Unixster

You can’t win them all, as the saying goes, and that apparently includes Linux fans. To wit: Despite the best hopes of many of us in the community, the man suing Sony over the removal of the “other OS” feature from its PS3 has apparently lost his case. The bad news is that the man won’t get the money he had requested to compensate for an upgrade to his newly crippled PS3; the good news is that he reportedly wasn’t forced to pay Sony’s legal bill to boot. Linux bloggers were none too pleased with the news.

Samsung has unveiled its much-discussed Galaxy Tab Android-powered tablet at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin, Germany. The device runs Android 2.2, has a seven-inch display, and focuses on connectivity and entertainment. It also enables video conferencing and can be used as a mobile phone. “This is a true alternative to the iPad and is vastly more capable,” Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group, told TechNewsWorld. “It showcases what Android devices can do and is a strong counterpoint to the built-in limitations of the iPad.”

In my dumber days when I ran Microsoft Windows, I was more concerned with backup programs. After I moved into the Linux desktop, I became much less paranoid about system failures. The Linux environment just never crashed. That does not mean that I never make backup copies of my critical data files. It’s just that I do not worry about the Linux OS crashing to the point that I have to reinstall everything from scratch. That was the nudge with Windows that pushed me to migrating to Linux.

Cloud computing, technology delivered over the Internet, has become a hot area in the last few years. The technology marketplace moves at breakneck speeds, but it is still shocking when innovation almost completely wipes out squabbles like those over open source vs. proprietary software. “In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant,” Matt Asay recently wrote at GigaOm. Tim O’Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008, when he said that “Architecture trumps licensing any time.”

Corporate America is playing a cruel joke on Linux desktop. Businesses benefit from free Linux, improving their bottom line on the shoulders of Linux — all the while ignoring (and damaging I think) the Linux desktop. Linux servers toil in back rooms bringing big bucks to companies smart enough to use them. What do these companies install on their employees’ desktops? Windows, of course! It is no small irony that some (if not most) of Linux’s biggest beneficiaries are Linux desktop’s worst sponsors.

So widely acknowledged are the security advantages of Linux that on those rare occasions when a bug is found, it tends to makes quite a splash. Such, in fact, is just what happened recently when news broke of the Linux kernel bug that — it turns out — had been around since 2004. A fix was actually supplied back then by SUSE maintainer Andrea Arcangeli, apparently; for some unknown reason, however, it never got incorporated into the Linux kernel. That, fortunately, has now been corrected. Nevertheless, even the most ardent Linux supporter can only wonder what happened to delay the fix this long.

Say what you will about Microsoft’s products, but there’s no denying the company’s entertainment value. Where else, after all, could a Linux fan find reason to laugh, cry, scream and commit various violent acts, all neatly wrapped up in one little package? That, indeed, is a fair approximation of the emotions that ran through Linux Girl’s mind when she read about Redmond’s latest attempt to ingratiate itself with the FOSS community.

Today, if you’re in need of a task manager application, you’re looking at a category filled — perhaps even overfilled — with options. If you carry a smartphone, you probably have a to-do list app in your pocket already. Gone are the days when Linux users had to panic over finding a suitable clone for Microsoft Outlook like Evolution. Web-based services like Google provide calendars and to-do lists that sync with multiple computers and smartphones. That said, I prefer a desktop to-do app that is easily transported to my multiple computers.