Linux

Despite their best attempts, Linux software companies say they are still having a hard time luring average consumers away from the Windows environment--but that may not necessarily be a bad thing.

Windows still dominates the PC world. About 90 percent of all desktops, laptops and even PDAs are powered by Microsoft, according to reports by Gartner and IDC. Even with all the hoopla last year about Linux progress, the buzz over breaking the Windows stronghold has died down considerably.

Between December 2004 and July 2005, the "defect density" in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts.

Defect density declined by 2.2 percent as the total lines of code in the Linux kernel continues to grow from 5.76 million in December 2004 to 6.03 million in July 2005, which represents a 4.7 percent increase.

Linux may be nibbling away at Microsoft's Windows footprint, but one small business has well and truly shut the penguin out in the cold.

Perth-based chartered accountants Marshall Michael Corporate Consultants recently completed an upgrade of its two Windows NT servers and, as a result a Linux firewall was decommissioned.

Marshall Michael account manager Rupert Cheong, who also doubles as the firm's IT manager, said an upgrade was necessary to ensure better business continuity.

Sales of Linux servers are booming, and HP is riding the wave. Akhtar Pasha finds that Linux boxes are being deployed in HPC, oil & gas, manufacturing, EDA and pharmaceuticals, with HPC still topping the charts when it comes to Linux usage. The penguin powers the Institute of Genomics & Integrated Biology’s four Teraflop supercomputer, and it is India’s first entry into the world’s top-200 supercomputer club.

SCO's CEO Darl McBride was told that the Linux kernel contained no SCO copyright code six months before the company issued its first lawsuit, a memo reveals.

An outside consultant Bob Swartz conducted the audit, and on August 13 2002 Caldera's Michael Davidson reported the results. "At the end we found absolutely nothing. Ie no evidence of copyright infringement whatsoever," wrote Davidson.

The IT world may be an insecure place, but don't blame Linux. In fact, very few IT pros participating in InformationWeek Research's Linux and open-source survey say Linux has introduced security problems into their IT environments.

Despite the unlimited potential of Linux its growth is not all that staggering. As an operating system Linux has a number of positive attributes but its spread over the past few years, especially on the desktop platform, has not been as uninhibited as many would have otherwise forecasted. The reasons for this are multitudinous, to say the least, but pinning them done is easier said than done.

Novell Inc.'s SuSE Linux Professional 9.3 desktop gives not only other leading Linux desktop distributions like Xandros a run for their money, but also enterprise desktops such as Windows XP Pro.

Nat Friedman, vice president of Linux desktop engineering at Novell, said, "We are getting ahead of Windows for the first time."

After kicking SLP 9.3's tires, I agree. This is one impressive desktop distribution. It has every Linux application that anyone is ever likely to want and it's all tied together with either a slick and up-to-date KDE or GNOME interface.

According to a recent study by Evans Data Corporation, more than a quarter of European developers using Visual Studio .Net as their primary development environment have written an application for Linux, and more than a third are likely to write a Linux application next year.
Developers using Microsoft's popular Visual Studio .Net software engineering suite were today offered a plug-in that allows them to code Web applications for Linux .

We've all had this nightmare. You turn on your functioning Windows/Linux PC, and all you get is a blank screen, or a message telling you that certain files are missing, or the kernel has panicked for some obscure reason. Nothing works, and you need the data on your machine. Yes, now's the time to whip out that trusty backup disk, and heave a sigh of relief that all the important stuff is backed up, right? Well, think again.