Linux laptops rocks germany... more in blog

With the survey of bestselling laptops in germany most of the laptops having Linux sells more.. the most profitable part of the IT reminds one more time. This is what we waits for.. the best sellers where in the list.. apple and microsoft. In previous year apple plays important role in the market of german, but now.. linux comes first. ASUS X5DIJSXO18L which position at no1, followed by EXTENS A5235-571G16N. what ever be german people understand about the marketing cunning of microsoft and apple. So this makes them to do it. Every country should follow this, but on taking the market of great Britain, dont know why they are showing their royalty here!, they dont keep the market of linux in their lists.. Bloody shit! this is not the correct way you are choosing, every part of the world is supporting linux, because of they thinks software as a service tool. You may understand about the better use, but you dont know about the business tricks. Is it nice? ok leave it. These lists where released by Amazon.com updated sales report. Lappys mainly has 250gb HDD, 15.6" screen sale more....

Microsoft Loses $435 Million in Netbooks

Firstly every one knows microsoft rulez.. They involved 90% of net book sale for past couple of years but now (Dated : 24/2/2009) they loses their involvement and down to 70%. They re facing now a big problem in net book sale.

Linux as its competitor was responsible for about $75 million in losses, not terribly scathing for Microsoft. But the figures begin to mount significantly when you consider the cost incurred for XP's lingering domination instead of the hoped for Vista (which accounted for less then two percent of the netbook market). Netbook Digest's calculation was based on a per unit loss of $36 due to XP, multiplied by 10 million netbooks sold in 2008, making $360 million. Add to that the $75 million lost to Linux and you get the $435 million.

Microsoft Enters(Brain Washes)Catalonian schools..More in Blog

When ever we doubt why microsoft is silent, when the linux booms.. may be you could say they gave advertisements so how could they do so? but they proved now... at the border of spain. Every one knows catalonian a beautiful place, here the government operates their machines under Linux platforms. Here comes the personal deal between Steve balmer and president of the Generalitat de Catalunya José Montilla, they get involved in a discussion that results to migrate their pervious linux(closed?) deals to microsoft windows(opened?) .

Microsoft provided facility of touch screen labs and other stuffs to the students, and they explained about the quality(?) of linux bad touch screens. Minister said, why they prefered linux at first, because they want to avoid the illegal use of properitary softwares. But Microsoft came on to give spl offers on using?...

INTEROP-ABILTIY MS / SUSE(R) Linux works on with interoperability, closs platform solutions

SUSE (R) Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 , from novell both are working to solve the many heterogeneous server models from many software industries, there happens some problems on interoperability, both OS has some problem on business model to support with each other, they touches with some simple concepts to overcome the problem on facing the complexity on cross platform working. It makes the bridge between the microsoft and linux solutions.
They solves your problem with their solutions ....

http://www.moreinterop.com/

they are concentrating more on virtualization to work linux in windows while started, and vice versa.

I dont know whether this could be an open source. But Novell said it would be a low paid for updates, and other stuffs. So surely they would fix the cost for enterprise editions, thats normal. May be this will work as a shovel to pick up all the problems and dusts on complex cross platform usage.

Red Hat Partners With Amazon.com On SaaS

When I added Amazon.com to our SaaS 20 Stock Index, a few readers asked me whether the online retailer is really a software as a service (SaaS) company. My answer: Absolutely. And a growing number of tech companies agree with me.

A prime example: Red Hat has inked a SaaS partnership with Amazon.com to offer JBoss middleware as a hosted service. Here’s a look at the deal, and its implications for managed service providers.

At Red Hat Summit in Boston, the open source company disclosed that JBoss Enterprise Application Platform is now available within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Red Hat claims JBoss is the first cloud-based application server.

For MSPs, the Red Hat-Amazon relationship is the latest example of open source software moving into the cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was already available through Amazon EC2. And fast-growing open source databases and applications like MySQL and SugarCRM, respectively, are increasingly popular as hosted services, MSPmentor has noted.

The challenge for MSPs is trying to figure out whether to build out hosted data centers, or to leverage third-party hosted services like Amazon EC2 or Google Apps, or Master MSP hosted services from such companies as Ingram Micro Seismic and Do IT Smarter.

Even traditional MSP platform providers such as Kaseya say they will now offer network operation center (NOC) and hosted services, in an attempt to assist MSPs with 24×7 customer support and other gap services.

Right now, it’s sometimes easy to overlook how online companies like Amazon.com and Google are gradually moving into the SaaS worlds. But as SaaS and managed services continue to converge, MSPs will need to adjust their business strategies accordingly.

Women in Open Source

We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don’t see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it.

However, when we started to actually look around we were happily surprised. There are lots of women involved in Open Source! For some reason men just seem to stick their nose out more and put themselves in positions where they are seen (and of course there are more of them).

That said, women do seem to be highly underrepresented in the Open Source community. A study from 2006, Flosspols report, indicates that about 1.5 % of the Open Source community is female compared to 28% in proprietary software.

The Open Source community is large, though, so that 1.5% amounts to a fair share of women.

There are several different groups and websites devoted to just women and Open Source such as: LinuxChix , Apache Women, BSDChix, Debian Women, Fedora Women, GNOME Women, KDE Women, Ubuntu Women, PHP Women and Drupalchix.

This post is our contribution to the community to highlight some of the women in Open Source and to hopefully engage other women to join.

Mitchell Baker

Included in Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2005. She is the Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and Chairman and former CEO of Mozilla Corporation, the company that coordinates the development of Firefox and the Thunderbird email client.

Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper is an advocate of open source software and sits on the board of the Open Source Initiative. Previously she has worked at Sun where she created and managed the Open Source Programs Office among other things.

Kim Polese

Kim Polese is the CEO of SpikeSource, a provider of business-ready Open Source solutions. Previously she has spent seven years with Sun working as a Java product manager, and also acted as the president and CEO of Marimba during the dot-com era. She was included in Time magazine’s list of “The 25 Most Influential Americans” in 1997.

Margo I. Seltzer

Margo Seltzer was the CTO of Sleepycat Software prior to the acquisition by Oracle in 2006. She was the lead author of the BSD-LFS paper and is a director of the USENIX association while continuing to serve as an architect on the Oracle Berkeley database team.

Stormy Peters

Stormy Peters is a co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and frequently speaks about Open Source at major conferences. Stormy has also addressed the United Nations, the European Union and various U.S. state governments regarding Open Source software.

Mena Grabowski Trott

Mena Trott is the president and co-founder of the company Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and TypePad. She was named one of the People of the Year by PC Magazine in 2004.

Val Henson

Val Henson has worked at companies such as Intel, IBM and Sun. She is a specialist in file systems and was a key developer and architect for ZFS at Sun and is currently developing chunkfs, a new Linux file system.

Máirín Duffy

Máirín Duffy is a senior interaction designer with Red Hat and is the team lead of the Fedora art team. She is also involved in the GNOME project where she is working on the GNOME marketing team and has developed the GNOME brand book.

Allison Randal

Allison is the president of the Perl Foundation. She is a key figure in the Perl community and has been active in the Perl 6 design process since the start as a project manager as well as contributing code and design.

More women in Open Source

As you can imagine, we simply don’t have enough room in this blog to post about every woman in Open Source, but here are a few more examples of women who have made their mark in Open Source:

• Dru Lavigne, maintainer of the Open Protocol Resource, writer for the “FreeBSD Basics” column on ONLamp, and author of BSD Hacks and The Best of FreeBSD Basics books.
• Lynne Jolitz, an early BSD user and Open Source contributor and advocate.
• Machtelt Garrels, Linux veteran, member of the Linux Documentation Project and BSD Certification Group Advisory Board and founder of the OpenDoc Society.
• Pia Waugh, president of the organization that runs Software Freedom Day and the former president and vice-president of Linux Australia.
• Radia Perlman, a contributor to network security, strong password protocols, IPSEC among other things. Silicon Valley Inventor of the Year in 2004.
• Erinn Clark, a Debian developer as well as the leader and co-founder of Debian Women.
• Hanna Wallach, a GNOME and Debian developer who helped the GNOME foundation to get its Women’s Summer Outreach Program off the ground.
• Amaya Rodrigo Sastre, a Debian developer and co-founder of Debian Women, as well as conference organizer and evangelist.
• Celeste Lyn Paul, participating in the KDE usability project as well as a member of the HCI working group. She has worked on the KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines.
• Eva Brucherseifer, co-founder of KDE Women, the KDE Edu project and the KDE Solaris mailing list.

This list is of course nowhere near complete and is based on mentions in articles, blogs, mailing lists, etc.

A special thanks to ITtoolbox which had a blog post called Top 10 Girl Geeks in 2006 which acted as a starting point for this list.

We hope that this post has helped highlight some of the women in Open Source, and the fact that there actually are lots of talented women working with Open Source even though they often act behind the scenes.

Canadian Firm Shows Faith In Ubuntu Server

While most major server vendors take a “wait and see” approach to Ubuntu, a major Canadian Web host says the server operating system is ready for prime time. Indeed, Cirrus Tech is now offering Ubuntu on its server hosting plans. Here’s a closer look at Cirrus Tech’s announcement, and the state of Ubuntu on the server.

Cirrus Tech’s Ubuntu server move comes less than two weeks after I noted Canonical’s Ubuntu server push is progressing slowly. Still, a few more small victories resembling Cirrus Tech could help Ubuntu to gradually gain mind share — and market share — on servers.

In addition to Ubuntu, Cirrus Tech says it offers Fedora Core, CentOS and Debian as Linux server options. Cirrus introduced Ubuntu server support because customers have been requesting it “for some time now,” according to a prepared statement from Mani Aminian, a sales manager at Cirrus. Aminian adds that Cirrus has experienced no problems running Ubuntu on the company’s servers.

Meanwhile, most major server vendors continue to take a “wait and see” approach to Ubuntu servers. While Sun offers Ubuntu servers, rival hardware makers like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM remain on the sidelines.

Sensing Opportunity

Smaller server vendors, however, are making progress with Ubuntu. System76, for instance, offers a range of Ubuntu-certified servers. And I’ve received dozens of inquiries from white box PC makers who are testing Ubuntu as a small business server.

Application providers are gradually climbing aboard as well. Untangle, an open source security specialist, now writes its applications to support Ubuntu servers, according to MSPmentor.

Still, Ubuntu’s momentum on the server remains a work in progress.

Greenie Linux 3.0.2H Released

Greenie Linux 3.0.2H, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution designed for Czech and Slovak-speaking users, was announced by Stanislav Hoferek and its main goal is to provide a simple to use operating system for everyday tasks, targeted at beginners and advanced users at the same time. Greenie looks much better now, as it received some aesthetic improvements.

This release is based on the latest stable edition of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and comes with Mozilla Firefox 3.0 RC1 and Opera 9.50. The default movie player is now VLC, a cross-platform multimedia player and streaming server that allows you to play different audio and video formats, DVDs, VCDs and different streaming protocols. The default photo viewer is now gThumb, an image browser and viewer for the GNOME desktop environment. Moreover, Greenie's size was reduced so it can fit on only one CD, the Bash aliases were improved for easier command execution and The GIMP comes packed up with a few additional plug-ins.

Fans of the popular Battle for Wesnoth, the free turn based strategy game created by David White, Frets on Fire and MPlayer will be disappointed, because the developer decided to remove them from this release. Frets on Fire is a game written in Python where you have to play along with the scrolling on-screen musical notes to complete a song.

Besides the two already available desktop environments, GNOME and OpenBox, another one was added. LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment), is now included in Greenie Linux 3.02H and was designed to be slim enough to keep the resource consumption at a low level. The components of the LXDE are independent and every one of them can be used separately with a small number of dependencies.

Download Greenie Linux 3.0.2H right now from Softpedia.

TinyMe 2008

About a year ago we reviewed TinyMe when it was still in its beta and test stage. But a lot has happened in the past year, and all of it good. But what makes it so good? Well, in addition to fixing all the bugs and little quirks, TinyMe has become more stable and loads faster than it was in the early days.For those who are unaware of this distro, TinyMe is a slimmed down, streamlined version of PcLinuxOS, otherwise affectionately referred to as PCLOS. The biggest difference between PCLOS and TinyMe is that while the former is more tailored toward modern hardware, while the latter is better suited to to older and slower computers. Plus - TinyMe is also useful for people who have modern hardware, but want to have a system that is as screamingly fast and lean as possible. And that's exactly what TinyMe is.The install disk weights in at a lightweight 199mb. This includes both the full installer, and a complete and fairly well featured livecd component. When first booting the cd, you're given the TinyMe boot splash screen, and the now-familiar list of livecd, various safe modes, console, mediacheck, and memtest. (This distro also includes a "copy2ram" option, which not all do. If you have the memory to do this, I'd definitely recommend it. You haven't lived until you've run a linux distro entirely from RAM.) The system loads from the boot menu into the full desktop in a blazing 30 seconds. (Ok, 30 seconds doesn't sound fast, but when you're talking about livecd boot times, that's screaming.)Once you're done booting there's a simple screen that asks you about your keyboard, and after that the login screen. The login screen comes with two logins, "guest" and "root," that you can choose from. The login info is even conveniently displayed on the screen for you, so there is no scrabbling through README files or documentation to get in. Once you login, it almost immediately drops you on the desktop! If you've logged in as "guest," you get a little popup menu asking if you want to setup your system options. (This menu is bypassed if you login as "root," which is a bit curious, but I guess that's ok.)Once you close that, wandering around the desktop is fairly quick and easy, as the system is powered by the OpenBox window manager. This is a streamlined and ultra sleek Window manager that keeps things fast and simple. The desktop is populated by a group of icons that are ordered in a way reminiscent of Puppy, in the angled corner style. In fact, speaking of Puppy, a few of the utilities (such as Grafburn) have been ported over from puppy to TinyMe since they're so lightweight and yet powerful.One of the unique features of TinyMe is that it contains the TinyCC, a minimalistic control center, in addition to the fully featured PCLOS control center. It also includes GnomePPP for dialup, Audacious for music, MTPaint for drawing, Abiword for writing and more. There's even a couple of games to keep you entertained. The system also uses the Synaptic Package Manager for installing new ports which makes life so easy. Another interesting thing is that the livecd has Conky running on the desktop. For those unfamiliar with it, Conky is a real time system monitor for your PC. It tells you how much of each of the important elements of your PC (ram, swap, cpu, etc) are being used. If you don't like it, it's easy enough to remove with a little config file edit, not a big deal at all. The help files can walk you through that if you ever need to do it.TinyMe uses the PCLOS Draklive system installer to install TinyMe onto your drive. For the most part it's everything you would expect Draklive to be, but with a few minor twists just for TinyMe, such as the ability to install to a pen drive. The install to the system is very quick and easy, and only took a couple of minutes start to finish.Once you've installed the system and rebooted, everything you found in the livecd is present in the live system, save for two icons on your desktop, one for the help files, and one for the installer. The moving of the help files is not a big thing since those are still there, just in a different place. The system really does a splendid job of being a full featured workstation distribution while being as lean and trim as possible. It detected all of my hardware and set it up properly with zero issues, and no post-setup tweaks needed at all.While there are no video player applications installed with the system, installing one is pretty easy through Synaptic. One bump I found: TinyMe doesn't autodetect dvd's and cd's like I'd like it to. But the media players all seem to see them alright, so that's something I can overlook. One thing of personal preference I'd rather see in this system is the default use of Firefox as the browser rather than Opera. There's nothing inherently wrong with Opera, except that for purists, it's not truly open source (nor is it quite as good as Firefox).But other than that and the few other tiny quirks I mentioned before, I really have nothing bad to say about TinyMe 2008. It's a great OS: lean, clean, responsive and ready for newbie and experienced user alike. So if you haven't had a chance to check it out, I recommend downloading it. You can get it here.

The Inevitability of Open Source Windows

The FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) Community knows, thanks to leaked Microsoft internal documents, that since about 1998 Microsoft has been in a sort of war against them. Because of this, it is not surprising that the FOSS community has looked at Microsoft with suspicion and has vilified it to no end. But, is Microsoft really evil?

The reality is that Microsoft is just a company. It is a company that was at the right place at the right time (when the PC was created) and this brought a lot of success. Of course, there was a lot of hard work and good talent involved. In some respects, Microsoft may have even been a positive force in the world, since it was instrumental in bringing down the price of computing at a time in which this was very expensive. However, with that success came a lot of power.

As we all know, power can be a good thing, when used wisely and benevolently, or can be a bad thing, when used shortsightedly an selfishly. Unfortunately, corporations are, by their very nature, selfish and shortsighted. I am not saying that all people inside of Microsoft are bad people. I am sure that, for the most part, most people at Microsoft are just your average, mostly honest, hardworking people. But, it is not in the best interest of “the company” to be generous and meek. So, management has sometimes seen fit to use their power in ways that benefit “the company” at the expense of every one else.

For example, lets take the case of the Linux operating system. With the advent of the Internet, creating a powerful high quality operating system through collaboration is now possible. People from all over the world can now cooperate to create a software pool that everyone in the world can benefit from. Because it is freely available to all at no cost, poor people can more easily afford to own an up to date computer for their computing needs. Since the code is open to all and there are no hidden APIs, companies can build programs that run on that operating system knowing that they are competing on a level playing field. Knowledge is available to all and passed on to new generations rather than locked-in within a single increasingly more powerful corporation. Doesn’t this sound like a good thing for mankind?

But, the above is not in Microsoft’s best interest as a company. Therefore, Microsoft has been fighting tooth and nail the growth and adoption of Linux. Is Microsoft evil because of this? Well, lets just say that, while Microsoft’s success was due in large part for being at the right place at the right time, it now finds itself in the way of progress and the betterment of mankind. Worst yet for Microsoft is that, as time goes on, the inadequacy of its proprietary model, for a world in which technology has become so intertwined with our lives, becomes more and more evident. Computers and the internet are the railroad and freeways of today, except that what is being moved are ideas. Everyone needs computers (increasingly so) and therefore everyone has a stake. Too much control by one company is not in everyone’s best interest.

This realization seems to be very widespread now. The European Union competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, is pushing hard for Europe to get out of the proprietary treadmill. I remember when, in 2002, the FOSS world rejoiced at seeing a congressman from Peru very clearly articulate, masterfully really, the advantages of “free software” over proprietary software in a response to a letter sent by the General Manager of Microsoft in Peru. That letter must have sent chills up the spine of Microsoft’s management. I can only imagine what they must now be thinking about Mrs. Kroes position expressed publicly at a recent a conference in Brussels. If this trend continues, and there is no indication that it won’t, it seems that Microsoft is due for being replaced outright as the primary provider for the world’s operating systems and basic business applications. Is there anything Microsoft can do to avoid this?

There are several strategies Microsoft has been implementing to stem the growth and adoption of FOSS (For example, see here, or here). All of them, however, have proved to be only temporary stop-gaps, with very limited success. Even the threat of patent warfare seems to be a strategy that is not expected by Microsoft to be overly successful, otherwise we would be hearing a lot more about it. So, what can we expect Microsoft’s next big move to be?

Microsoft is going to become an OSS company, not a FOSS company. (See what the “F” stands for here.) We are already seeing the early signs of this. They have created a couple of open source licenses and have submitted them for approval successfully with the Open Source Initiative. Microsoft has pledged to become a more open company. Although the said pledge has been received with a lot of skepticism, I think they really mean it. They have to. Microsoft is now hard at work trying to convince the world that they really have changed. Is all this going to be enough? I don’t think so. They have to still go a little further. Lets see why.

What are the advantages that FOSS is offering to the world?

1. A level playing field for software vendors. No hidden APIs. Everyone gets the updates and information about new features at the same time. Everyone has the same documentation and the same access to the OS developers.
2. The possibility of accessing the code by the user. This is especially important when the user is a government, sometimes for security reasons. However, it can also be important in the context of education. This also allows the user to choose who to receive support from.
3. An expanded potential for innovation and software improvement. This is because, since everyone has access to the code, innovations, fixes, and improvements, can come from anyone in the world, sometimes from the least expected places.

So, can Microsoft match that? Well, what if Microsoft offered Windows, or a version of Windows, as an open source product? They already have open source licenses that they feel comfortable with (albeit not definable as free software). They would of course retain the copyright and trademark. “But, but, then other people can compile the Windows source code and bypass purchasing it from us”, I hear Mr. Ballmer say. Yes, but Microsoft could still sell proprietary add-ons and applications since only the base OS needs to be open. They would retain the advantage of being the company most familiar with the code and the maintainers of the standard implementation, which would make them the premier company to offer support for it. They could offer money to those that contribute code to the Windows base. In one fell swoop Microsoft would eradicate some of the most important advantages Linux has over Windows as far as governments, third party software developers, and the general public goes. What does Microsoft loose in doing this? They loose some advantages over third party vendors that used to give them an edge. They would have to rework their way of making money from Windows around support. But, at least they are able to stay in business and are not tossed out altogether. I think it is only a matter of time before this happens. What do you think?