I would normally leave the Linux netbook market alone thanks to Jay’s great coverage but since Marks and Sparks is a British institution I’m grabbing this one.
Via Glyn Moody comes the news that a £99 Elonex netbook is expected to go on sale in high street M&S and Next stores next month.
According to The Telegraph: [...]

Dana Blankenhorn yesterday called the OLPC project a failure for its inability to mass market a low-cost Linux laptop. Dana’s definition of failure, in this case, seems to be based on the quantity of XO laptops distributed.
Like the commenter I am not sure that is fair given the interest OLPC has generated in low-cost computing [...]

“2008 is starting with a bang for open source,” wrote Mark Radcliffe last week, and he’s not wrong. Not only did we see Sun’s $1bn acquisition of MySQL, but we’ve also seen an extraordinary amount of venture capital funding. Today saw no fewer than three investments announced, with Greenplum landing $27m Series C, Zenoss closing [...]

IBM and Sun Microsystems announced today a deal whereby IBM will distribute Solaris on select x86 systems from IBM. IBM customers will now have the option, in some cases, to select Solaris as an operating system, alongside Microsoft Windows, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). From the press release (press [...]

I recently saw an interesting article on the use of Windows in HPC clusters and as I read through it, I realized that the names ‘Windows’ and ‘Linux’ could have easily been swapped throughout the piece if the subject was enterprise servers in 2002. The OS with the hold on the market and most of [...]

For those of us tired of all things iPhone this week, there are some other, refreshing signs of product and market innovation and the all-important sexiness factor. Where? Well, it’s Linux of all places. I’m referring to the latest laptops from OEM goliath Dell that deliver Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux — which itself represents an effort [...]

Canonical has announced that Dell will sell personal computers pre-installed with Feisty Fawn, Ubuntu 7.04. Financial details, such as what license fee if any is being paid by Dell to Canonical, which sponsors Ubuntu, were not disclosed. Dell will offer optional paid support from Canonical, maintaining Canonical’s support revenue model; some Dell customers are willing [...]

IDC reports that shipments of laptops are ready to overtake shipments of desktops, a long-running trend in the PC industry. We’ve also been hearing more and more about ‘green computing’ and how energy efficiency and environmental impact are becoming priorities for consumers concerned about their world and enterprises concerned about their reputation.

This got me thinking [...]

Over the last five years or so, there have been a number of rumors, stories and announcements on pre-loaded desktop Linux from big PC makers that typically get Linux fans excited, then disappointed. Sometimes, it would amount to sending out PCs with a basic OS like FreeDOS or no operating system at all. If the [...]

I am pleased the announce today the we have officially launched the 451 Commercial Adoption of Open Source (CAOS) Research Service and the first CAOS Report - “Stack and Deliver,” covering the open source stack provider space. For more details on these announcements, I invite you to take a look at the two press releases [...]

Sun Microsystems and Canonical issued a joint press release yesterday regarding Ubuntu support for the UltraSPARC T1 processor and the related Sun server line. We touched upon this topic in part one of our interview with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu, late last week.
While this news was expected, based on Mark Shuttleworth’s appearance during [...]

I admit to being impressed by the boldness of Sun’s ‘Niagara’ UltraSparc T1 processor strategy when the chip was launched at the end of last year – eight cores, 32 threads and its emphasis on lower power consumption seemed to put it ahead of the pack. But I was surprised and a bit uncertain about Sun’s decision to turn the design specs of the chip over to the open source community as OpenSparc. What would they want with it, and what would they do with it?