Year One of the rebel said....

Saturday, September 10, 2005

One Saturday, September 10, 2005 I made my first post. A lot of good things have happened in that year.

1. We saw things like Xgl which is an X server architecture designed to take advantage of modern graphics cards via their OpenGL drivers, layered on top of OpenGL via glitz. It supports hardware acceleration of all X, OpenGL and XVideo applications and graphical effects by a compositing window manager such as Compiz. The project was started by David Reveman and first released on January 2, 2006. In plain english, Xgl turns the desktop into a malleable 3D environment with features such as 'wobbly' windows that can be stretched and pulled, true real-time opacity, and treating the entire desktop as a multi-faceted rotable 'cube'.There is also AIGLX which can do do the same however,NVIDIA graphic cards currently lack any support for AIGLX at all. Some of the features in Xgl and AIGLX even surpass what we've seen in Vista.
2. We saw that the state of Massachusetts has finalized a proposed move to an open, non proprietary format for office documents.
3. FarStone announced a plan to offer a Linux version of FarStone’s award-winning Personal Disaster Recovery(TM) software solution, RestoreIT,at Desktop Linux Summit.
4. Koobox, the first-ever line of desktop computers offered by a major OEM to exclusively run Linspire 5.0 Linux selling at K-mart.com and Sears.com.
5. Hewlett-Packard plan to certify SLED 10 for select notebooks: including the nx6310, nx6320, nc6320, nc2400, nx6315 and nx6325 models
6. Linspire made their basic CNR service available to everyone at no charge.
7. The IDC estimated that 9 million Linux PCs will be shipped in 2006, with that number growing to 17 million in 2008. So less than 4% of PCs expected to be sold in North and South America in 2008 will come with Linux.

Linux is freely available, and most are not required to register their copies with any central authority, so it is very difficult to know how many people use Linux to date. Could be as many as five million users. Most of those people now install Linux from CDROM's. Linux distributions have grown to hundreds of MBs of Linux software, and downloading that over even a 28.8 modem or an ISDN connection takes a long-long time. To date you can purchase and have shipped a distribution directly from the vendor, and you usually get some form of support, usually installation support. Even with over 3 or 4 million lines of code in the Linux kernel, there is a lot of code left to write.

What dose all this means? "It means choice." To date, the Linux desktops can't run applications like Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 or support many other consumer add-ons, but if you only need basic productivity tools,a browser to be productive, and you love the notion of less expensive software that leaves you free of Microsoft's strategies and whims. Linux is a perfect fit for you currently.

I wish every other bloger luck in their writing. “The PC has caused humankind to have critical reflections of ideas.” Share your thoughts and ideals with the world.....