Debian

Ubuntu tops the Open Source Census with 46 percent

The Open Source Census rolls forward, but I'm not sure how far it has gone as yet. In the summary, it shows just 789 machines scanned (as of the time that I read it). That's not a bad start, but it is just a start. As such, it's hard to read much into the data.

To be more representative, it will need to get more responses from those employed by larger companies. With just 22 percent of respondents employed by a company with more than 1,000 people, it's clear that the Census skews toward SMBs (small and midsize businesses, with an emphasis on the "S").

It will also need a more representative geographic spread. For example, France, which always shows up as second or third, in terms of open-source adoption in every open-source survey I've seen, apparently doesn't even scrape 2 percent of participants. The United Kingdom, by contrast, is third, behind Canada, despite its dismal commercial open-source penetration.

So the data appears to be highly imperfect, but it will get better as more participate.

The data on Ubuntu's amazing adoption, however, is nigh impossible to dispute, looking at the data.… Read more

Ubuntu's Hardy Heron is here

With its scheduled April 24 release of Ubuntu 8.04, which also goes by the alliterative moniker "Hardy Heron," Canonical will ship its second "long term support" (LTS) version. But the first, really, since the company and distribution became widely popular.

There's always been a bit of a flavor-of-the-month aspect to Linux distributions other than the big two: Red Hat (along with its Fedora community version) and Novell's SUSE. Gentoo grabbed headlines one year; Mandrake was supposed to make the Linux desktop a widespread reality another year. It might be tempting to paint Ubuntu'… Read more

Can 3,000 Brazilians be wrong?

Children in rural areas of Brazil are about to get their geek on with a slew of new Debian-based Linux machines, as Softpedia notes:

Schools from Brazil will receive about 3000 Debian GNU/Linux based computers, with four multimedia terminals, as the Ministry of Education is willing to buy them for 3000 rural schools. The computers will have compatible printers and 36 months contractual support. This is not the first time when the Ministry of Education from Brazil is buying Linux-based computers, as about a month ago they acquired 90,000 Debian GNU/Linux PCs, with compatible wireless cards, wireless … Read more

End of the line for Progeny Linux

It's long been clear that Progeny Linux, an attempt to commercialize support for the Debian version of the open-source operating system, had ceased to be relevant. But the company made it official on Monday.

A note on its Web site reads, "We are sorry to inform you that Progeny Linux Systems, Inc. ceased operations April 30, 2007."

Debian and Progeny founder Ian Murdock already had left the company in 2006 to work on the Linux Standard Base project. In March, Murdock joined Sun Microsystems as its chief operating systems officer, where he balances involvement with Linux with … Read more

Say what? Debian developers are 'childish'

Andreas Barth and fellow Debian version 4 release manager Steve Langasek probably predicted a little bit of resentment from fellow contributors to the Linux project when they set up an "experiment" help fund their efforts. After all, they called it Dunc-Tank, which naturally reminds us of a really fun carnival sport.

While the rest of the team is getting paid nothing, as is the norm in open-source communities, Barth and Langasek have reportedly raised enough to pay themselves $6,000 each.

They probably didn't predict, though, that Dunc-Tank, which they said was designed to help speed the … Read more