Linux Solutions

It’s kind of like dating your best friend’s sister – it’s just not the done thing. But last week Google did something similar when they jumped into Mozilla’s back garden and started kicking its ball around.

Googles new Chrome browser caused a bit of a stir with its beta release. A rival to Mozilla, and a threat (apparently) to Internet Explorer, will the new browser tear people away from Firefox’s awesomeness? Or will Firefox continue to rule supreme?

Although the release was all about Google, something that was duly noted by people round the world is that now open source has been given another global platform to show us its moves on. But what do Mozilla think about the competition?

Mozilla CEO John Lilly, a man who is extremely proud of Firefox, said that “Google’s trying to give users a good Web experience as well… as for competing, users will make their own choices. If you’re asking whether we’ll see market-share erosion, we’ll see, but remember that 72 percent of the users on the Internet still use IE, so there’s room to grow for everyone.”

But Ray Valdes of Forrester Research believes its not all good: “There will be some negative impact” on Mozilla…the question is how much and in what time frame.”

The early adopters are curious, Valdes said, “and some are going to switch over for sure. That will be a negative impact in terms of influence on the technogeeks,” Valdes said.

Firefox has the advantage of a huge and dedicated community of users, which Google will have to convince to switch over to them. “That won’t go away soon,” Valdes said.

Also, it looks like, with the signing of a three year contract, that Google will be helping finance Mozilla a little longer. Mozilla reported in a financial statement that 85 percent of its 2006 revenue came from a “contract with a search-engine provider for royalties.”

Lilly recently wrote on his blog that the arrangement with Google “means a lot for our ability to continue to invest in Firefox and in new things like mobile and services.”

“We all owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mozilla for really bringing a lot of innovation back to the browser space,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management.

“They’ve led the way. We have no doubt they will continue to do so moving forward. We wanted to continue extend our relationship so they have resources to do so.”

Pichai said alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer aren’t well-known. “Most people don’t know there is choice. We wanted to add our voice to the mix.”

A fall out it would seem is inevitable, but for now everything is rosy.

On Thursday it was announced that Amazon will be selling the G1G1 v2 laptop by late November.

And to be honest, that’s all anyone knows. The major question of what is the price? Remains unanswered, but most relevant is the announcement those laptops available from Amazon will be using Sugar, and there will be no dual boot or Windows XP version.

The details came out in an announcement posted to wiki.laptop.org by OLPC’s (one laptop per child) Product Manager Kim Quirk on Saturday:

“As it has been reported, One Laptop per Child will sell its XO Laptop on Amazon.com in late 2008 as part of a global ‘Give One, Get One’ (G1,G1) program. Although the first iteration of the ‘G1,G1′ program was extremely successful and sold more then 185,000 laptops, the delivery of the laptops in the USA did not run as smoothly as we anticipated.

“Selling the laptops on Amazon.com will provide us with the resources to process and ship the laptops globally in a timely fashion.

“In addition, contrary to some media reports, it will be a Linux-based XO Laptop that will be offered as part of the global initiative and not a dual-boot machine running both Windows and Linux.”

And that’s you lot I’m afraid, not a great deal of information, but you can expect bits and pieces to emerge in the run up to the product launch, leaving just enough time for the rumour mill to start spinning.

Software developer Red Hat has bought an Israeli company in an effort to gain a foothold in the battle against Microsoft and smaller rivals that provide computing services for complex networks.

Red Hat said on Thursday that it paid US$107 million in cash for privately held Qumranet, which sells software that helps computer systems run multiple programs more efficiently with less equipment.

The acquisition is the latest in Red hats long running war with Microsoft. Red hat represents the largest seller of Linux operating systems in the world.

Qumranet’s software will enable Red Hat to piggyback its products onto Microsoft Windows applications, giving Red Hat access to Microsoft’s customer base, said Katrinka McCallum, Red Hat’s vice president of management services.

Analysts however warned that Red Hat, who paid a premium for the Israeli company, has had limited success in the past in breaking into the emerging software area that Qumranet has been developing.

The acquisition will cut Red Hat’s earnings by 5 cents to 6 cents a share in 2009 before the company realises any financial benefits.

Red Hat’s stock fell 51 cents, or 2.5 percent, Thursday to $19.93.

Red Hat acquired multitasking software programs that are referred to as “virtualisation,” a relatively new technology field that represented less than $100 million in sales last year but could balloon to $2.4 billion in 2011, according to a recent Goldman Sachs analysis.

Microsoft dived into the virtualisation field only this year. The market is currently controlled by VMWare of California, but the field is so young that an estimated 95 percent of potential customers remain untapped.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has started a month long celebration of the GNU Projects 25th anniversary with a video in which British comic legend Stephen Fry expresses his support for the free software.

The insanely intelligent Fry shared his love of the GNU Project and Linux in a blog posting last February.

“The two great pillars of Open Source are the GNU Project and Linux,” Fry wrote. “I shan’t burden you with too much detail, I’ll just make the outrageous claim that your computer will be running some descendant of those two within the next five years and that your life will be better and happier as a result.”

The blog entry caught the eye of Matt Lee, a campaigns manager for the FSF, who contacted Fry and arranged the recoding of the video last spring in London.

Check out the video below:
Happy Birthday GNU
According to FSF director Peter Brown the release of the Fry video, is just one of the things planned for the anniversary of the GNU project. “We’re planning a month long celebration,” says Brown, “starting with this video and running through Software Freedom Day [September 20] to the anniversary itself, which is September 27.”

At least one campaign and an essay by Richard Stallman are also planned.

FSF has several goals, according to Brown. The first “is to make people realize just how expansive the scope of GNU is, how much GNU [software] there is out there,” says Brown. “I think a lot of people would be surprised at the amount of new GNU stuff that is coming all the time.”

Brown says the anniversary is a good time to re-emphasize the ultimate goal of the movement.

“If we end up in a world where some free software applications are very, very popular and we don’t end up with software freedom that will be to the detriment of everyone. So this is our way to remind the community that there’s a goal in mind, an end point that’s more than having your software work well on the Microsoft platform,” Brown says.

“It’s about having a complete environment of free software that we want everyone to use. We want to push that final goal of replacing all proprietary software.”

In this sense, Brown says, the anniversary is not just about GNU itself. “It’s not just that we want our particular project to be successful and popular. Promoting GNU is great, but we have to realize that’s only one part of the puzzle. It’s only by getting there jointly that we will succeed.”

News has recently broken of internet search giant Google’s intentions to release an open source browser called Google Chrome, which thy promise will be small, fast and stable.

It should be available to download shortly, but you can get an indication of what’s in store from a 38-page comic by Scott McCloud. The comic starts by explaining how browsers have changed: how they run web applications rather than just showing pages.

Tabs appear to be central to Chrome, and should be movable from window to window. The browser will be multi-threaded, so separate tabs can run separate processes.

The URL window will include and auto complete function – but just to pages you’ve previously typed in the address bar. Opening a new window will show you the nine pages you visit the most and four sites you search on most often rather than a home page.

For people who enjoy the dark side of the internet, Chrome will have an incognito porn mode – where none of your browsing history is recoded and cookies are deleted when the window is shut.

In an effort to fight malware, any dangerous processes are sandboxed – they cannot write files to your hard drive or read your documents. Chrome will get automatic updates of phishing sites and malware attacks so your browsers will get a warning if they go to a flagged site.

Chrome also uses a built in task manager for each tab so you can see what resources are being used by individual pages.

The Chrome development team thanks Mozilla and Web Kit for their contribution.

The Windows version launches in 100 countries today, and Mac and Linux versions will arrive shortly.

OpenHanded, the “Poky Linux” and Matchbox developer has announced that it has been acquired by Intel Corp. The UK-based embedded Linux services team joins the Intel Open Source Technology Center, and will focus its efforts on Moblin Development for mobile internet devices, as well as other mobile handsets.

According to Openhanded, Intel will continue to support open source projects led by OpenHanded staff, including Clutter and Matchbox, “and in most cases, will accelerate these projects as they become an integral part of Moblin.” OpenHanded contributions will now be available from the Intel open source site.

Openhanded still has the rights to Matchbox, a lightweight window manager for X11 that is widely used in Linux devices. Nokia, for example, uses Matchbox in the Maemo stack it maintains for its Linux-based N810, N800 and 770 web tablets.

OpenHanded also maintains the free GNOME-based Poky Linux 3.0 distro for mobile devices. Similar to Moblin, Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded, and the Nokia-sponsored Maemo.org project, the release is based on X11, GTK+, and Matchbox. However, in place of the Hildon GUI layer used by these platforms, Poky includes a new “Sato 0.1″ application framework and theme.

OpenHanded was founded by Matthew Allum, a well known X.org and Debian hacker, OpenedHand joined GNOME’s advisory board in 2005, and has long worked to improve GNOME for embedded applications.

The Moblin project was launched by Intel early last summer. The project maintains a multi-tiered chroot-based sandbox aimed at helping to standardise development tool-chains used to build software for Intel’s Atom processors. At its lowest chroot level, the sandbox can be used to build a Linux-based application environment resembling Poky Linux.