Wind River Flying High With Linux, Sep 08, 2006

Software developer Wind River Systems has been getting some traction lately, as seen with the strength of its second-quarter results. On the news, the stock price rose 6% to $10.83. But the big issue is whether the company can sustain this growth.

Last week at the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, IBM officials announced a "fundamental expansion" of what the company is doing around open source -- software whose code is "open" to alterations from users.

The cost of supporting Netware, Novell's old flagship OS, is keeping the company from wholeheartedly joining the exploding Linux market.

Nokia Corp. is adding the Google Talk application to a Nokia handheld Internet browsing device, in a move that could help boost the search company's reach in mobile communications.

Open source software is stable, secure, liked by users and can save the government money.

[Estonia] gave the Linux-based voting system a trial run in January, when about 600 people voted online in a referendum in the capital, Tallinn. The plan is to allow online voting in the next parliamentary elections in 2007.

Billionaire Michael S. Dell, founder and chairman of Dell Inc., has placed a $99.5 million bet on Red Hat.

Linspire calls their product the world’s easiest desktop Linux. I cannot disagree. Of the different flavors of Linux that I’ve tried in the recent past, Linspire is, hands down, the easiest to install, configure and use.

Microsoft said Ballmer's e-mail did not violate federal anti-spam regulations. But anti-spam activists and legal experts said the message does not make it easy for people to remove themselves from future mailings, as required by the law.

Open-source geeks are devout in their belief that software should be free to all, and hold as their icon the Linux alternative to the Microsoft commercial empire. As unpaid volunteers who collaborate to develop open source code, they tend to be anti-corporate types. So they watched with some trepidation as a capitalist giant, IBM, began pouring money into Linux, capped by a $1 billion investment in 2001. Yet in the past year, the corporation known as Big Blue has seen its reputation in the global open-source community shift from suspect sugar daddy to knight in shining armor.

When small companies announce they’re putting Linux OS on a computer it makes news. When they announce they’re putting it on a laptop it’s even bigger news. Now you’re beginning to realize how big a deal it was when computer giant Hewlett-Packard announced they were selling a laptop with Linux inside.

Hewlett-Packard is now taking orders for their nx5000 business notebook computers with Novell’s SuSE Linux 9.1 installed. I’ve happy to report that the combination is a winner.

Microsoft executive Martin Taylor's schedule is packed with meetings like the one in June when he met with representatives from French drugmaker Aventis in his Redmond, Wash. office. Aventis has tied together groups of computers running not Microsoft's operating system but the freely available Linux. These high-performance clusters can analyze proteins at blazing speeds. "That's great for Linux," Taylor said cheerily, at the time.

That same week -- by coincidence, the company says-- Microsoft announced plans for a new version of Windows software to handle exactly the kind of high-performance computing Aventis had set up. Says Taylor now, "I'll knock on their door in a few months so they can check out our stuff."

Webmaster's note: I couldn't resist. It's Friday

Microsoft Corp. said Friday that its latest version of Office software inadvertently contained a font featuring two swastikas, and said it would offer tools to remove and replace the offending characters from the program.

Actually using 4.0 is quite easy. If you’re used to most Linux distributions or Windows it shouldn’t take long to figure out how to use Lindows. And all those new features listed above really work! I’m impressed that Lindows 4.0 even recognized three digital cameras I plugged in, allowed me to listen to Real Audio streams without any hiccups and, a first, allowed me to watch DVDs with no problems at all. Those are big improvements over the last version of the OS. It took less than thirty seconds to get my WiFi card up and running on my wireless home network.