Farmer gives low-cost laptop a proper field test, Feb 14, 2008

FROM his hot, dusty, locust-plagued property in the NSW outback, a software engineer who goes by the name Quozl is doing his bit to help educate 1.5 billion of the world's poorest children.

Novell hopes its SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 (SLED) will tempt everyday computer owners to abandon Windows and switch to a newer, cheaper and supposedly better alternative.

Leaving Windows takes more than courage. While Microsoft's operating system can be frustrating at times, staying in the Windows comfort zone is probably the only sensible option for most of us.

In geek speak; Knoppix is a Linux Live CD. That means it runs the Linux operating system directly from the CD, bypassing the hard drive making it a useful very useful tool.

The use of Linux and other open source software in Australia and New Zealand is miles behind North America, according to tech research company Forrester.

Crest Electronics chose a Linux operating system, then seven months on, the company chose to abandon it for Windows. Adam Turner explains why.

When Bill Robertson decided last year to switch 450 workers and 100 desktops at De Bortoli Wines to the open source Firefox web browser, he had the company's future in mind.

A road test of Windows XP, various Linux distributions and the Mac OS X by the non-profit Australian Consumer Association's Choice magazine has concluded that there is little difference between them when it comes to ease of use.

An updated Linux vs Windows TCO study has found that a 250-seat company can end up saving 36 percent if it were to equip its users with the open source operating system and applications that run on it.

The Windows vs Linux security debate has been given a fresh lease of life following the publication of a study by well-known tech journalist Nicholas Petreley which predictably concludes that Microsoft "Get The Facts" campaign does not deal with the "real facts."

One of the oldest Linux distributions may drop the GNOME desktop and leave it to users to install this environment if they so wish.

Melbourne firm Cybersource has taken the idea of a read-only device to its logical conclusion and come up with what it calls a Safe Internet Computer, one that runs off a CD and is immune to worms, spyware and all the other filth that inhabits the internet these days.

Linux users running a 2.6 series kernel and using iptables for firewalling have been advised to upgrade to fix a bug which could be exploited remotely to cause a denial of service.

Novell will launch its own Linux distribution, aimed at the enterprise, before the end of the year, the company's solutions manager for the Asia-Pacific, Paul Kangro said yesterday.

Kangro demonstrated the features of the forthcoming distribution, which will be named Novell Linux Desktop, during a roadshow organised in Melbourne yesterday.

A German study claims that the use of open source software can result in savings of up to 30 percent compared to proprietary alternatives.

The German firm Soeren Research, which issued the findings based on interviews with over 50 organisations, found that the savings came from reduced licence fees and operating costs.

Here at the Bleeding Edge 2004 electoral campaign, we're agonising again over how to cast our vote. Should we stick with the incumbent or elect a new candidate to look after our affairs?

It's a much more difficult choice than voting for either John Howard or Mark Latham. What we have to decide is whether to stick with Windows XP or move to Linux.

The lack of skilled administrators is to some extent a hurdle in the way of companies adopting Linux on the desktop, HP's Linux chief technology officer, Bdale Garbee, said yesterday.

Asked whether the emergence of a large number of so-called sysadmins, who could only control a network by clicking on a graphic user interface had anything to do with the lag in Linux take-up for common tasks, Garbee, a former leader of the Debian GNU/Linux Project, agreed that it was, to some extent, a factor.

Linux has long been seen as the IT industry’s country cousin: good enough to drive low-end PCs and web servers but not sophisticated enough to support high-end enterprise systems. However, the open source operating system has come a long way, and a growing number of IT directors are finding a role for Linux in the back office.

Decision-support tool TradeSignal, for example, uses Linux to support its real-time financial information service, which distributes 400 million stock prices in real time to futures brokers in the US and Europe. The cost of late or corrupt data could run into billions and systems reliability is vital to the company, says technical director Stephen Egan. Red Hat Linux offers TradeSignal that reliability, in addition to a 60 per cent cost saving over the previous Sun/Solaris environment. “I don’t have anything against Microsoft or Sun but with figures like that, it was a pretty simple decision,” Egan says.

According to ITV's director of technology operations and infrastructure, Nick Leake, the company is moving most of its servers to Linux and would like to move its desktops too, although it plans to standardise mainly on Windows XP and Citrix for the next five years.

"We had servers that had cost hundreds of thousands of pounds only a few years ago," Leake says. "We took them out and replaced them with (Linux) servers with half as many processors, and the hardware cost of those servers was less than the hardware maintenance bill of the ones we were taking out. And with half as many processors, we were getting a 20-30 per cent performance gain. The economics of that are quite compelling."

Starting this week, more than 700 IT professionals will attend Linux education events staged by Novell and IBM in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Auckland. The vendors say their low-cost workshops will jump-start the exploitation of Linux in business beyond the pilot project, by demystifying the free operating system and exposing myths.

These include a perception that Linux is complex and command-line-driven, difficult to use and understand, immature, hard to manage, not ready for important applications, has an unfamiliar user interface and requires people to do lots of retraining.