the industry needed: a push to make machines that are universally affordable, and a Linux that can be operated and maintained by people other than smug bearded men.

We knew that the Asus Eee PC was going to be popular, but no one expected it to become this popular. Sales figures are starting to roll in for the Asus Eee PC and it turns out that Asus has shipped over 350,000 units thus far, outperforming all early estimations.

Doubts about whether poor, rural children really can benefit from quirky little computers evaporate as quickly as the morning dew in this hilltop Andean village, where 50 primary school children got machines from the One Laptop Per Child project six months ago.

The Southern California Linux Expo has filled all available speaker slots for not only the SCALE 6X main conference, but also all three Friday specialty conferences.

They also have made a new driver package for Linux available for download. Unlike the Windows package this one adds quite a bit of new features.

Software licensed under the GPL open source license is considered to be Free Software but that doesn't mean it's free as in beer and that developers don't have rights.

There are 35 days left before Australia's national Linux conference gets underway in Melbourne on January 28 but tickets have already sold out.

And so Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has finally agreed to give the Samba Team the protocol information it needs to allow systems that use Samba to interoperate as completely as possible with Windows Server machines. Based on the information Groklaw has provided about the agreement, it looks like this might be the first of many solutions to Microsoft's cagey Linux patent talk.

The healthcare services company moved 50 of its 70 applications to Linux over the last two years and will complete the process with the remaining 20 within a year or two.

The hottest thing on YouTube this month isn't The Dark Knight trailer or that clip of a baby giving an evil eye. It's video of somebody downloading a copy of Ubuntu, a Linux-based operating system.

Sometimes putting together a best-of-the-year list is like pulling teeth. There simply isn't enough big news to fill the list out. That was not a problem for desktop Linux in 2007.

The entry cost for personal computing is tumbling thanks to lower component prices, the greater popularity of low-cost (and often Linux-based) operating systems and free open software.

By announcing last week it would begin providing indirect technical support for OpenOffice.org, Sun Microsystems Inc. took another quiet step towards admitting that the 'freemium' business model it has employed for the past five years has been -- at least in regards to sibling StarOffice -- a failure.

The Open Source Consortium has welcomed the BBC's move to make its iPlayer online on-demand TV service available for streaming on operating systems other than Microsoft Windows.

Belgian developer Dries Buytaert is on the verge of putting open source CMS (content management system) Drupal officially into business.

Desktop Linux became the most popular topic in open source during 2007, as evidenced by the our August post asking if Ubuntu had clinched the desktop Linux market.

Even before I picked up Unix, I worked on networks. While networking has gotten simpler, it's almost all TCP/IP now instead of Arcnet, Token-Ring and a half dozen dusty wiring and protocol schemes. The services that use networking have gotten ever more powerful and more complicated. That's why a book like Carla Schroder's Linux Networking Cookbook is so valuable.

The growing prominence of Linux in China is resulting in an industry event to take place there in February, co-sponsored by the Linux Foundation and Chinese OSS Promotion Union, the foundation announced Monday.

Here are my impressions of the Eee PC after two weeks of using one. I have shown this laptop to hundreds of people who have visited the public library where I work.

The first thing we can say about the Linux desktop in 2007 is that there are more users than ever. The Linux Foundation 2006 survey had fewer than 10,000 people signing in. This year more than 20,000 Linux desktop users reported in.

Either there really is no "average" computer user, or "Mrs. D" is just not your "average" average user.

Linux, an alternative open-source operating system, is nothing new to small business. As a server platform, Linux is widely used to share files and run Web servers, not to mention routing e-mail and serving up the shared calendar and task capabilities that compete with Microsoft Exchange.

LinuxInsider met with Zemlin to get his views on the changing trends in open source computing and his predictions for where all of this is headed in the new year.

CMP Channel Test Center conducted its first-ever World Series of Linux, looking at six desktop distributions of the Open Source OS. Over three rounds, they were put through the paces to see if Linux is ready for prime time.

Is Steve Ballmer on the list?” “Yes,” said Santa. “He has a reality-distortion field too, but he only uses it on himself — he thinks his employees are happy, Google is a fad, and Linux is full of stolen Windows source code.”

The GTK port of the WebKit HTML rendering engine has gained support for the HTML5 video element. The media backend, which uses GStreamer, was implemented by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin of Collabora. Developer Alp Toker integrated the backend with GTk/WebKit's Cairo graphics pipeline, making it possible for the video content to be embedded in SVG and manipulated with CSS and JavaScript.

I have one. I’m just one in ... well, quite a few thousand, really – but nevertheless, their supply has been surpassed by the demand. Yes, I’m talking about the ASUS Eee PC, the diminutive priced highly popular subnotebook which has brought Linux to the masses. Here are my complete first impressions and experiences, from the box through power on.

A streaming version of the BBC's iPlayer online TV on-demand service has been launched for the Windows, Mac and Linux platforms.

Last week we learned how to create text frames, and how to control text flow across multiple frames. Today we're going to learn some great shortcut for navigating long documents, some simple tricks for managing photo printing, and how to turn on KWord's text-to-speech engine and make it read to you.

After spending the past month with the Eee, the answer for me is still no. For sure, the Linux-based, 2-lb. Eee is an all-in-one wonder that I enjoy using as much or more than most of the notebooks I've owned in the past. It has exceeded my expectations in many areas.

A little-known Taiwanese firm that makes motherboards for brand-name PCs has put its own moniker on one of the lightest, sleekest, cheapest laptops ever to connect to cyberspace.

Linux is an alternative operating system to Microsoft Windows and, although it’s completely free to use, it can be complicated to set up.

Apple and Linux are engaged in battle – a battle to win over disgruntled Windows users. But who will win, and what will the consequences be for the loser?

The New York Stock Exchange is investing heavily in x86-based Linux systems and blade servers as it builds out the NYSE Hybrid Market trading system that it launched last year. Flexibility and lower cost are among the goals. But one of the things that NYSE Euronext CIO Steve Rubinow says he most wants from the new computing architecture is technology independence.

While we haven't heard much more about the gOS laptop with the $300 price tag, word is that Everex will be equipping another portable model -- the 7-inch, VIA-based, ultra-portable Nanobook -- with a $400 MSRP and its Google-themed Linux OS.

Oslo, Norway-based Trolltech announced the promotion of KHTML creator Lars Knoll to VP of Engineering. Knoll's KHTML work was instrumental in the development of the Webkit open source browser engine that is fast gaining momentum in the mobile phone market.

I read an article on CNN a couple days ago about Linux and ewaste reduction. It wasn’t until I spent far too long shoveling my driveway tonight, though, that I had time to give the article any thought. At first blush, it seems to be another ringing endorsement of Linux. Free, open source, and with the power to save the earth, besides? I should be jumping up and down, right?

What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world? Rory Cellan-Jones brought an XO home to find out.

In Gartner Inc.’s forecast for the server operating systems market, there’s nothing listed under the category of emerging products. And although the market is by no means static, the pace of change inside many corporate data centers is slow.

In 2004, health care software vendor McKesson Provider Technologies began focusing on ways to cut IT costs for customers, including hospitals and medical offices.

Although China's Linux market as a whole doubled from 2003 to 2006 to $20 million per year, sales of Linux desktop software grew more slowly. In fact, the market share of Linux desktop software in China dropped from 16% to 12% in the same period.

Sales of Asustek Computer's Eee PC have soared in its first few months on the market, but success may be its undoing. Rivals are already developing products to compete with the low-cost laptop PC, market researcher Gartner says.

Seagate has issued a workaround for Linux users who want to use its Free Agent drives.

Everex has confirmed plans to ship a UMPC (ultra-mobile PC) with a 7-inch screen, similar to competitor Asus's EEE PC. A source close to the company revealed that the device -- codenamed "Cloudbook" -- will ship with the Google Apps-oriented "gOS" Linux distribution early next year.

Switching on a Linux PC for the first time may be a little disorientating as many options are in different places. Follow our guide and find your feet quickly and easily with the Ubuntu version of Linux.

Back in 1999 I remember the first PC entered our house coming preloaded with Windows 98. One of the things I liked about it was the defragmentation screen where blocks presenting 'datablocks' on the harddrive were moving over the screen for almost eternally. I remember at that time it seemed like a logical maintenance requirement for any filesystem.

Living in Africa we have abundant sun, a power source we rarely consider when we buy yet another gadget. Along comes the Aleutia E1, an ultra low power computer setup that can be run from a roll up solar panel or car battery and runs Puppy Linux.

SEAGATE'S latest batch of drives, the ironically titled Free Agent series are not compatible with the Open Sauce operating system Linux.

Although most Eee PC owners are satisfied with their $350 to $399 USD purchases, they have been faced with the prospect of voiding their warranty by simply removing two screws from the bottom access panel to upgrade the memory.

Sometimes, several unrelated changes come to a head at the same time, with a result no one could have predicted. The PC market is at such a tipping point right now and the result will be millions of Linux-powered PCs in users' hands.

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