Linux To Regain 50% Netbook Market Share, May 20, 2009

The past couple of weeks saw a flurry or articles debating the future of Linux on netbooks. A report in the Taipei Times on May 9th was picked up by LinuxToday but largely ignored by the tech press and the blogosphere. Stephen Lim, the General Manager of Taiwan based Linpus Technologies, made the surprising prediction that Linux will regain 50% market share from Windows on netbooks by next year.

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 the growing popularity of netbooks more and more people are using small screens which support lower resolutions than larger laptops or desktop displays.

In most current Linux distributions if you plug in a piece of removable media, anything ranging from a USB memory stick to a removable hard drive to a memory card, an icon pops up on the desktop and/or a file manager window opens. The same thing happens if you insert a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM into a drive.

A while back the good folks behind Freespire, the free version of Linspire, sent me a CD with version 2.0 for me to review. I was very happy to look at it as Linspire has been a leader in getting preloaded Linux systems into retail and online outlets, something I believe is critical for mainstream Linux adoption.

You might have heard of Microsoft's Silverlight technology. It's a rich internet application (RIA) framework positioned to rival Adobe's Flash. Unlike Flash however, it's only available for Windows and Mac, not Linux. This is where Moonlight comes in. Moonlight is a project to create a Silverlight plug-in for the Mono environment, which will run on Linux, Mac and Windows.

Back in January I wrote a review of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard. The fact that as I write this, over five months later, that review is still in the O’Reillynet Blogs Hot 25 says a lot about just how much interest there is in this up and coming Canadian distribution, a user friendly derivative of Slackware.

A unique survey ran on O'Reilly's web site during the first three months of 2007, aimed at people who contribute free documentation to online mailing lists, web sites, and other forums. The survey garnered 354 responses, which in itself indicates the thriving state of free documentation and the dedication of the people who write it.

I’m probably not saying anything that hasn’t been said before here, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts on why people seem to be drawn to the Microsoft Way. I recently did something at the ‘day job’ that I’ve thought about doing for a long time, but never quite worked up the steam to follow through on, I signed up to participate in a a Microsoft-centric project, and to learn .NET.

Some years ago Linux creator Linux Torvalds famously compared changing operating systems to “performing brain surgery on yourself”. I’ve quoted him often because so many people seem to have unrealistic expectations when they pick up a Linux DVD or CD-ROM.

With the final release of Ubuntu 6.10 approaching, and apparently set to be spot on schedule October 26th, we're starting to look beyond it to Ubuntu 7.04, scheduled for release on 19 April 2007.

As usual, the dividing line between legal and illegal (or permitted and infringing) rests on the legal definition of a derivative work.

There are no rules for indie media, other than maybe "honor the content," where content is some combination of the idea and truth. Otherwise, especially with something like an interview, there wouldn't be any creativity at all--just the raw data.

As nice as Kubuntu is, the default installation doesn't fit every user. This article shows how to get help, get access to more software packages, set up a firewall, and review and get rid of unnecessary services.

Well, I still don't own a Mac, as lovely and tempting as they are. Linux is working out great for my needs. Here's a quick outline.

David Berlind over at ZDNet wrote a remarkable article called Did Microsoft send the wrong guy to Massachusetts' ODF hearing?. If you missed this article, you'll have missed the equivalent of what Intel's Andy Grove called an inflection point. This one has the potential to have more impact than the release of the first Pentium processor.

There are very few people in the world who fully understand Open Source. Sure, you can understand it from a technical perspective, but the social threads that cascade through the thousands of sub-communities are intensely difficult to truly understand.

For the last couple of years, we've been homeschooling our two youngest kids. Gloria has been making sure they learn the easy subjects like history and mathematics. I've been making sure they also learn the hard subjects like, um, cinematography. So I've been making sure they view some of the great classics.

In a recent interview, ESR shocked a lot of people when he said, "We don't need the GPL anymore." Federico Biancuzzi recently contacted RMS to talk about the past, the present, and the future of the GNU GPL. Among other things, they discussed the new clauses of the upcoming GPL version 3.

Analysts who deny Linux's place in the enterprise as a desktop have either failed to interrogate the system thoroughly or have a bias.