Dell moves 40,000 Ubuntu PCs, Nov 30, 2007

Dell has shipped close to 40,000 systems pre-installed with the Ubuntu flavor of Linux, according to multiple sources. By most accounts, that's a heck of a total for what remains more or less a fringe operating system.

Canonical's release of a fresh version of Ubuntu has been met with plenty of grumbles. And now we find some other open source players trying to cash in on Ubuntu's issues.

Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has shown all the loyalty of a free agent athlete. Just a few months after resigning from Linspire, Carmony has traded in his old company's Linux operating system for Ubuntu.

Red Hat is suffering from JBoss reflux, according to a pair of prominent open source software watchers.

Canonical has busted out yet another version of Ubuntu – this time taking aim at the much hyped and loved virtualization market.

We went to OSCON, hoping to uncover some fresh details on Sun Microsystems' "Project Indiana." We mostly failed in this endeavor.

Should you believe Red Hat's claims that its new Exchange marketplace for "open source business applications" contains nothing but open source business applications? We say "no" - since not even Red Hat appears to have a good answer for this question.

Red Hat last week continued its appliance assault via a partnership with Symantec.

Sun Microsystems has moved one mailing list posting closer to explaining how it plans to mimic the Linux distribution model with OpenSolaris.

Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz has blunted whatever public niceties existed between his company and Microsoft with a revealing attack on Redmond's lawsuit threats around open source software.

... the new version of Linux ships on April 19 as Ubuntu 7.04 Server Edition, Desktop Edition and Edubuntu.

Despite such concrete turns in the Linux market, Oracle's support plan continues to be more bluster than muster, according to Mark Shuttleworth, whose company Canonical oversees Ubuntu Linux.

Red Hat has put Fedora Core 6 up for grabs. Xen fans and Mac fans have been asked to rejoice.

Wall Street continues to drool over the idea of Oracle producing its own line of Linux software for reasons unclear to us.

Those wondering how Oracle would respond to Red Hat's purchase last week of JBoss didn't have to wait long for some action. Chief Oracle Larry Ellison dropped a few not so subtle bombs during a recent interview, saying he would buy a Linux maker if the companies had some real value. Given that Ellison doesn't think Red Hat or Novell worth their market cap, he may order Oracle to fire up its own version of Linux.

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn't hack Tuttle's web site at all. The city's hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

Red Hat has shipped a fresh version of its high-end Linux operating system that pushes support for large x86 systems much higher.

Little Penguin Computing has nabbed one of HP's major hardware executives, announcing that Pauline Nist will officially join the company next week.

Dell this week received much praise for releasing a new version of its "open source" PC. The computer fits into Dell's n Series range of Windows-less systems. These ship with a copy of FreeDOS in the packaging material - but not installed on the PC - which is apparently a bizarre concession to Microsoft.

Shares of Red Hat jumped today as the software maker revealed that strong sales pushed second quarter revenue significantly higher.