As the economic downturn has taken its toll on GNU/Linux companies, many surviving companies have decided to move away from the desktop market, and focus on the server instead. This escalated to an alarming pace after the death of Eazel, a startup that created the Nautilus file manager, and while the focus-on-server mania has calmed down lately, it is still very much alive. Yet, it seems to me, that focusing on the server will in the end cause these companies to lose not only the desktop, but the server as well.
Philippe Fremy has written a nice piece describing the benefits of the Qt toolkit over Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC). For those of you not familar with Qt, it is the toolkit used by the KDE desktop as well as the Qtopia environment featured on the Sharp Zaurus PDA. Qt - unlike MFC - works on Windows, Linux, UNIX, and Mac OS X (Aqua).
It started seemingly innocuously enough; a letter was received by one member of the KDE development team asking the KDE Project to use RedHat Linux on machines at LWCE and to display RedHat's shadow man logo on those machines. In exchange, the letter from RedHat explained, KDE would “benefit from many valuable marketing benefits in our booth, on our website, and in our newsletter.”
UPDATE (7/30/2002 15:21 and 16:04 EDT): New information from RedHat is available at the bottom of this article.
In an announcement late last week, the Debian Project released its much anticipated Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 distribution. Debian is well known for its high level of stability, as well as powerful package (software) management tools.
In a move anticipated since rumors of talks leaked out last month, MandrakeSoft issued a press release today announcing the availability of PC's at Wal-Mart's internet division with Mandrake Linux preloaded. This move follows Wal-Mart's earlier offering of PC's with LindowsOS pre-installed last month.
When my copy of SuSE Linux 8.0 arrived, I felt almost like I was coming home after a long trip. SuSE had been my primary Linux distribution for over two years, until last November, so it was exciting to see what they had been up to. SuSE 8.0 seems as good a way as any to come back to SuSE, after all it was the first distribution to ship with KDE 3, and it comes with a truckload of improvements over previous versions.
MandrakeSoft has released a statement detailing the reasons why Mandrake will not join United Linux. The two key reasons for the decision repeated through out the document consisted of UnitedLinux's non-Free nature and lack of any advantages for MandrakeSoft.
A group of leading independent websites are planning to launch a new Linux cooperative website in conjunction with “wIndependence Day 2002.” The unveiling of the new web site is scheduled to take place early next week.