November 16th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
InformationWeek writes “Why Linux Will Succeed on the Desktop,” outlining its strategic position and anticipating its future market domination.
Nicholas Petreley begins:
“I believe Linux will become the de-facto standard desktop operating system. Though it’ll take a while for many users to break free from ties to Windows, there is good reason to believe that this day will come… The global community is already beginning to rally behind standard document formats.”
Petreley is surprisingly anti-GNOME, which I personally think is an excellent desktop environment. Aside from my disagreement with him there, I think he raises a number of important points and I certainly agree with his overall conclusion that Linux use will grow until it displaces Windows as the default desktop operating system for most users.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | 4 Comments »
November 13th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Wired seems excited about Everex’s $200 Linux PC–and why not, because it is an interesting little item!
Members of the OpenOffice community had predicted that cost pressures would eventually break Microsoft’s hold on the most price-sensitive part of the PC market, leading to OEMs installing OpenOffice on their machines. Everex did so earlier this year for the models they sell at Wal-Mart, and the last I heard, Wal-Mart was planning to require OOo on all the computer brands it sells.
The newest Everex innovation takes its commitment to open source one step further. A customized version of Ubuntu Linux helps the gPC to break the $200 barrier, the first for a retail personal computer.
After their initial post, Wired got even closer to the gPC with a hands-on review. And they like it!
Edit: Slashdot announces Wal-Mart has already sold out its stock of gPCs!
Our friends at Zareason also sell the gPC at the same price point.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Wired on the $200 Everex PC
November 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Sam Hiser writes a follow-up to several high-profile migrations to OpenOffice.org and Linux for the Financial Times. It’s good to check back in on major migration stories to see how things have progressed after a few years, and in his three case studies, the results are good.
All three of these take place in Europe: the French Gendarmerie police force’s installation of OpenOffice.org, Firefox and Thunderbird on 70,000 Windows boxes (70% of its total desktops), Munich, Germany’s migration of 14,000 desktops to Linux with OpenOffice (about 100% of its desktops), and Peugeot Citroën’s migration of 20,000 desktops (40% of its total) to Linux with OpenOffice as well.
It’s a great followup with some very encouraging results. It’s got me excited to see the next major round of migrations, which I expect soon.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
November 5th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
Rupert Goodwins blogs for ZDNet UK “Vista versus the Gutsy Gibbon…”
Goodwins is clearly a hardcore computer user going back decades, and currently has seven functional machines with a mix of operating systems. However, he is becoming more and more focused on using Linux as his primary platform.
“How come I’m so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn’t succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.”
Call me curmudgeonly, call me prejudiced, call me atypical, but isn’t computing all about doing what users want?”
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | 1 Comment »
October 29th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
This weekend I traveled to Boston to attend FOSScamp, a BarCamp-style event held at the Hotel at MIT. FOSScamp was sponsored by Canonical and led into the Ubuntu Developer Summit, happening this week at the same venue.
I represented the OOo community in an informal way and gave my talk “Guerrilla Marketing OpenOffice.org in the New York Metro Newspaper” in front of a diverse audience including KDE developers, an FSF representative, and a number of others. It was well-received and brought to light the fact that lots of open source projects are working on evangelizing/marketing, but that we could improve our effectiveness by pooling our efforts and sharing our experiences more broadly.
One of the highlights of the weekend was meeting Mark Shuttleworth, whom I had communicated with only once (by email) before. He is a charismatic and well-organized leader, which I think is reflected in the successful, rapid growth of the Ubuntu community.
Lots of other great, intelligent and hard-working people attended FOSScamp, and the atmosphere of collaboration and openly exchanging ideas and knowledge will lead to the continued great success of the open source movement.
Edit: A few other mentions of FOSScamp have popped up today. Ars Technica picks up a quote from Shuttleworth’s introductory remarks about “brilliant flashes of innovation” that occur because of the free sharing of ideas in the open source world, and Corey Burger summarizes FOSScamp on the Ubuntu Fridge.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on FOSScamp Boston
October 22nd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
At Web 2.0 last week, Nokia announced its forthcoming N810, the successor to the N800 Internet Tablet.
New features include a hardware slideout keyboard, built-in GPS, and 2GB of Flash memory.
A new OS update will be released with it, which will also be installable on N800s. Screenshots from Ari Jaaksi’s blog show it to be quite attractive.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Maemo, Open Source | 1 Comment »
October 18th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
The official announcement from Canonical states that Ubuntu 7.10, “Gutsy Gibbon,” is now available.
I’ve been using the beta for a few weeks now, and it is a beautiful, polished, full-featured operating system, that I think handily outdoes Windows. I’ve been very pleased with it and expect Ubuntu’s marketshare to continue its rapid rise with this update.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu 7.10 Released Today
October 8th, 2007 Benjamin Horst
David Pogue reviews the XO for the New York Times.
“The XO laptop, now in final testing, is absolutely amazing, and in my limited tests, a total kid magnet. Both the hardware and the software exhibit breakthrough after breakthrough — some of them not available on any other laptop, for $400 or $4,000.”
Pogue immediately sees the potential of the XO, especially through the way it has created new network- and group-centric paradigms of working and learning.
“Most of the XO’s programs are shareable on the mesh network, which is another ingenious twist. Any time you’re word processing, making music, taking pictures, playing games or reading an e-book, you can click a Share button. Your document shows up next to your icon on the mesh-network map, so that other people can see what you’re doing, or work with you. Teachers can supervise your writing, buddies can collaborate on a document, friends can play you in Connect 4, or someone across the room can add a melody to your drum beat in the music program. You’ve never seen anything like it.”
As many had hoped, developed world customers can now buy one of their own (more accurately, you can buy two, one shipped to you and one to a child in the developing world).
The XO is a formidable testament to the power and promise of open source, and a huge vote of confidence in the potential of millions of people around the world that have so far been left out of the information age. Its release is clearly going to be a world-changing event.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, OLPC, Open Source | Comments Off on David Pogue on the OLPC XO
October 3rd, 2007 Benjamin Horst
A thorough review of the upcoming Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” release shows just how polished this distro is. Tolero has written the very popular “Review of Ubuntu 7.10 (gutsy) new features and changes” on his blog to cover the new features and other improvements it includes.
See Ubuntu.com for a countdown clock to its final release (15 days from today).
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source | Comments Off on Ubuntu 7.10 Review
October 1st, 2007 Benjamin Horst
DesktopLinux.com writes “All Macedonian students to use Linux desktops”
“All together Macedonia will deploy 180,000 NComputing-enabled workstation seats, enough to provide virtually every elementary and secondary school student in the nation with his or her own classroom computing device.”
This suddenly becomes one of the largest open source implementations yet undertaken anywhere.
“Besides Ubuntu 7.04, each NComputing server/PC comes with NComputing’s Terminal Server software and OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, Evolution, and Wine.”
What a great stack of powerful, free and open source applications. Top shelf quality at a bargain price.
“NComputing claims that the Macedonia project is at the same time, the largest known thin client and desktop Linux deployment ever undertaken. “This project would not have been possible 5 years ago,” said Ivanovski. “Today’s least expensive desktop PCs are so powerful we use less than 10% of their capacity and NComputing’s technology puts this wasted power to work.”
Smart policies like this will help Macedonia and other developing countries leap to the technological forefront quickly, and will result in hundreds of thousands of open source-savvy adults in the coming years. All while saving huge sums of money over the alternative, proprietary software route. This is sure to pay dividends to the country’s economy for decades.
Posted in GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on All Macedonian students to use Linux desktops