Cody Taylor

Today, Microsoft is announcing its biggest layoff ever and Sun is quietly laying off the first of what may turn out to be an additional 6,000 employees. Red Hat? Total year-over-year up 17%. Novell? Its Linux sales in 2008 were up by 38%. Which companies do you think are doing better?

“Linux is great. It’s a free, open-source operating system (OS) based on work done by Linus Torvalds in the early ’90s. Again, it’s free, powerful and easy to … Oh wait, it’s a pain to use.”

Ensign Taco writes “I’m sure nearly every one of us has had it happen. All of a sudden your Windows PC slows to a crawl for no apparent reason. Yeah, we all like Linux because it doesn’t do annoying things like this, but the Windows desktop still reigns supreme in most managed LAN work environments. I’m running XP with 4G of RAM and a decent CPU, and everything was fine, until one day — it wasn’t. I’ve run spybot, antivirus, and looked at proc explorer — no luck. There is no one offending, obvious process. It seems every process decides to spike at once at random intervals. So I’m wondering if there’s a few wizards out there that know what to look at. Could this be a very clever virus that doesn’t run as a process? Or could this just be some random application error that’s causing bad behavior? I’ve encountered this a few times with Windows PCs, but the solution has always been to just add more hardware. Has anyone ever successfully diagnosed this kind of issue?” And whether such a problem is related to malware or not, what steps would you take next?

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mytrip writes “In what may come to be seen as a deeply symbolic moment in the history of operating systems, Red Hat is on the verge of surpassing Sun Microsystems’ market capitalization for the first time. Sun, perhaps unfairly, represents a fading Unix market. Red Hat, for its part, represents the rising Linux market. Given enough time for its open-source strategy to play out, Sun’s market capitalization will likely recover and outpace Red Hat’s.”

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Linux is a very secure operating system, immune to Windows viruses and trojans. Instead, the potential security threat lies in running malicious code – by accident or voluntarily. It’s easy to avoid the most common attacks by knowing what to look for. Here are a few guidelines and examples of commands that Linux beginners should treat carefully.

Can a dedicated Windows user make it for two weeks using only Linux? Preston Gralla tried it and lived to tell this tale.

Derwent sends along a Computerworld piece which begins: “The Ubuntu Mobile operating system is undergoing its most radical change with a port to the ARM processor for Internet devices and netbooks, and may use Nokia’s LGPL Qt development environment as an alternative to GNOME. During a presentation at this year’s linux.conf.au conference, Canonical’s David Mandala said Ubuntu Mobile has changed a lot over the past year… ‘I worked on ARM devices for many years so a full Linux distribution on ARM is exciting,’ Mandala said, adding one of the biggest challenges is reminding developers to write applications for 800 by 600 screen resolutions found in smaller devices. ‘The standard [resolution] for GNOME [apps] is 800 by 600, but not all apps are. For this reason Ubuntu Mobile uses the GNOME Mobile (Hildon framework) instead of a full GNOME desktop, but since Nokia open sourced Qt under the LGPL it may consider this as an alternative.'”

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ruphus13 writes “Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, claims that the company is very close to the M mark, at which point, they will be a self-sustaining company. While people feel that this should not worry Microsoft, the real question is whether a 10,000 person effort on a failure like Vista can actually be the paradigm of a long-term strategy. From the article: ‘Microsoft had 10,000 people [the article is unclear whether these were all developers, or administrative and support staff were factored in] working on Vista for a five year period … huge profits in any given year can mean relatively little five years on. Canonical’s self-sustaining revenue may not be threatening — but it leaves one wondering how sustainable Microsoft’s development process really is.'”

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