One reason I love attending LinuxWorld is the show floor; it’s a great opportunity to learn more about Linux-related companies that you’d otherwise probably not encounter at smaller events. One such company is Unicon Systems, who won the LinuxWorld Best of Show award for an embedded solution.

Their amazing product, a $600 mobile development kit, conveniently called the MKit, which greatly lowers the entry barriers into the mobile and embedded device market. If you have a great idea for a new product of thils ilk, you should definitely take some time to learn more about Unicon Systems.

Jason

Title says it all…

Download Flash Player 9 Beta 3 for Linux

While the pundits have been proclaiming the rise of the Linux desktop for just about as long as Linux has existed, it remains to be seen whether any en masse desktop adoption awaits us (I’m talking general public adoption, and not adoption among those likely to be reading this blog). Although distributions like Ubuntu, and great resources such as our newly released “Beginning Ubuntu, Second Edition”, by award-winning author Keir Thomas is slowly changing my opinion that the Linux desktop could soon emerge in much the same way Firefox did.

Another indication is the growing number of stories such as “Digital World: The Rise of Linux (finally?)” appearing in mainstream publications such as The Jerusalem Post. If anything, it’s an indication of the growing influence of Linux and open source in society at-large.

But perhaps the most telling indication is highlighted in part in Paul Graham’s excellent new essay, “Microsoft is Dead”. I’ve never been much of a Microsoft-basher, although admittedly Vista has left me muttering the Redmond giant’s name in conjunction with no small number of four-letter words over the past month. Microsoft finds itself in a very tough position, needing to figure out how to adapt its all-encompassing operating system to gel with a user base far more dependent on Web-based applications than ever before, yet Vista’s incredibly long development cycle coupled with its questionable outcome could quite possibly have closed the window on the company’s ability to adjust to this demand in time.

Ultimately, exactly why will the general public even need an operating system (i.e. Linux) capable of booting to little more than a browser in 5-10 years? With Gmail/Flickr/Google Office/Firefox/Pandora/SugarCRM/etc it certainly seems plausible, and in fact likely. One must wonder why high-profile open source projects such as OpenOffice and Thunderbird aren’t working on web-based versions, as the writing certainly seems to be on the wall regarding the pending death of the desktop client. We’re not there yet, but all indications are showing that’s where we’re going.

In an unprecedented annoucement on Greg Kroah-Hartman’s blog, he announced that the Linux kernel community would development free Linux kernel drivers for any company willing to simply give them some specs and (maybe) some hardware to development against. This is simply wonderful. Personally, I think this is the biggest announcement of 2007 for Linux. Sure, many people will say, “Well, that’s the way it has always been! If they would give us specs we would write the drivers.” Well, sorry, it hasn’t been happening. Sometimes, it takes an announcement like this to wake people up. When people install an operating system, they like their hardware to “just work”. This can get us there.

The Microsoft/Novell deal continues to elicit a great deal of discussion within the open source community, with some calling for a boycott of Novell products and services. While I find the agreement a tad concerning, I think the jury is still out as to what ultimately is going to become of this. In fact, one must wonder whether this will prompt Microsoft-oriented developers and consultants to begin exploring Linux on the basis their current and future clients may ask them to help out with integration and deployment projects.

At any rate, Novell and its community is hard at work trying to quell the fears of the general open source public. Recently, the OpenSUSE team recently held an IRC session to answer questions regarding the ramifications of this agreement. It makes for very interesting reading, you can find a complete transcript here.

I found this part of the chat particularly intriguing:

Nov 27 11:21:05 We’re paying for the promise that Microsoft made to our customers not to sue them
Nov 27 11:21:43 Not to sue them for what? For problems you don’t acknowledge exist?
Nov 27 11:21:57 Well, we put together an agreement with MS to make Linux and Windows work better together
Nov 27 11:22:03 *zippy (n=zero@xdslg239.osnanet.de) has joined #opensuse-project
Nov 27 11:22:05 Now, as everyone knows, MS has spent the last 10 years saying negative things about Linux
Nov 27 11:22:11 including implying that there are IP issues in Linux
Nov 27 11:22:30 It didn’t make sense for us to do a partnersihp with MS on interoperability issues and still have this patent cloud hanging around for our customers
Nov 27 11:22:36 *lmb (i=lmb@1.0.0.127.in-addr.de) has joined #opensuse-project
Nov 27 11:22:39 and so MS asked us to put together a patent agreement as well.
Nov 27 11:23:00 And so, we promise MS’s customers that we won’t sue them and they promise the same thing to our customres
Nov 27 11:23:08 They pay us for our promise and we pay them for their promise
Nov 27 11:23:24 It doesn’t matter if the allegations from MSFT are true or not

I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but if Novell and its customers are now protected from future lawsuits over patent violations, what does the future hold for other Linux-minded companies such as Red Hat?

Read the IRC log

“I wouldn’t try to apply an Oracle operating system patch to one of my RHEL servers. That would probably lead to some instabilities,” said Tabor Wells, director of technology for Smarter Living, which runs the SmarterTravel.com and BookingBuddy.com websites.

Click here to read the article.

The main themes for feature development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.

Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for both users and developers.

All this is a little late, considering SUSE and Mandriva already have these features built in. Rather unexpectedly for those who considered Ubuntu the Best Hope Yet for the Linux desktop, Ubuntu is now playing catch-up, not only compared to other Linux distros but also compared to Windows Vista.

But I don’t want to moan (yes, really). I’m just happy one of my favorite distros will be getting some eye-candy love.

Like most of you, I maintain a small horde of old computers in my office, going all the way back to my (still operational!) Commodore 64. Of these machines, I regularly use three, including a server running SUSE, an old laptop running Ubuntu, and another laptop running Windows XP. The old laptop dates back to 2001, running a respectable 800Mhz processor but sporting a paltry 128MB RAM. As mentioned, for some time now I’d been running Ubuntu on this machine, however even Ubuntu tends to grind a bit with so little RAM.

You can read more about Compiz and XGL at their Wikipedia pages, but for an impressive demo of the technology–synchronized to music (!)–click here. Scroll down to see the video link. Sadly it’s a low-res YouTube video, and the music is of the annoying hard rock variety (think coin-op games), but you should get the idea. (A downloadable 45MB version can be found here, although it’s in WMV format.)

Frankly, on this evidence, XGL and Compiz blow away anything on offer with Vista and Mac OS X, both in terms of eye candy and also sheer usability. I have some concerns about how useful all of this will turn out to be in everyday life (OS X is subtle and sparing with its effects), but some ideas on offer with Compiz are just profound, particularly the ability to fold back the edge of a window to see what’s behind. Why hasn’t anybody thought of that before now?

John the Ripper is an invaluable component of any decent sysadmin toolbox. In this excerpt from Hardening Linux, the author James Turnbull explains how it can be used to test your /etc/shadow file to ensure your users are using secure passwords.

Click here to read more

Now all we have to do is get Intuit to release Quicken for Linux. Oh, and somebody should have a word with Microsoft about releasing Office for Linux.

Mark Pilgrim has long been one of my favorite technical writers. He’d taken a long hiatus away from blogging, and to my great delight suddenly resurfaced again in April. More recently, he’s made the switch away from the Mac to Ubuntu, and resultingly has published a great list of software essentials. One gem I pulled from the list is FireBug, a CSS/HTML/JavaScript monitoring and debugging extension.

Unabashed promotion: Mark is the author of Dive into Python, the print version of which is published by Apress!

(Did I mention that you should use this service with care? Most of the repositories are unofficial and using them may break your system. You’ve been warned!)

Read the ZDNet Article