An Infamous Cyber-Cynic Falls In Love With Linux, Mar 09, 2009

How do you know when Linux has gone mainstream? When one of the tech industry's great cranky-pants pundits gives it a resounding thumbs-up.

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the launch of its third annual Red Hat Innovation awards to be presented at the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World, co-located this year in Chicago Sept. 1-4, 2009.

One of the intriguing battles over the past couple of months is a silent battle between Sun Microsystems and Red Hat. It’s silent because it is being played out deep inside the New York Stock Exchange and, unless you’re actively watching, you’ll have missed the tussle. At the same time it is an fascinating battle that represents many things: the old versus the new, Linux versus Unix and investor sentiment.

Steve McIntyre, Debian Project Leader talks about his work with the free open source Linux distribution.

A new battle is playing out in the Linux desktop arena. This new battle? GNOME vs. KDE.

Everywhere we turn these days, we see evidence of open source developers trading their time and hard work for little more than the hope of benefiting the ever-growing open source community.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer laid out who he thinks are the biggest threats today to Windows on the client side. Surprisingly, Apple wasn't number one. It wasn't number two or three either. Referring to a pie chart at the meeting that gauges threats to Windows, Ballmer said that Windows itself, both licensed and pirated, were the top two threats to Microsoft in the client OS space, followed by Linux, then Apple.

The Zenwalk developers have released version 6.0 of their "Zen computing" Linux distribution.

The performance results of different distributions, even ones running the same kernel version, the same core libraries, and the same filesystem can be very, very different.

With a recent study confirming that 90 percent of netbooks purchased in the last three months are running Windows, it appears that the initial spike in Linux use in netbooks has begun to fizzle out.

Microsoft takes a lot of grief for its stance on Linux, while IBM gets a lot of credit. Extending from that, the industry tends to view IBM as a paragon of open-source virtue while Microsoft plays the role of villain.

While it may go unnoticed for many PS3 owners, it’s Linux capabilities are becoming more talked about, especially due to the emulated games it can run, using systems like Yellow Dog Linux.

It's not news that Microsoft will get Windows 7 out as fast as possible this year. Vista has been a complete dog, so Microsoft will rush to deliver what is essentially a cleaned-up, lightweight version. What is news is that Google will have its own contender for desktop operating system king: Android.

The release of the very nice Asus Eee PC 1000HE signals a turning point in the sub-notebook market and it's one that Linux desktop advocates will not like. It looks like the 10 inch netbook has hit the sweet spot for consumers and that sweet spot includes Windows but not Linux.

No matter if you're exclusively a Windows shop, every good IT technician needs Linux in their toolkit.

While Linux is widely used in servers and is growing slowly on the desktop side, the embedded market for Linux is one that continues to have momentum. One such proof point for came this week from the year end financial results for embedded operating system vendor Wind River.

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