Tux Watch

The results of Linuxquestion.org’s Voting for its Members Choice Awards [here] have finally been announced [here] with Ubuntu taking the lead again on the Linux Distribution of the Year Choice by the website’s users with KDE being the dominant Desktop Environment. Knoppix still leads the show for Live Distros and Firefox continues to be the king of web browsers. Mysql continues to the bag Mr. Favorite choice while GIMP is the best Graphics App of the year. Cheers to Linuxquestion.org users, great going!

Here are the official results for the 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards:

• Distribution of the Year - Ubuntu (26.44%)
• Live Distribution of the Year - Knoppix (26.22%)
• Browser of the Year - Firefox (74.61%)
• Database of the Year - MySQL (61.68%)
• Office Suite of the Year - OpenOffice.org (89.79%)
• Desktop Environment of the Year - KDE (56.58%)
• Video Media Player Application of the Year - mplayer (41.93%)
• Video Authoring Application of the Year - Kino (27.81%)
• Audio Media Player Application of the Year - amaroK (57.07%)
• Audio Authoring Application of the Year - Audacity (67.07%)
• Multimedia Utility of the Year - K3b (69.51%)
• Messaging Application of the Year - Gaim (51.52%)
• Window Manager of the Year - Fluxbox (21.44%)
• IDE of the Year - Eclipse (34.47%)
• Mail Client of the Year - Thunderbird (52.74%)
• Text Editor of the Year - vi/vim (38.42%)
• Graphics Application of the Year - GIMP (65.60%)
• Security Application of the Year - nmap (20.94%)
• Windows on Linux Application of the Year - Wine (50.10%)
• Web Development Editor of the Year - Quanta (36.34%)
• Shell of the Year - bash (89.45%)

Its full gear for Google Summer of Code 2007 [here] in the upcomming month of March when Google begins accepting applications. According to the Google website [here], the program offers student developers stipends to write code for various FOSS projects. Google works with a several FOSS and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month-period.

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According to the Red Hat Website [here], the Swedish Armed Forces have made the decision to migrate their servers from Windows NT to Red Hat Enterprise Linux thus replacing Windows NT with Red Hat Enterprise Linux across its core IT infrastructure. The decision by Swedish authorities is driven by security considerations.

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According to NetCraft [here], in the February 2007 survey, NetCraft received responses from 108,810,358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache’s market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002.

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Alright guys, the Linux 2.6.20 Kernel has been released after two months of development and includes two different virtualization implementations. KVM gives full-virtualization capabilities using Intel/AMD virtualization extensions and a paravirtualization implementation usable by different hypervisors. Additionally, 2.6.20 includes PS3 support, a fault injection debugging feature, UDP-lite support, better per-process IO accounting, relative atime, relocatable x86 kernel, some x86 micro optimizations, lockless radix-tree readside, shared page tables for hugetbl, and many other things. For more information on the list of changes, visit [here].

Jim Finkle reports [here] from Boston (Reuters) that the Free Software Foundation is reviewing Novell Inc.’s right to sell new versions of Linux operating system software after the open-source community criticized Novell for teaming up with Microsoft Corp. According to Eben Moglen, FSF’s General Counsel, “The community of people wants to do anything they can to interfere with this deal and all deals like it. They have every reason to be deeply concerned that this is the beginning of a significant patent aggression by Microsoft”. The foundation controls intellectual property rights to key parts of the open-source Linux operating system.

I would also definitely agree with the FSF since on one side, Novell took the contributions of the FOSS community to build its Operating System offerings and on the other side opted to bring on Microsoft that in originality has always taken Linux as a threat, to protect those contributions which in its own is a pretty silly way to manage IPR.

The news of the month is that the Linux kernel community is offering end users and in particular companies free Linux driver development services says Greg on the Linux Kernel Monkey Blog [here]. The objective is to reduce the issues and sufferings of searching for a suitable device driver for Linux thus no need to search Linux Device Driver Kits and browse through tens of example drivers in the Linux kernel source tree.

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FreedomHEC is the hardware conference [here] where you’ll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more.

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The Linux Professional Institute has launched [here] the LPIC-3 Certification Program representing the culmination of LPI’s Certification Program. LPIC-3 is designed for the “enterprise-level” Linux professional and represents the highest level of professional, distribution-neutral Linux certification within the industry. The LPIC-3 program consists of a single exam for LPIC-3 “Core” designation. A number of “specialty” exams are proposed as additional designations on top of the LPIC-3 “Core” certification. Proposed specialties include the following: Mixed Environment, Security, High Availability and Virtualization, Web and Intranet, and Mail and Messaging. The first such “specialty” designation, “Mixed Environment” has been made available in January 2007.

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The Microsoft launch of its new operating system Vista could possibly loose its previously held Window’s market share due to the fact that Vista carries a whole new set of Graphical User Interface features and enhancements that will require the new end-users of Vista to first receive a significant amount of training to manage the new interfaces. Secondly, Vista may be trying to copy a number of features from products developed by the FOSS community including the Firefox browser.

Third, Vista will not be living up to its promise of including new ground breaking enhancements such as a new file system so people will be getting more of a resource hungry eater than a full of new features operating system. Fourth Vista is going to be one of the most resource hungry Operating Systems ever and you can say goodbye to all your old low-performing hardware equipment like Pentium-4 and below whereas Linux has the capability to even make such low-performance hardware become effectively useful.

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Part- 4. India Plays “IT” Big

Further adding to local FOSS Ecosystem development initiatives in India, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu has been making headlines [here ] the world over as the state goes for FOSS due to concerns over security and the high costs that Microsoft offers for Windows. The Indian state is not new to FOSS as the local government been running Red Hat Linux on various backend servers coupled with JBoss application server and PostgreSQL databases.

Mr. C.Umashankar the Managing Director, Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu (Elcot is a state-owned IT supplier) has clearly announced that

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Part- 3. India Plays “IT” Open

India has been very prominent on the FOSS world news bulletins due to the fact that with one of the largest populations in the world, the country has been on preference list for Information Technology and Software Business Process Outsourcing for the western or developed world. Adding to this, almost every major FOSS development corporation has either Research and Development center in India as well as country operations including giant brand names like Red Hat, Novell, IBM etc. In India, the Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) [here ] has been leading FOSS initiatives in the country.

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Part- 2. Pakistan Brings Nation Closer To Realization

To take FOSS efforts to the next level in Pakistan, the Government initiated a project worth Rs29 million titled “Open Source Resource Center” (OSRC) [here] was established at the through the Ministry of IT’s [here] implementation arm the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) [here] in January 2004 in Islamabad to facilitates stake holders and investors in the software industry, should they decide to shift their businesses from vendor-dependent proprietary software to open source software technology. It aims to create a culture of open source software use in Pakistan through media awareness and training workshops, and act as a virtual community for experts in this field.

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Part- I. Realizing True Potential

Readers on this side of the world may not be aware of some very interesting ICT and FOSS developments taking place in the various regions of Asia. First of all, there are many FOSS initiatives that are very active within the overall region adding value to the global FOSS movement. These regional or country level initiatives include organizations and groups like:

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Can a wiki-based search engine compete with the established commercial search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN? No one may have an answer to this at the moment but the the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales through a Dec 23, 2006 online posting announced that he was developing the search engine that could probably do so in the near future.

The Wikia website [here] states that search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet that stands broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken as it lacks freedom, lacks community, lacks accountability, lacks transparency and the Wikia project will change all that.

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