Scott Allen wrote in to let us know about an interesting sounding web cast that he will be presenting on Tuesday. Details follow below.
In our on-going GNU/Linux review series, we have received much criticism from loyal users of the various distributions we have covered. Timothy R. Butler notes that many of the issued raised by those who commented on the series were cases of knee-jerk reaction and ponders how such reactions impact the community at large and its appearance to outsiders.
In the third part of our Penguin Shootout series, Timothy R. Butler considers the latest distribution from the best-known name in the sector - Red Hat. With its much hyped and attacked BlueCurve interface and various other improvements, will 8 be the Shadowman's ticket to victory in our challenge? Read on to find out.
Information Week is reporting that GNU/Linux is heading for even more mainstream adoption in 2003. “Linux already is mainstream at Cendant Corp. The real-estate, travel-services, and hospitality holding company has 7,000 hotels, and there's nothing more mission critical than efficiently managing check-ins, departures, payments, and reservations. About 60% of the hotels use a property-management system from Hotel Software Systems Ltd. that runs on a Linux distribution from SCO Group, even though Cendant offers Windows-based property-management software.”
Former Red Hat employee Bernhard “Bero” Rosenkraenzer has resurfaced, after leaving Red Hat last fall, with a brand new GNU/Linux distribution meant for the average user. According to the distribution's web site, “The Ark Linux distribution is based primarily upon a Red Hat Linux 7.3 / 8.0 foundation. On top of this, we have added a new easy-to-use installer (an Ark Linux installation is only four mouse clicks away!) and extensively tailored the software applications and utilities included - all in an effort to ensure that Ark Linux provides superior ease-of-use and the features and functionality end users have told us they want.”
Every one sees them all the time and would probably miss them if they didn't exist. What are they? Icons! Torsten Rahn and Everaldo Coelho, the predominant icon duo in the KDE artist world, and creators of virtually all of the icons you see in KDE, spent some time with Open for Business' Timothy Butler discussing how the new Crystal icon theme came about, how it ended up replacing Mr. Rahn's HiColor theme, and the overall importance of icons to the enterprise desktop.
This year has proven most interesting for GNU/Linux. While there were not any amazing surprises, there were numerous events that are noteworthy for review. The upshot to all of this is that most of what happened was good overall for the Free Software community.