As we lead up to the 2003 Open Choice Awards here at Open for Business, we start afresh on our desktop distribution survey. Over the next few weeks we will consider Mandrake and Red Hat's latest entries, as well as lesser-known Libranet GNU/Linux. Today, however, we put the microscope on the successor to the spring Penguin Shootout award's winner — SuSE Linux 8.1.
About a month ago, NeTraverse contacted OfB Labs with an early release copy of Win4Lin 5.0, the follow-up to the already impressive Win4Lin 4.0 released in May 2002. Win4Lin, for those not familiar with it, offers near-native (or better) speed “virtualization” of a Windows box so that one can run Windows 9x (95/98/Me) inside GNU/Linux.
Ximian, one of the most influential companies in the GNOME community and publishers of an enhanced version of the same desktop, announced Ximian Desktop 2, also known simply as “XD2” today. XD2 is the first offering from Ximian to be based on GNOME2, which was released last June.
Lindows.com announced today that it has previously entered into an agreement through which SCO would provide Lindows with certain technology. According to Michael Robertson, CEO of Lindows.com, this means that Lindows.com customers will not have to worry about SCO's ongoing attempts to “protect its IP.” Interestingly enough, this may cause a much larger impact than Robertson bargained for.
In a number of stories that broke today, the SCO-IBM conflict continued to grow to include Novell Corp., the company that SCO's (formerly Caldera) founders came from, and perhaps even Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself. Links and further information within.
If you have been paying as close attention as I have been to the current and near future of Microsoft, the Windows operating system, and Microsoft's most recent purchases, then you are likely to come to the following conclusion. If you haven't, then read on.
Well, it seems to be official. After more rumblings, denials of rumblings, rumblings about the denials of rumblings, SCO is now playing hardball (or is that harderball?). The beleagured Linux company formerly known as Caldera is now claiming that some UNIX code is hidden in the Linux kernel, but will not release the information Free Software developers need to try to fix the problem. Instead, SCO CEO Darl McBride refuses to release that information out of fear the community would “launder the evidence.”
Over the last year, ATI has shocked observers by not only taking the video card performance crown from nVidia, but also keeping it. This trend appears bound to continue for the foreseeable future with the recently released Radeon 9800 that has taken much of the spotlight away from nVidia's card intended to surpass the 9700.
A few months ago I had a few minutes of free time on my hands and so I made a stop at Best Buy to browse for some networking equipment. As I walked toward the hardware section, a software package caught my eye that I hadn't heard of before: “Acronis PartitionExpert.” Realizing the need for a good partitioning tool in many environments that use GNU/Linux, I made a mental note to contact Acronis when I got back to the office.