The Proliferation of Linux

Can it be?  Is it really possible?  Adobe has finally put up with a 64-bit Flash player for Linux.  Admittedly, it’s still a preview release, but still it seems too good to be true.  It isn’t April Fool’s, is it?

The pre-release release was announced with a bit of, what I hope is, sarcasm:

We are pleased to announce that there is now a version of the Flash Player for Linux that supports 16 theoretical exabytes of physical memory. This technological feat is accomplished using a bleeding edge type of processor known as a 64-bit CPU.

I feel a bit sentimental about it all. It’s weird, but I think I’m going to miss the hundreds of comments on every post gently requesting a 64-bit version. So don’t be afraid to pop in with a “64-BIT NOW!!!1!!” comment every so often, you know, just for old time’s sake.

The alpha release of 64-bit Flash for Linux is now available for download at Adobe Labs, go and get it if you dare.

Adobe Penquin.SWF blog [via Slashdot]

Donald Townsend. CC BY-NC-SA

A recently released study conducted by the Linux Foundation place the value of the Linux Kernel at around 1.4 billion US dollars (~1.1 billion €) and the value of a the full Fedora 9 distrbution at just above 10 billion US dollars (~7.85 billion €).

The companies and individuals who work on Linux-related projects and build this value proft by sharing the development burden with their peers (and sometimes competitors.) Increasingly it’s becoming clear that shouldering this research and development burden individually, as Microsoft has done, is an expensive approach to building software. While monopoly position in the past has allowed them to fund this massive development, we believe that in the future competition from collaborative forces will make such an isolated position untenable.

O’Reilly Radar

Linux kernel version 2.6.27 is now officially out. This new release brings with it quite a few improvements and new features, including a new filesystem (UBIFS) for ‘pure’ flash-based storage.

Read on for the release announcement and links to the relevant pages.

(more…)

As we all know, there lots of distros out there that excel in different areas and niches.  Ubuntu is great for beginners and desktop use, Red Hat/SuSE for the corporate types, Gentoo for control freaks (don’t get me wrong, Gentoo’s great…) and so forth.  And then there are the distros that make us Linux affcionados bow our heads in shame.  Distributions like Linspire (formerly Lindows), gOS, Linux XP and so on.

To this end, the Internetling blog has a post outlining the three worst offenders: gOS, ZevenOS, and Linux XP.  The last of these even appears to be in violation of the GPL as they only offer a 30-day trial version for download.

Internetling

The folks over at CodeWeavers (of CrossOver fame) have managed to create a working port of Google Chrome for Linux and Mac using WINE.  The port is available for free on the CodeWeavers site.  Most of the Google Chrome functionality has been implemented, the biggest missing feature seems to be auto updates.

Jeremy White writes on the CodeWeavers blog:

[On] Thursday, September 4th, I called a company Fire Drill.  I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible.  By Friday, we had a first working build.  But it had a major problem - you couldn’t do https sites, so logging in to Gmail, for example, was right out.   Unfortunately, supporting that required that we finish the implementation of a nearly brand new DLL in Wine - the winhttp dll.  Luckily for us, Hans Leiddeker had recently joined CodeWeavers, and in a bit of a hazing ritual, we asked him to scramble madly to implement what we needed.  A little more than a week later, and he had done it.  Of course, there were many other people who pitched in and tuned Wine to make Chromium just that much nicer.

NB. The CodeWeavers implementation is “free as in beer” but not “free as in speech”.

• Chromium
• CodeWeavers blog
• [via Slashdot]