Redhat

Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers.

Good OS, the open source startup that introduced gOS, a Linux operating system with Google and Web applications, on a $199 Wal-Mart PC last November, announced that gOS Rocket will debut Monday, January 7 during the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and online.

Rocket is packed with Google Gears, new online offline synchronization technology from Google that enables offline use of web apps; gBooth, a browser-based Web cam application with special effects, integration with Facebook and other Web services; shortcuts to launch Google Reader, Talk, and Finance on the desktop; an online storage drive powered by Box.net; and Virtual Desktops, an intuitive feature to easily group and move applications across multiple desktop spaces.

Open source technologies are gaining momentum as a viable backbone for core computing requirements, resulting in soaring popularity for Linux worldwide. In fact, 2006 was a banner year for Linux, powered by a record surge in enterprise deployments as well as broad-based validations from industry heavyweights, including Oracle and Microsoft.

As the fastest growing operating system and storage management software opportunity in the market today, Linux continues to gain substantial traction in companies of all types and sizes, from mid-range organizations to large-scale enterprises running mission-critical applications.

Developers at Google have released the beta version of Google Desktop for Linux.

This was announced by a software engineer in his blog stating the commitment what Google has made for the Linux community. The first edition of this software was released in June this year.

The new tool allows users to search and launch applications on Linux platform and also enables to customize the hotkey used to launch the quick search box.

Apart from the regular search, the new tool also supports search of more image formats and will display better thumbnails in the search.

It also enables users to search files in Microsoft Office enabling easy access for both Linux and Windows users.

Every so often I bump into yet another example of Linux being used in creative ways. Here's a new one: an ASUSTek motherboard, the P5E3, which ships with a built-in Linux variant called Splashtop.

Splashtop's a small but fairly useful Linux desktop environment that boots and runs entirely in RAM. The current iteration of Splashtop features network connectivity (both wired and wireless), a rebadged version of Firefox 2.0, and the Skype VoIP client (version 1.3) -- a small but useful clutch of tools. I read through a sneak preview of the product at Phoronix.com, and the impression I got was that it's still pretty rudimentary but that it will over time be expanded into something far more functional.

Finally, two Linux groups merging to offer a better unified face to real competition!

I remembered Scott McNealy's words during Sun Developer Conference back in 2002 in Bangalore. His words were "Do not develop for any OS, not even for Solaris, develop on Java so that your investment is safe on any OS" Only visionaries dare to say this at the cost of their own business interest (Solaris).

In our Samooha project we were looking at improving performance of boot-up time for our heavy Swing application :-)

Guess what, we just moved to Java 6 to see if things are different and we got a bonus of 20 percent additional speed to our application boot-up time!!

Looks like Java 6 has done a good job until at least we are hit with any other blocks in the near future.

In an effort to increase revenue from its JBoss server software, Red Hat is contemplating splitting the product into two versions--a free, unsupported product and a subscription-based supported one.

Currently, there is a single version of JBoss, and Red Hat has sold support for it since acquiring the company behind it in April. But Chief Financial Officer Charlie Peters, speaking at a UBS financial conference Tuesday, said that the company is considering applying the two-version formula it used to profit from Linux.