One Shot Design

Google announced a Cloud Computing operating system targeted at netbooks. The announcement met with mitigated response. Some GNU/Linux users do feel that this initiative is adding to an already fragmented Linux panorama where Ubuntu seems to be standing out.

Having acquired PC-BSD Software in October 2006, the enterprise-class hardware solution provider iXsystems has now announced the Apollo, a workstation featuring the preinstalled PC-BSD OS.

This new offer reminds me of Zareason, who offers a broad range of hardware with any flavor of Ubuntu GNU/Linux preinstalled: desktops, laptops and servers. I did purchased a workstation from Zareason in Autumn 2008 and found it to run smoothly.

PC-BSD has already been mentionned on this blog. Capitalising on the KDE desctop environment, it is probably one of the most user-friendly UNIXes after Apple Inc. OSX. PD-BSD relies upon Free-BSD, but it also uses its own package management system (PBI) to install applications. There is already quite a broad choice and the list keeps getting longer.

It is nice to see it an OS as promising as PC-BSD running on fully supported hardware.

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.