Novell has announced the release of OpenSUSE 11.0, which offers more than 200 new features and hundreds of application updates.

The 11.0 release of openSUSE includes more than 200 new features specific to openSUSE, a redesigned installer that makes openSUSE even easier to install, faster package management thanks to major updates in the ZYpp stack, and KDE 4, GNOME 2.22, Compiz Fusion, and much more.”OpenSUSE 11.0 is a really exciting and groundbreaking release, perfect for Linux enthusiasts and developers as well as users who are new to Linux,” said Joe Brockmeier, OpenSUSE community manager.

Important updates and package additions compared to 10.3:

“The OpenSUSE Project contributors, inside and outside Novell, have worked hard and should be very proud of this release. It sets the bar for what a Linux distribution should be.”

OpenSUSE 11.0 is also the first Linux distribution to include the 1.0 Banshee release, enabling users to manage and play back digital music and video content.

“The OpenSUSE Project is an important part of Novell’s Linux strategy and is one of the ways we demonstrate our commitment to the open source community,” said Roger Levy, senior vice president and general manager for open platform solutions at Novell.

“OpenSUSE serves as the foundation for our enterprise products and gives Novell an important opportunity to work closely with the community.”

The new version is available for download immediately. A full DVD image or Gnome and KDE live CDs enable users to run OpenSUSE from the CD without modifying their computer.

* Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

Binary packages are in the process of being built and it may take a few days for them to appear, but the source is available now. You can find out more about this release in the announcement. Check out our download page for packages for your distribution.

Seems it was in .xx for ever! One step closer to being able to get rid of Windows!

About Wine

Wine is a translation layer (a program loader) capable of running Windows applications on Linux and other POSIX compatible operating systems. Windows programs running in Wine act as native programs would, running without the performance or memory usage penalties of an emulator, with a similar look and feel to other applications on your desktop.

The Wine project started in 1993 as a way to support running Windows 3.1 programs on Linux. Bob Amstadt was the original coordinator, but turned it over fairly early on to Alexandre Julliard, who has run it ever since. Over the years, ports for other Unixes have been added, along with support for Win32 as Win32 applications became popular.

Wine is still under development, and it is not yet suitable for general use. Nevertheless, many people find it useful in running a growing number of Windows programs. Please see the Application Database for success and failure reports for hundreds of Windows programs, as well as the Bug Tracking Database for a list of known issues, and the Status page for a global view on Wine’s implementation progress.

See full release note here.

Of particular interest is the speed at which the betas are being released.

Download high resolution version (1024×768, 885 KB)

From WineHQ

This is the first release candidate for Wine 1.0. What's new in this release? Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.

The sources:
http://ibiblio.org/pub/linux/system/emulators/wine/wine-1.0-rc1.tar.bz2
http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/wine/wine-1.0-rc1.tar.bz2
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
http://www.winehq.org/site/download

Documentation:
http://www.winehq.org/site/documentation

Although there are still many bugs that make openSUSE 11 beta 2 unsuitable for day-to-day use, it is improving at a rapid pace. An additional beta will be released later this month before the final official release, which is scheduled for June 19. Users who want to test beta 2 can download it from the openSUSE web site.

There are a lot of things to like in openSUSE 11 and it will make a good choice for many users—it is already shaping up to provide better PulseAudio integration and stronger desktop search capabilities than Ubuntu, for instance. OpenSUSE also has excellent support for KDE 4, which is why we have used it as our reference platform for KDE testing and reviews.

Here are a few screenshots from the installation.

Arstechnica has a post on the same topic.

You may find these links useful (on Linux, SUSE):

Installation of SuSE 10.3 (German site translated into English by Google translator)

List of Linux related sites

Digg submissions on OpenSUSE

As a technical sport motor racing demands of its participants a close understanding of the technologies that can help them. F1 motor racing is probably second only to the aerospace industry in the application of aerodynamic simulation and wind tunnel technology. It is a testament to the rapid advance of Linux in high performance computing that most teams in Formula 1 have been using Linux systems in their aerodynamic and engine workshops for a number of years.

“Formula One is a product excellence business that’s all about innovation and technology,” says Jonathan Neale, the managing director of McLaren Racing. “We’re competing for first place in an environment where the difference between first and tenth is about 0.6 seconds, so we’re constantly seeking fractions of a second in performance improvement. On average we’ll make a change to the car every 20 minutes during the course of a season, and to do that, simulation is vital in making efficient changes to the car.” Back in the factory, McLaren uses computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis running on Linux on SGI Altix high performance computers to simulate and predict the car’s behaviour.

Motor racing wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time those daring young men diced with death and each other in their flying machines, with little more than grease blown overalls, a loose flying-helmet, oil-splattered goggles and a V8 engine between them and the oncoming road. The skill of the driver was everything.

Times have changed. Modern motor racing in the 21st century is a team sport, and the difference in performance between the front of the grid and the also rans is measured in hundredths of a second. Every year the cars get faster, the lap records come down, and the drivers and cars reach new limits of endurance and performance, despite a regular tightening of the rules for the sake of safety and increased competitiveness. Every new rule that is imposed to slow the cars down or level the playing field becomes a challenge for the designers, to readjust the vital balance of weight, material, power, downforce, grip, and traction.

Complete Article

Brian Brazil and the team behind the ultra-free gNewSense Linux distribution have released a beta of the forthcoming 2.0 (or Deltah) series. gNewSense is based on Ubuntu but strips the distribution of non-free components to provide users with a truly free operating system. gNewSense is backed by the Free Software Foundation. Among the changes in this release are that gNewSense is now based on Ubuntu Hardy released

last week; the distribution has new artwork; the browser has been changed from Firefox to Epi

phany, the Gnome browser; non-free GLX has been removed from X/mesa; and there is now support for Debian source packages.

gNewSense can be downloaded here or here (torrent).

gNewSense is derived from Ubuntu, and thus has most of the same functionality. There are a number of differences though.

Andrew Binstock and Donald Knuth converse on the success of open source, the problem with multicore architecture, the disappointing lack of interest in literate programming, the menace of reusable code, and that urban legend about winning a programming contest with a single compilation.

Knuth enthuses about Ubuntu and FVWM, sees little future in multi-core programming, and regrets that literate programming isn’t more widely liked. He also forswears unit testing, but the right to skip the testing phase is kind of something that you have to earn.

“Have you been surprised by the success of open source since that time?

Donald Knuth: The success of open source code is perhaps the only thing in the computer field that hasn’t surprised me during the past several decades. But it still hasn’t reached its full potential; I believe that open-source programs will begin to be completely dominant as the economy moves more and more from products towards services, and as more and more volunteers arise to improve the code.

For example, open-source code can produce thousands of binaries, tuned perfectly to the configurations of individual users, whereas commercial software usually will exist in only a few versions. A generic binary executable file must include things like inefficient “sync” instructions that are totally inappropriate for many installations; such wastage goes away when the source code is highly configurable. This should be a huge win for open source.

Yet I think that a few programs, such as Adobe Photoshop, will always be superior to competitors like the Gimp—for some reason, I really don’t know why! I’m quite willing to pay good money for really good software, if I believe that it has been produced by the best programmers.

Remember, though, that my opinion on economic questions is highly suspect, since I’m just an educator and scientist. I understand almost nothing about the marketplace.”

Read full interview script. Very very interesting read.

Souce: InformIT through Wired

New features include the Wubi Windows installer and Firefox 3 beta 5.

Check out Linux Format’s overview of the release

Download Ubuntu here

The mirrors are already getting hit with heavy traffic, so we recommend using the torrent, which is available from the release page.

Ubuntu is released every six months with many new features and the latest versions of popular desktop software applications. Ubuntu 8.04, which is codenamed Hardy Heron, is the second Ubuntu release to offer long-term support, which means that security and maintenance updates will be available for this version for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.

Ubuntu 8.04 includes GNOME 2.22, the latest version of the popular open-source desktop environment. There are many new features and significant architectural improvements in GNOME 2.22, including GVFS—a completely redesigned virtual filesystem abstraction layer—and PolicyKit, a secure privilege elevation system that is safer and more flexible than the anachronistic gksudo mechanism.

Ubuntu now also includes PulseAudio, a powerful new sound server with support for network transparency and advanced mixing capabilities. Although PulseAudio has a lot to offer on the desktop, it still suffers from some transitional issues and integration weaknesses in this release that manifest themselves in certain configurations.

One particularly significant feature included in this release is Wubi, a Windows-based installer that allows Ubuntu and Windows to coexist on the same partition. Wubi installs a fully functional Ubuntu environment into a folder on the Windows filesystem and sets up a boot menu that allows the user to enter Ubuntu at startup. Wubi doesn’t require the user to partition their hard drive and it makes it possible to uninstall Ubuntu directly through the Add/Remove Programs utility in Windows.

There are a handful of new applications included by default in this release, such as the Transmission BitTorrent client, the Cheese webcam application, and a new CD burning program called Brasero.

The next major version is Ubuntu 8.10, which is codenamed Intrepid Ibex and is scheduled for release in October. During the Intrepid Ibex development cycle, the focus will be on mobile computing and desktop scalability. The planning process will begin early next month at the Ubuntu Developer Summit.

Several popular Ubuntu flavors and derivatives have also been released today, including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio, Edubuntu, and Mythbuntu. The Ubuntu 8.04 server edition has also been released and includes an impressive set of enterprise-oriented features. It has already been certified on a variety of Sun server products and has ActiveDirectory integration, virtual appliance support, and improved AppArmor security policies.

Update:

Check out some cool snapshots here: Gallery: A peek at Umbutu 8.4

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition, only the second Ubuntu release aimed at servers, will be available for free download on Thursday, and features performance, stability and security improvements, according to Canonical.

The company said Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition, which comes with five years of maintenance and support, is designed for both enterprises and application makers who need a stable platform to plan around.

“Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is at the centre of a growing ecosystem of applications that serve businesses of all sizes extremely well,” said Canonical chief operating officer Jane Silber, in a statement.

The server includes more network-infrastructure applications than the previous edition, 6.06 LTS, including authentication tool FreeRadius, monitoring tool Munin, VPN tool OpenVPN and backup tool Bacula, Canonical said.

The kernel has been additionally hardened, and AppArmor policies have been integrated. The server integrates host firewalling, features additional storage technologies, including iSCSI and DRDB, and includes more than 500 maintained and supported server packages, according to Canonical.

The new version adds the KVM virtualization technology, and kernel improvements mean the server uses resources more efficiently when under virtualization, Canonical said. The system integrates with Microsoft’s Active Directory, via technology from Likewise Open, and is the first distribution to optionally include Sun’s OpenJDK Java development kit, the company said.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition is the fourth server release from Canonical. It comes with five years of security updates and maintenance. Among the new and updated features available with the LTS release are:

Solid Foundation

• Expanded range of network infrastructure applications including authentication (FreeRadius), monitoring (Munin), VPN (OpenVPN) and backup (Bacula).
• Enhanced security with integrated AppArmor policies and increased kernel hardening.
• Increased range of storage capabilities including iSCSI and DRBD.
• Over 500 maintained and supported server packages, together with access to more than 20,000 additional components built for 8.04 LTS.
• Integrated host firewalling to protect Internet facing servers.
• Fully upgradable from the previous 6.06 LTS release.

Extensive Ecosystem

• Active Directory integration as standard, provided by LikeWise Open.
• Ubuntu is the first distribution to include Open JDK from Sun as an option.
• Certified applications for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition from Alfresco, Bacula, IBM, VMWare, Parallels, Qumranet, Tresys, Zarafa, Zend, Zimbra and more.

Virtual Platform of Choice

• Addition of KVM for hosting virtualisation of applications and operating systems.
• Significant kernel improvements to optimise resources use when under virtualisation.
• Ubuntu JeOS enhanced to optimise virtual appliances and ready to run in VMWare or KVM environments on any system.

Pricing, Availability and Technical Information

• Extensive information on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition can be found at www.ubuntu.com/server.
• On Thursday, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition will be available for download from www.ubuntu.com/download

Here’s the meat of the announcement:

It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.

An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers. The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities. But there’s good news too. Technical developments that have become available over the past year or two are accelerating the spread of the Linux Desktop.

But I have been thinking, why would RH want to do this? Over the years, RedHat was *the* brand that was almost synonymous with Linux which has support. Corporates and businesses when asked the techies “who will support open source” almost always got some pointers in RedHat’s direction. And then this!

What is Red Hat really scared of - Microsoft? But this exit of RedHat will announce in no uncertain terms the victory of Ubuntu too! Today, if XP etc rule the desktop market, Ubuntu has slowly got the mindshare of the Linux users and is the most dominant Linux distribution today.

Does Red Hat’s exit now leave the desktop Linux field open to Ubuntu? I would say, yes!

The Eee PC 900, which the Taipei-based computer maker unveiled last Tuesday, can be configured with either Microsoft Corp.’s Windows XP Home or the open-source Linux. The price for both configurations, said an Asustek spokesman, is identical: $549.

But there are differences. Users who purchase an Eee PC 900 with Linux, however, receive a laptop that boasts 20GB of flash memory-based storage space. Customers who opt for Windows XP, meanwhile, end up with a machine equipped with only 12GB of solid-state storage.

When asked why the two models pack different quantities of storage space — and whether the lesser amount was stuck in the XP version because of the licensing fees Asustek must pay to Microsoft — Asustek spokesman Charlton Ho called it a “strategic decision.”

“Cost would be one of the reasons, but not the main one,” Ho said in an e-mail. He then proceeded to trumpet the Linux-based system. “Also, [the] Linux version is our main Eee PC model with our unique interface, so the consumer not only can get the great and easy-to-use interface on the Linux version but extra storage space,” Ho added.

Both Windows and Linux models pack an 8.9-in. screen, 1GB of system memory, a 1.3-megapixel camera and an Apple MacBook Air-style multi-touch trackpad.

This is the second ultralight line from Asustek that offers XP as an option; it currently sells a Eee PC with a 7-in. display in the U.S. for $399.

Window XP, which is to disappear as an option on most new computers after June 30, was granted a reprieve of sorts two weeks ago, when Microsoft said it would allow OEMs building what it called ultra low-cost PC (ULCPC) laptops to pre-install XP Home until the end of June 2010.

We consider this release candidate to be complete, stable, and suitable for testing by any user.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Desktop Edition features incremental improvements to familiar applications, with an emphasis on stability for this second Ubuntu long-term support release, and is easier than ever to try out with the new Wubi installer.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server Edition follows in the footsteps of Ubuntu 7.10 with even more virtualization support and security enhancements - enabling AppArmor for more applications by default, improving protection of kernel memory against attacks, and supporting KVM and iSCSI technologies out of the
box.

The Ubuntu 8.04 LTS family of variants, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, UbuntuStudio, and Mythbuntu, also reach RC status today. The final release of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is scheduled for 24 April 2008 and will be supported for three years on the desktop and five years on the server.

Source: ubuntu list

Novell actually isn’t taking an extreme position on the consumer Linux desktop. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian on April 15th in India, according to an InfoWorld report, simply said that the consumer market is taking longer to develop than the business market and that “The market for the desktop for the next three to five years is mainly enterprise-related.”

OK, fair enough. I think the consumer Linux desktop is growing faster than he does, but he’s certainly right when he says that the Linux desktop is going to grow faster still in business. I mean, there must be some enterprises moving to Microsoft Vista, I just don’t happen to know of any.

For businesses that want a desktop upgrade and get ill at the very thought of dealing with Vista’s woes, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP1 deserves serious consideration. That’s especially true since businesses can now buy SLED pre-installed on Lenovo ThinkPads and the HP Mini.

Red Hat, though, in their announcement that they were giving up on their consumer Linux desktop plans went overboard. In their blog post, the Red Hat desktop team declared, “The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative.”

And this is news how? Linux, not just the desktop, but the now popular server, still suffered from fools that don’t realize it’s a mature, business and home ready operating system. If Red Hat had started out with a similar attitude when the company started that Microsoft and the Unix companies had too strong a hold on servers and that people didn’t understand Linux could work for them, Red Hat would be long dead. If you don’t believe in your product, how can you expect anyone else to?

The Red Hat desktop team then went on, “Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.”

Sure, it’s tough. Selling anything new is always tough. Most businesses, whether it’s selling pizzas or operating systems fail. If you can’t deal with it, go get a job flipping burgers.

But, here’s the point Red Hat, there are businesses working with the Linux desktop that have not failed, not stalled and, frankly, I’m not even what you’re talking about when you mention charities. OLPC (One Laptop per Child)? The project is meant to do good, but it’s also meant to pay for its own. The OLPC sells XO laptops, it doesn’t give them away.

In fact, if you follow what’s been happening with the Linux desktop, you’ll see it’s doing great. Asus sold 300-thousand of its Eee PC series running Xandros Linux last year. This year, the Taiwanese company expects to sell 2-million of them. Sounds to me like desktop Linux is doing pretty darn good for them.

Everex hasn’t released numbers for its gOS-powered gPCs, but from all reports this Google-oriented Linux PC is doing quite well. Dell’s been selling some of its PCs with Ubuntu Linux for closing in on a year now. While, Dell won’t give out sales numbers either, as Todd Weiss reports in ComputerWorld, Dell spokesperson Anne Camden said, A [sales] number is not going to validate it as much as our actions to date.” Those actions have been to continue to add new Ubuntu-powered models like the Dell Inspiron 1525 and updating their systems with Ubuntu 7.10 and the ability to play DVDs..

Those are just the big success stories. You also have major retailers like Amazon, Best Buy and Sears now selling pre-installed Linux PCs. And, thanks to the Vista flop, Windows PC sales are actually declining.

Put it all together and what do you get? You get the best time ever for the consumer Linux desktop to gain customers’ attention. So, why is Novell lukewarm and Red Hat downright cool about home Linux?

Part of it is simply their business plans. Novell wants the business Linux server and desktop market. Red Hat is focusing on its servers and JBoss. But, you know what? I think some of this, especially from Red Hat’s tone, is simple, good old-fashioned jealousy.

Consumer Linux is now a success. But, it’s not Red Hat’s success. It’s the success of gOS, a distribution that came out of the blue late last year. It’s the success of Xandros, the oldest desktop Linux distribution but one that has never been that popular. And, last but perhaps most tellingly, it’s the success of Ubuntu.

There was a time when if you said Linux, people immediately thought of Red Hat. Now, except in server circles, if you say Linux chance are your listeners will be thinking of Ubuntu. Oh, and have I mentioned that Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu is targeting servers now? Could Red Hat be getting just a wee-bit jealous of the little people-friendly Linux that could? I think they just might be.

Concurrent is a Linux distributor specializing in real-time technologies that can be utilized by some very serious businesses. For example, Concurrent is the key supplier of RedHawk Linux for the US Navy’s Aegis cruisers, which are equipped with anti-air, anti-surface, and anti-submarine weapons systems.

The company’s trademark architecture relies on the presence of multiple processors, and the ability to schedule threading between CPUs and cores to ensure higher reliability for user tasks, as opposed to hardware-specific tasks. One way it does this is through a mechanism Concurrent calls processor shielding, which grants higher priorities to selected cores that run user applications…such as anti-submarine algorithmic operations.”When the worst-case time measured for either executing a code segment or response to an interrupt is significantly different than the typical case, the application’s performance is said to be experiencing jitter. Because of computer architecture features such as memory caches and because of contention for shared resources, there will always be some amount of jitter in measurements of execution times,” reads a Concurrent white paper on the subject (PDF available here).

“Real-time applications are defined by the fact that they must respond to real world events within a predetermined deadline. Computations that are completed after this deadline are considered incorrect. This means that the worst-case jitter the operating system allows determines whether that operating system is suitable for hosting a given real-time application. Each real-time application must define the amount of jitter that is acceptable to that application.”

As the white paper goes on, high-priority tasks are granted to shielded CPUs, while hardware interrupts are assigned to the others.

In the multi-core era, it becomes possible to segment processor resources and architecture more granularly. So the most noteworthy new features of RedHawk Linux 5.1 is Intel and AMD quad-core processor support, plus support for non-uniform memory architecture (NUMA) used by AMD processors.

NUMA enables separate cores to access different segments of memory without having to utilize the same stream. Real-time processes are able to work faster using NUMA because all processes are local to a particular node and will not be shared or interrupted by another page trying to use the same node.

NUMA is more important for companies using real-time Linux operating systems because they need reliable access to time-critical environment situations that may not be met by a regular Linux OS. NUMA is used by AMD processors today, and will being integrated into the next generation of 45 nm Intel CPUs. Previous Intel Xeon and Pentium processors used a shared pool of memory that each processor was forced to access using a memory controller hub or front-side bus.

Source: BetaNews

The problem is caused by inadequate checking while typefaces embedded in PDF files are being processed, but no further details are known as yet. When manipulated PDF files are opened, injected code can be executed with the user’s rights. An entry has already been added to the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database, but it gives no further details.

In addition to Xpdf, affected software includes the poppler project and, in some Linux distributions, also KOffice, if code from Xpdf is statically linked in, as is the case with Ubuntu. Several Linux distributors are already issuing updated Xpdf, poppler and KOffice packages that fix the problem. Administrators should install these updates without delay.

See also:

• New xpdf packages fix arbitrary code execution, vulnerability report by the Debian developers
• poppler vulnerability, vulnerability report by Kees Cook of the Ubuntu Security Team
• KOffice vulnerability, vulnerability report by Kees Cook of the Ubuntu Security Team

Source: heise-online.co.uk

“The full changelog from 2.6.24 is 7.5M, with a 12MB compressed patch. Tons and tons has changed, but if you’ve been following the -rc releases, you’ll already know about the big things. The changes from the last rc (-rc9) are fairly small and mostly pretty trivial, and the shortlog is appended. So it’s mostly one-liners, with some updates to drivers (net and usb) and to networking that are a bit larger (although a number of the driver updates are things like just new ID’s etc).”

More information about the latest release can be found on the KernelNewbies Linux 2.6.25 wiki page.

It’s been long promised, but there it is now. Special thanks to Ingo who
found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a
regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as
reliably before.

That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding
things up for, and it’s not like there weren’t a lot of other fixes too,
they just didn’t end up being the final things that triggered my
particular worries.

The full changelog from 2.6.24 is 7.5M, with a 12MB compressed patch. Tons
and tons has changed, but if you’ve been following the -rc releases,
you’ll already know about the big things. The changes from the last rc
(-rc9) are fairly small and mostly pretty trivial, and the shortlog is
appended.

So it’s mostly one-liners, with some updates to drivers (net and usb) and
to networking that are a bit larger (although a number of the driver
updates are things like just new ID’s etc).

For those of you who haven’t followed -rc’s, and want the more readable
overview of what has changed since 2.6.24, I’d suggest the usual sites,
notably http://kernelnewbies.org/.

And a reminder for git users: while the _full_ changelogs are huge and
unwieldly and you easily lose sight of the big picture from just bring
overwhelmed by the details, if you’re interested in some particular
subsystem, using “gitk v2.6.24.. <path-limiter>” is a good way to see what
has changed in that particular area.

Linus

“If there is a single complaint that is laid at the feet of Linux time and time again, it’s that the operating system is too complicated and arcane for casual computer users to tolerate. You can’t ask newbies to install device drivers or recompile the kernel, naysayers argue.

Of course, many of those criticisms date back to the bad old days, but Ubuntu, the user-friendly distribution sponsored by Mark Shuttleworth’s Canonical Ltd., has made a mission out of dispelling such complaints entirely.”

…

“One of the killer features of Ubuntu is that the installation media is also a “live CD.” This means that you can boot it off the CD and try it out first before installing it. (You can also set Ubuntu up to boot off a USB drive.) In other words, you can make sure that all your hardware will work correctly and that you’re happy with the look and feel of the operating system before committing yourself to anything permanent. You can also carry it around and use it to boot up a friend’s computer under Ubuntu.

And when you do install it, you’ll be asked a minimum of questions, and none of them are in the least challenging to anyone who has ever installed Windows. The install is even smart enough to help you resize an existing Windows partition (even Vista!) to set up a dual-boot system and set the boot menu to handle it.”

Aha! But how many of the “casual computer users” install Windows in the first place (and why are we comparing that anyway)? Ubuntu may make installation easy - but the “casual computer users” who is used to the mouse and file-manager to do all things, would you even want to talk of shell scripts?

Is (was) Linux targeted towards the “casual computer users” in the first place?

Not too sure about that. If you look at how Linux interfaces looked 10 years back, definitely no. I remember I used to hack around the *vms and make the desktop look as bright as other OSs. Things definitely have changed, but the reputation has lingered. Linux still remains an enigma to the masses. It always was like that. Windows for masses. Mac for the passionates. *nix for the programmers.

I do wish that Ubuntu or the latest flavours of Linux makes that dent in the casual users minds. Ubuntu is ready for the millions of office workers and people who only do e-mail, word processing, and web browsing. People don’t need to know that there is a Linux kernel underneath, though the Software Update application will remind them occasionally.

For someone who wants to do more, they have to learn a lot to get things done, unlike Windows or Mac OS X. Either commercial software has to arrive or free software has to evolve past a programmer’s paradise.