One Shot Design

Matt Asay of CNET.com wrote an interesting article exploring the common history of Oracle Corporation and Red Hat Linux, and the possibility of Oracle to focuse on Ubuntu Linux in order to break away from Red Hat. Asay’s conclusion makes a lot of sense, because Canonical’s Debian-based Ubuntu is the GNU/Linux distribution with the best popularity and the biggest adoption rate at the moment. The only problem though is that Canonical is not for sale.

In April 2009, Oracle commited to acquiring SUN Microsystems, who introduced the Solaris OS. I mentionned earlier on this forum about Nexenta, an operating system based on Ubuntu code and the Solaris kernel. With this choice, Oracle would still be able to capitalize on the extensive Debian and Ubuntu repositories.

After several months of waiting and pondering I have decided to jump in and get an HTC Magic running Google’s Android platform.

The choice of a carrier was tricky. I eventually chose Orange, which would be the weakest network in Switzwerland, but they have extremely good costs for calls and roaming in Europe.

The first days, I’ve had a hard time figuring out how to type correctly. The best solution seems to be anticipating the fingertip roundess by typing a few millimeters closer to the dial center.

Update: Android is seamslessly integrated with online Google services. I can access my calendar, create and modify events; and gMail runs like push e-mail on Android. The first time I logged, the address book synced with my gMail contacts but the application seems to fail to refresh. I performed a soft reboot to achieve the result. I have also installed on my laptop a Thunderbird plugin called Zindus that consolidates and syncs the address books. Zindus syncs most address book fields between Thunderbird and gMail contacts, but street addresses have to be written manually.

Debian and all the other GNU/Linux distributions based on it are the first lineage of operating systems to support USB 3.0.  Sarah Sharp, a Linux developer at Intel’s Open Source Technology Center explains how to manually enable USB 3.0 on Debian.

UNIX Berkeley Software Distributions like PC-BSD were created to make the FreeBSD accessible to the layman. Both PC-BSD and FreeBSD use the ZFS file system designed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system.

Another ZFS-based operating system has just been released: StormOS beta, based on Nexenta, a combination of the OpenSolaris Kernel and Debian code. Unlike PC-BSD, which needs its own installation sources, Nexenta and StormOS can install and run Debian applications.

Officials from the European Union are said to be enlisting the help of rival browser vendors in their anti-trust dealings with Microsoft.

According to a Wall Street Journal report the European Commission has begun speaking with hardware and software vendors, including rival browser companies such as Opera, on ways which Microsoft can allow for competition on Windows systems.

Read the article at vnunet.com.