Is Sony a Linux killer?, Aug 31, 2009

Most people welcomed the news that the Sony PlayStation 3 was slimming down, both in physical size and in terms of off the shelf pricing. The Linux crowd are not so impressed however.

Since its inception in 2004, Ubuntu has been the beneficiary in what seems like a bottomless money pit for South African entrepreneur, Mark Shuttleworth via his commercial support and development venture, Canonical.

I recently upgraded a friend of mine to Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop for his five-year-old Acer laptop with 512 MB of RAM. He immediately fell in love with the GNOME interface, the speed at which the system booted and how snappy it responded to his barrage of clicking. He was in heaven. What came next was a bit of a shock. A few days after the "big transition," I received a frantic phone call.

Yesterday, Apple announced significant price drops on many of its consumer products including the iPhone and Mac Air.

Have you bought a Kindle or Kindle 2 yet? Don't--at least not until you check out the COOL-ER ebook reader. The COOL-ER is Linux-based and is ready to deliver with 128MB RAM, 1GB storage (Expandable to 4GB--SD Card) and its SamsungŪ S3C2440 ARM 400MHz processor.

The Kickfire appliance is a Linux-based, rack-mountable, database appliance tuned for Data Warehousing.

I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) and am happy to say it's an overall success. However, (and this is a big however) I don't really see that big of an improvement over previous versions. I use Ubuntu 8.04 and am perfectly satisfied with it. 9.04 has OpenOffice.org 3.x but so what? I can install that myself.

Apple users are the most dedicated and fervent operating system fans with undying loyalty to their operating system, hardware and peripherals. And they're just as loyal now to the new Unix-based OS X as they were to the old proprietary Mac OS. However, when given the option of a Linux-based computer or a Windows-based one, 100% say they would rather use Linux.

The Linux desktop is in danger of extinction. There's still a glimmer of hope in the unlikeliest of places: Schools.

One new survey of more than 1100 IT professionals from small, mid-sized, and large IT organisations worldwide has revealed that an astonishing 84 percent have absolutely no plans to upgrade to Windows 7 during the course of the next year - and that in the face of some pretty encouraging and enthusiastic reports from beta testers so far.

Linux OS Server shipments have and will continue to slip by double-digit margins in 2009. Windows Server shipments are hit hard as well but almost 5% less so than those of Linux. The original report came from IDC.

As much as Microsoft loves to grinch about Linux, they've made significant changes over the years to compete with it--and will abandon it altogether to maintain their competitive edge. Windows 7 will be the last Windows product.

Is there a stimulus package on the way for those who use Linux and Open Source Software? You bet there is but it might not come from where you'd expect. Too many wasted stimulus dollars have already rained down upon those who wasted their own money but this time it'll be different.

Cisco in the server hardware business? With VMware? Using Linux? Has the world gone topsy-turvy?

The general consensus is that Windows dominates the Netbook space. The info was gathered from sales reports by Asus, MSI, Dell and Sylvania. This news is an amazing smackdown to those of us who were hoping that the Netbook space would be overwhelmingly Linux-owned.

Here's some good news for a change: Linux-related jobs are on the rise.

The EE Times reported earlier this week that the Dell E4200 and E4300 laptops are running both Linux and Windows on the same machine. Why both you ask?

Unfortunately, until today it looked like only Windows users were going to be able to play, but the BBC has now announced a deal with Adobe which will add Flash video streaming to the iPlayer service and let Linux users get in on the act.