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%)

Thanks to TuxMachine [here], I came accross some very interesting links showing Microsoft’s attempts to interfere with the FOSS and Linux movement and possibly conquer it by:

1. Microsoft’s CodePlex [here] is an attempt to become FSF’s Savannah or SourceForge.net but if you go through their terms and conditions, you will be amazed how they treat Intellectual Property Rights. I hope the developers joing this site have a good eyesight vision, hey how many fingers are these?

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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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Interested in taking over the world with GNU/Linux? Ken Leyba’s blog on the Free Software Magazine website has a very interesting article [here] and as the title implies, it lists ten interesting ways to take over the world, and in this case, with Linux ofcourse. Some of the points are very useful and the rest are the basics that we have learnt from the test of time and practical experience in the FOSS Industry. The interesting fact nowadays is taht Linux has grown up into a commercial grade Operating System environment and as time is passing, more and more vendors are either developing versions of their software to run on Linux or intend to add this support in the near future. The ten ways listed in no particular order show what you can do whenever you can do :

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My earlier predications about Linux for year 2007 [here] seem to be catching on quickly (grinning). It may seem a bit unbelievable but according to thisTechworld news article [here], nearly half of all enterprises will be running mission-critical business applications on Linux in five years’ time. That’s according to survey of IT directors, VPs and CIOs carried out by Saugatuck Research, which questioned 133 businesses worldwide.

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Linux has been part of mainstream technological advancements worldwide with the momentum continuously increasing everyday especially when Linux enemies like Microsoft too are digging their way into the FOSS movement through partnerships with Novell. The Information Technology industry is vast and spans globally thus anything happening in the industry in one region also affects the other. After observing the overall Linux industry trends [you can read the year 2006 reflections by at Matt at InfoWorld here], I would like to make the following predictions that will drive the next year:

• Linux will continue to be the leading and preferred server-side operating system in 2007 worldwide.

• 80% of all US based Venture Capital investments will be targeted at

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