Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

Its been five years since I set foot on the floor of the first LinuxWorld in San Jose, Calif. What a long, strange trip its been. Back then, Caldera, Corel, Compaq, IBM, LinuxCare, Red Hat, Sendmail and VA Research dominated the rather small showroom floor. As for Debian, the Linux behind popular business distributions such […]

Want an honest-to-God great Linux desktop for your SMB but you dont want to give up Windows? Boy, do I have a deal for you! Its Xandros Inc.s Xandros Desktop OS Business Edition 2.5. Built on top of the Linux 2.4.24 kernel, specifically the Debian 4.0 (Sarge) variation, its one solid operating system, and its […]

ASHEVILLE, N.C.—Red Hats stock may have been troubled recently, but businesses still believe in the Linux distributor. At a recent Blue Ridge Entrepreneurial Council meeting here of about 100 businesspeople, a trio of Red Hat Inc. executives didnt find questions about law firms seeking to file class-action suits against the Linux company because of its […]

Wi-Fi is everywhere. Many laptops now come with 802.11g and 802.11b-compliant wireless hardware as standard equipment, but wireless security is almost an oxymoron. Thats going to change. Wai Sing Lee, an analyst with market research firm Frost & Sullivan, sees a huge jump coming for wireless security and, in turn, vendors, value-added resellers and integrators […]

LinuxWorld is less than a week away, but Linux distributor Xandros is beating other vendors to the punch by announcing its new desktop: Xandros Desktop OS 2.5. Building on the base of the old Corel Linux desktop distribution, Xandros Inc. is continuing to try to forge a place for itself as a leading Linux desktop […]

Just when the Unix community thought that the fractious BayStar-SCO dispute was history, the investment house proved everyone wrong. The company now says it will sue SCO and continue the pairs troubled financial relationship. The SCO Group Inc. had depended on BayStar Capital II LP to give it the financial fuel it needed to pursue […]

Its not over yet. Yes, I know SCO lost in the DaimlerChrysler case, but when all was said and done, that case turned into a much smaller matter of contract law rather than anything to do with Linux. And making it even more meaningless was the fact that DaimlerChrysler did finally assert that it had […]

SCO suffered its first major defeat Wednesday in its legal wars against Linux-using companies, when DaimlerChrysler was granted all of the important points in its motion to dismiss SCOs case. Judge Rae Lee Chabot of Oakland County Circuit Court in Michigan all but dismissed The SCO Group Inc.s case after a hearing, which, according to […]

eWEEK.com has confirmed that an internal Hewlett-Packard Co. memo to senior HP staffers, which surfaced on Friday, reveals HPs circa-2002 thoughts on when, how and why Microsoft Corp. would start filing patent infringement lawsuits against HPs use of open-source software. The memo is dated June 3, 2002 and shows how worried HP executives were that […]

Linux and open-source fans throughout the world got a shock on Friday night (U.S. Eastern Time) to find that Slashdot, the IT news, gossip and chat site, was apparently offline. Attempts to reach the wildly popular site were greeted with a HTTP 503—Service Unavailable Error—message. The Slashdot outage was the result of an intentional server […]

Its being a long week for Red Hat executives, as no fewer than 10 law firms have announced their intentions to launch stockholder class-action lawsuits against the Raleigh, N.C., Linux company in the wake of its announcement that it is changing its accounting methods. Typically, the complaints charge that Red Hat Inc. CEO and president […]

OK, so youre ready to at least start thinking about switching to a Linux desktop. What should you be looking for? Well, to answer that question, you first need to answer another question: What are you using your desktop for? Today, Im going to talk about lightweight Linux desktops. Next time up, Ill yack about […]