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.
Less than a week before Christmas, MandrakeSoft has been forced to issue a second urgent call for support from users. Apparently, while the long-term outlook looks good for the company, the short-term is not quite as bright. The company has urged those enjoying Free copies of Mandrake Linux to consider supporting the company's efforts by joining the MandrakeClub or purchasing a products from MandrakeStore.
MandrakeSoft's new Multiple Network Firewall (“MNF”) specialty Linux distribution has been on the forefront of the computer news
for the last week, not so much because of its technical merits, but because of what appeared to be a reversal in
the company's policy on licensing. The distribution's creator and company co-founder, Gaël Duval, was kind enough to return to our hot seat and discuss both the licensing controversy as well as some other points about MNF.
The goal is tough, the reviewers tougher, and while the lineup of contenders are all worthy the award, only one will receive it. In this report, Open for Business' Timothy R. Butler grills Xandros in the first of a multi-part series to find out which vendor has created the best GNU/Linux distribution in town.
InformationWeek reports on the exciting news that 8-year old RedHat Software of North Carolina has made a profit for the first time. ” Leading Linux provider Red Hat Inc. climbed into the black for the first time in its eight-year history during the quarter ended in November. The company says it had a profit of $305,000 on revenue of $24.3 million for the third quarter. A year ago, Red Hat lost $15.1 million on revenue of $20.1 million.”
eWeek has a nice interview with Linus Torvalds as well as an overview of the upcoming Linux 2.6/3.0 release. “Although I have a soft spot for Jan. 5 [for the freeze] … it will be exactly 12 years since I got the PC that was to become the first Linux PC.”
Craig Drummond has released a new theme and “engine” for GTK programs that provides something many people have been looking for: a common look and feel for KDE and GNOME applications. While Red Hat's Blue Curve attempts to do something similar, Mr. Drummond's Geramik is the first theme implementation to provide smooth integration between environments.
infoSync has the story on a new batch of Zaurus PDA's from Sharp Electronics. Zaurus handhelds offer form factors and features similar to PocketPC units, but include a special version of Linux and TrollTech Qtopia in lieu of Windows CE. “The SL-5600 will use the same general form factor as the current SL-5500 model. However, it will run on a 400 MHz Intel XScale PXA-250 CPU. Rather than using a split-RAM architecture like the Sl-5500 and Pocket PCs do, the SL-5600 will have 32 MB of RAM that is dedicated to just active memory.”