The goal is tough, the reviewers tougher, and while the lineup of contenders are all worthy the award, only one will receive it. In this report, Open for Business' Timothy R. Butler grills Xandros in the first of a multi-part series to find out which vendor has created the best GNU/Linux distribution in town.
InformationWeek reports on the exciting news that 8-year old RedHat Software of North Carolina has made a profit for the first time. ” Leading Linux provider Red Hat Inc. climbed into the black for the first time in its eight-year history during the quarter ended in November. The company says it had a profit of $305,000 on revenue of $24.3 million for the third quarter. A year ago, Red Hat lost $15.1 million on revenue of $20.1 million.”
eWeek has a nice interview with Linus Torvalds as well as an overview of the upcoming Linux 2.6/3.0 release. “Although I have a soft spot for Jan. 5 [for the freeze] … it will be exactly 12 years since I got the PC that was to become the first Linux PC.”
Craig Drummond has released a new theme and “engine” for GTK programs that provides something many people have been looking for: a common look and feel for KDE and GNOME applications. While Red Hat's Blue Curve attempts to do something similar, Mr. Drummond's Geramik is the first theme implementation to provide smooth integration between environments.
infoSync has the story on a new batch of Zaurus PDA's from Sharp Electronics. Zaurus handhelds offer form factors and features similar to PocketPC units, but include a special version of Linux and TrollTech Qtopia in lieu of Windows CE. “The SL-5600 will use the same general form factor as the current SL-5500 model. However, it will run on a 400 MHz Intel XScale PXA-250 CPU. Rather than using a split-RAM architecture like the Sl-5500 and Pocket PCs do, the SL-5600 will have 32 MB of RAM that is dedicated to just active memory.”
Linux and Main has full coverage of the Microsoft antitrust trial decision announced a few minutes ago. “'The court is satisfied that the parties have reached a settlement which comports with the public interest,' said Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee. The ruling flies in the face of thousands of public comments to the contrary, many filed by Linux users.”
No matter how often it has been said, it seems that many GNU/Linux and Macintosh users refuse to see the obvious. The response to a recent article of mine demonstrated this statement as well as any other example I can think of. What is so obvious? That while speciality software and functionality is nice, it isn't going to make or break adoption of an operating system.
DebianPlanet has a surprisingly negative review of Debian GNU/Linux 3.0, mostly highlighting the installation problems that keep the average user from enjoying Debian's unique advantages. “This is a critical review of Debian 3.0, but I want to say right from the start that I'm not trying to bait anyone. However I feel that reviewers often root for Debian as the open-source underdog, and give it marks which it doesn't deserve. If RedHat 8.0 came out with installation software like Debian 3.0 it would be savaged. I think it's time for an honest review, to spur the Debian developers into making the best possible distribution. I really want Debian to succeed. I want to use it daily, and recommend it to my friends. But I can't do that right now and I think it's important people understand why.”