Today Linux desktop manufacturer Xandros acquired Linspire for an undisclosed amount. Xandros will also be keeping existing engineering, support, and key sales employees and long-time Linspire employee and CEO Larry Kettler will be joining the Xandros executive team as the VP of Business Development. While Xandros didn't mention their total employee numbers Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos claims Xandros to be the third largest Linux company in the world after the acquisition. Former Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony has some harsh criticism of the deal on his blog.

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Overall, it's a good looking desktop ( it's green, but that changes easily enough) they have included some documentation for folks to get an idea how to get started using it. The only thing that stands out cosmetically to me is the slab menu.

Our nominees are BEL Server Basic (KDE), UServer 8.04 LTS, OpenSuse 11 and CentOS 5.

Situationally, we talked about what we felt were the 'keypoint' strengths' of each distro and what role we would fit them into the LAN as.

This is a small LAN, one of the purposes of using Linux as a server for our intents is to provide small/medium sized businesses an option that makes the most out of available resources. Which often means using equipment at hand or easily (low cost) gotten.

Which distros cooperate the best? We take 4 distros at a time and put them all on a LAN to see how well they perform individually and collaboratively.

I think we can all agree, that Linux is taking a foothold, and gaining a certain degree of traction among desktop users, the gripes of the past, are being chipped away, and the product is becoming slowly more solid. Now its time to market the product, in a cheap and easy way, by telling us what hardware already works....

Vector Linux , Fast , Stable and Fun!

Today ain't been our day. We experienced two occurrences of downtime today for seemingly unrelated reasons.

This distribution is based on Ubuntu 8.04 and has the KDE interface with the Ultumix style and configuration. It also has many fixes such as the screensaver bug. We found out it was related to editing the Kmenu. We also installed the Mac4Lin interface which says it's under the LGPL. This version includes the Gamer Edition and Ultimate Edition meta package installers you will need to get all of the extras. Check our site for updated meta packages once in a while under downloads. We also have the 64 bit version and it should be available right after this one is up on the net.

My daughter is getting married this Summer, and she purchased some weird Avery return address labels for invitees to RSVP whether they plan to attend. The labels have an Avery number of 18195. I have no MS-Windows workstations at home, and I couldn't find an Openoffice.org Writer template for this particular label stock. What to do?

First Full Length 2 hour Show This Saturday 8:PM Pacific Standard Time, 11:PM EDT. You can call in or listen live.

Talk about anything Computer Related!

Eoin Brazil, a Computer Systems graduate from the University of Limerick (BSc in 2000 and MSc in 2003), is now a Research Officer working on auditory displays and on the use of sound in human-computer interaction in the university's Interaction Design Centre.

There was a time when I thought the Linux desktop was going to take a market share at least equal to Apple’s. Maybe even 5% or 10% of the total desktop market. I had high hopes that the One Laptop Per Child Initiative would put Linux laptops in the hands of impressionable young minds who would never have the chance to become dependent on Windows. Though that plan has fallen through the cracks. I don’t hate Microsoft Windows I just don’t have a desire to see any operating system dominate the market in such a way that the lack of competition stifles innovation and forces users into an endless upgrade cycle, offering progressively smaller incremental value.

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At the Irish Open Source Technology Conference, there's some very impressive people lined up - evangelists from the US, England and Wales, 19yr old 'self made millionaires and even one or two special guests (more on June 1st). So, how about a local Dubliner to add into the mix.

Shaun Smith, a lead developer in the Java Platform Group in Oracle and Eco-System Development lead for EclipseLink, the Eclipse Persistence Services Project, is to return to Ireland in June to present at the Irish Open Source Technology Conference.