Will Linux Breathe Adobe's AIR?, Feb 28, 2008

You've probably heard by now about Adobe's AIR, a way to create "rich Internet applications" on the desktop. It's only for Windows and Mac at this point, but Adobe's plan is to eventually release it for Linux as well.

What is it about Ubuntu that has generated such excitement about Linux? To steal a word from Obama's playbook, "Change."

Linux needs to be the best thing that could happen to Linux. Anything less than that won't cut it.

I've been running Ubuntu Linux on my notebook, a Sony VAIO TX model, for some time now. I'm impressed with how stable it's been and how a whole raft of features like action-key support (for things like dimming the display) are available directly out of the box, without having to install additional stuff that I needed to download from Sony's site.

Whether you want to customize Knoppix, respin an existing distribution of the open-source operating system, like Puppy Linux, or are intent on creating your own package from scratch, we'll walk you through the process.

After the filing of the Verizon / BusyBox suit, and after reading about any number of other, similar incidents where a company showed what could only be seen as flagrant disregard for the GPL, I had to ask myself: Why do people do this? Are companies really that naive about the GPL, or do they just think they can get away with anything?

Now a cadre of Canberra Linux Users group folks have crafted a simple Web site to compel Windows and closed-source software uses to switch to Linux/FOSS: Make The Move. It's a great idea, but as much as I hate to admit it, I think the delivery needs work.

And so Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has finally agreed to give the Samba Team the protocol information it needs to allow systems that use Samba to interoperate as completely as possible with Windows Server machines. Based on the information Groklaw has provided about the agreement, it looks like this might be the first of many solutions to Microsoft's cagey Linux patent talk.

If you create a piece of open source software and discover that it has been put to use in a way you find personally distasteful or immoral, what would you do about it?

There's been more than a bit of buzz circulating in the Linux community about the upcoming release of KDE version 4, and there's also more than one way to try out the release candidate -- such as a live CD.

People in South Korea speak of folks in North Korea more as lost brothers than bitter enemies. Over the years the two have made various rapprochements, but now it looks like North and South are teaming up on a whole new kind of joint project: a Korean-language Linux distribution.

Some distributions of the open-source operating system are bloated, but Puppy Linux, Knoppix, SLAX, NimbleX, and -- yes -- Damn Small Linux will get you up and running fast.

After reading colleague Alexander Wolfe's piece about a Linux distro called "Vixta" that apes the look and feel of Windows Vista, I confess to having mixed feelings about the whole thing. Mostly negative ones.

Not long ago I blogged about fitting Linux onto an older system and giving it to someone who doesn’t need the latest model of PC. This week, I tried it with a notebook that’s about seven or eight years old. Windows XP barely ran. Linux gave it a new lease on life.

Maybe the truth is that Linux is already a success, and that talk of "the year of Linux on the desktop" is also misleading. Plain and simple: I don’t believe Linux has to eclipse Microsoft on the desktop to be viable. Frankly, I don’t think it has to eclipse anything at all.

Is your organization in the process of migrating from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice.org on Linux? If so, your biggest obstacle may not be getting used to the new suite, but rather moving from Microsoft's proprietary .doc format to OpenOffice's Open Document Format (ODF).

My father recently retired a 1-Ghz AMD computer with 1 Gbyte of RAM that he'd built from mail-ordered parts. He'd dropped the cash for a new Dell with Vista, which he likes quite a lot (no grousing, please, it happens), and let me have the old machine. My first move: Wipe it clean, install Linux, and prepare it for an exercise in "hand-me-down computing."

You ever get behind the wheel of a car that you just didn’t want to drive? Maybe the seat couldn’t be moved to the right height, or wasn’t adjustable at all, or there was just some strange, petty little thing that made you nuts? There may be a parallel between that experience and the reasons why some people just don’t want to use Linux.

If I have a Linux box and a Windows box, does that count in one, the other, or both, or neither? And if I download ten distributions but don’t actually use any one of them in a fulltime production system, does that count?

If you're a Vista-wary Windows user who would rather switch than fight, should you move to a Linux distro or Apple's OS X? We asked a Mac fan and a Linux advocate to lead a guided tour of each OS.