UK report says Linux is 'viable'
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A UK government study finds the open-source Linux operating system is a  "viable" alternative to rival products.
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Survey from The Yankee Group shows cautious corporate interest in moving desktop and server systems to Linux.
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Welcome to a new on-line column here at LinuxJournal.com, "Linux Products Insider".  I'm James Gray, Products Editor at Linux Journal.  After the spam has been deencrusted and hucksters repelled, I'll use this space to update you on the latest and greatest products and services that I find using my secret channels.  This week, I had the chance to take part in a press conference with Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu.  Read on to learn why Shuttleworth's is so fired up about the new Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" (available this week), as well as why he thinks Ubuntu is so darned successful.  read more
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Research: Businesses are going open source, but OS may still be too technical for most users. The open-source operating system Linux may be gaining a lot of ground in the enterprise space, but Windows will
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Open-source software advocates got a potential boost from a report by the U.K.'s Office of Government Commerce, which cited advantages on the server side and a growing maturity on the desktop front.
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Linux is gaining ground with companies but Windows will continue to dominate consumer PCs in the near future. That is the non-contentious conclusion of the latest IDC research.
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Warm, fuzzy and free, the open-source operating system is winning over both Windows and Mac users. Ready to try it? Here's what you need to know. By SeÃ¡n Captain.
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Are you convinced that Windows environments are less expensive to own and operate than Linux computers? Martin Taylor, the manager behind Microsoftâs anti-Linux strategy, believes the companyâs Get The
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(InfoWorld) - As Red Hat prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations. Makers of "software appliances" are using the launch as an opportunity to predict that the days of the monolithic OS are numbered. They say the future lies in a modular system in which software runs with only enough lines of OS code to make it work. Some see promise in the appliance alternative to the OS, while skeptics think large enterprises will still need a general-purpose OS. The same questions arose recently around the launch of Microsoft's Windows Vista. A trio of Gartner analysts published a report in 2006 that said the increasing complexity of Windows makes it "unsustainable." Gartner predicted Windows will be broken up into modular components. The same could be said for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), said Billy Marshall, CEO and cofounder of rPath Inc., a software appliance platform vendor. As new features are added to it, RHEL 5 has become just as unwieldy as Windows, Marshall said. "It's bigger and more bloated." OS vendors add all sorts of functionality in the event some enterprise may want it, and the addition of these features is one of the reasons why both Microsoft and Red Hat have encountered delays bringing their products to market, he said. Installing an OS could use as much as 1.82G bytes of space on a hard drive, he said. A software appliance with only the code to run one application would use just 300M bytes, he said. "The general-purpose OS model is breaking," Marshall said. Another software appliance vendor, Ingres Corp., on Feb. 27 launched a database management software appliance it calls "Icebreaker" to compete against IBM Corp.'s DB2 and Oracle Corp.'s database software. Software appliances may have a place in some niche environments in which a customer needs to run just a few pieces of software, said Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group. But a larger business would probably still need the various programs that are bundled into an OS, he said. It might be possible to run an enterprise infrastructure without an OS, Lyman said. "But then again, you've already got people [in your IT department] running the OS, and it's a pretty critical part of the infrastructure." Rather than seeing OSes fading, "I think we're seeing the trends going the other way," said Adam Jollans, director of worldwide strategy for Linux and open source at IBM. At a time when IT administrators want to get more out of their existing hardware, isolating software applications and running them only with small pieces of code seems counterproductive, Jollans said. "Many more people want to run multiple applications and do many different things. ... so I think we need the generic operating system to support all the different things people want to do," he said.
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A round-up of fun Linux diversions.  When people talk about computer gaming these days, they invariably mean commercial games running on a Windows platform. Few people realize that Linux can be more than just a very good Web or file server. Even fewer people are aware of the many open-source or otherwise freely available games available for Linux. read more
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Windows beats Linux in total cost of 'ownership.' Hold on, that's not a good thing.
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One of the minor ironies of the Linux world is the slight disconnect between the mantra of &quot;choice&quot; the most ardent advocates use to make the case for a multitude of graphical interfaces and the state of the North American enterprise Linux market, where a
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This little OQO  machine is certainly pretty cool.  The biggest problem though is that it doesn't run Linux.  This leaves you with a device heavier than your PDA and all the insecurity and bloat of Windows and with a price tag of only sub $2000.  People don't care what OS their PDA/Handtop runs.  It can run an alternative OS and for the most part consumers don't care.  WinCE hasn't exactly been a stellar market success.  While Microsoft does have significant market share PalmOS, Symbian, and Linux are doing just fine.  Also most of the WinCE devices never have the fit and finish of their Palm and Symbian counterparts.  I don't know where OQO thinks they are going to fit in.  If they were to  ...
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(InfoWorld) - Red HatÂ has scheduled a March release for RHEL5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5), the latest version of its open-source operating system, while it tries to fend off new competitive threats from OracleÂ and the Microsoft-NovellÂ partnership. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens discussed the RHEL5, the competition, the Fedora Project, and other issues with IDG News Service. Following is an edited transcript of the interview, conducted this week at the InfoWorld Virtualization Executive Forum in San Francisco: IDGNS:Â RHEL5 comes out in March. What are some of the features that will move virtualization forward and keep Red Hat competitive? Stevens: RHEL5 is a scalable, full native 64-bit platform. In the second quarter of 2005, there was a crossover point where more 64-bit x86 systems were sold than 32-bit systems. So there is this untapped (64-bit) capability within the IT shops as many systems are still running 32-bit applications on 64-bit systems. With RHEL5, we aim to help allow IT and independent software vendorsÂ to realize the power of 64-bit computing on these multicore architectures. There is a lot of untapped capability in performance there, so we aim to help that. As to virtualization, it comes as an integrated feature set for RHEL5. IDGNS: How has the move by Oracle to undercut you on the price for its Linux support and the partnership between MicrosoftÂ and NovellÂ affected the direction you are taking Red Hat as CTO? Stevens: It hasn't really affected the day-to-day activities because Red Hat is focused on creating value for customers. We have developed really close relationships to understand where we need to drive technology to make a meaningful impact on their businesses. We focus on the fundamentals, not on something else. If you start to think about what is going to create revenue for the company versus what's going to create value for the customer, you're thinking about it the wrong way. Our results for the last quarter show that we are largely unaffected. We look at the vibrancy of the Fedora Project, our open-source community. Fedora is Red Hat's vehicle for bringing advanced technology really quickly to end-users. The last release of Fedora has been out for about four months, and we are averaging more than 100,000 downloads a week and 1.5 million downloads total. Compare that 100,000 a week to Oracle with their release of Oracle Linux. We reach in seven hours what they reached in their very first month of releasing that source code. With the Novell-Microsoft deal, we continue to believe interoperability is important. We didn't see anything new and meaningful in that interoperability agreement. With RHEL5, we're going to show rich compatibility between Windows and Linux. We already have that. We are absolutely open to and willing to work with Microsoft under an interoperability agreement but one that does not require our customers to pay anÂ intellectual property tax on Linux. IDGNS: What are your projects for the coming year besides RHEL5? Stevens: We'll continue an initiative we started last year around AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol). It's going to transform how you manage messaging systems in grid environments. We'll be bringing that to a bunch of (test) customers this year. AMQP is about allowing you to have data sources and data feeds that can scale across grid environments. IDGNS: What else? Stevens: We're leading the work in Linux around predictability with a project called Real Time. It's not just about dropping latency, even though it does that. It's around how we get determinism. It's really critical that the workloads you're running, whether its multimedia playback or transactions, know that there is a sort of boundary on the completion of transactions. Real Time is basically a rearchitecture of how the Linux kernel does locking and scheduling. We've had a team working on this for the past year and a half and we will be working with customers under a proof of concept through the course of this year.
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InfoWorld - As Red Hat prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations.
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The two second-tier Linux companies will adopt common Linux software and engineering. Alas, this idea doesn't have a great history of success.
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The Linux operating system is based on source code that is freely shared among developers worldwide. The Free Standards Group is touting the agreement as a milestone in Linux&#39;s march into the mainstream.