Eolas had long claimed that its two software patents 7,599,985 and 5,838,906 covered much of we now consider part and parcel of today’s Web. Microsoft finally surrendered and other technology giants like Texas Instruments, Oracle and JP Morgan Chase paid off Eolas. But other companies weren’t so quick to give up. Experts, like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s creator; Pei-Yuan Wei, creater of the early Viola Web browser; and Dave Raggettm who created the <embed> tag have long contended that Eolas’ claims were invalid.

While it was clear to the experts—and to your author who was the first person to report on the Web back in 1993–that Eolas’ claims were bogus, until this decision Eolas had managed to maintain its patents against all comers.

In the usually software-patent friendly U.S. District Court in East Texas though Eolas received a rude shock. After years of preparation, the jury took only a few hours to rule against Eolas on all points. Worse still, from Eolas’ viewpoint, the three upcoming trials that had been scheduled to rule on infringement and damages for Google, Yahoo and other companies, have also been canceled. Eolas will now need to restart its patent litigation machine.

Unfortunately, Eolas will probably do just that. The good news is that it will likely take years before Eolas will appear once more in a courtroom to take up this battle again.

Still, as Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media , said on Google+ about the decision, “The current patent system is a terrible tax on invention, as it requires real inventors to spend time in court rather than focusing on making real things happen. We must remember that the patent system was supposed to ‘promote the progress of science and the useful arts,’ not to enrich people who know how to work the legal system.” Unfortunately, he’s correct and while this decision is a good one, the fight against software patents, even these specific ones, is still far from done.

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Pentaho, a longstanding open source business intelligence applications player, notes that Hadoop and several top NoSQL databases are licensed under Apache. Pentaho’s Kettle open source project, othwerwise known as Pentaho Data Integration Community Edition,  is devoted to “operationalizing” big data.

Some of the big data capabilities in Kettle that will be open sourced include “the ability to input, output, manipulate and report on data using the following Hadoop and NoSQL stores: Cassandra, Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce, Hadapt, HBase, Hive, HPCC Systems and MongoDB,” the company announced.

Traditional relational databases and data tools are insufficient for handling big datasets.

One exec had this to say about the open source move:

“In order to obtain broader market adoption of big data technology including Hadoop and NoSQL, Pentaho is open sourcing its data integration product under the free Apache license. This will foster success and productivity for developers, analysts and data scientists giving them one tool for data integration and access to discovery and visualization,” said Matt Caster, founder and chief architectb of Pentaho’s Kettle Project.

NGINX, the fast Web server, now comes with commercial support.

NGINX, the popular open-source Web server, recently swept by Microsoft’s Internet Information Services to become the second most popular Web server in the world. Not bad for an open-source project without any commercial support! NGINX is changing that now. Its parent company has just announced commercial support options for businesses.

According to the newly formed, July 2011, Web company, NGINX’s original creators and developers will provide support for small, medium or large-scale commercial Web site installations. Three technical support packages are available–Essential, Advanced and Premium–covering installation, configuration, performance improvement, software maintenance, design, implementation, and optimization assistance.

NGINX promises to offer “rapid response and resolution of problems and incidents, including emergency bug fixes and prioritized development. Subscribing customers will also receive proactive notifications about major changes, security patches, new and interim software releases, and recommendations about available updates and upgrades. All packages can be supplied based on either a 12- or a 3-month contract. Subscribers to the Advanced and Premium options receive design, implementation and optimization assistance, as well as prioritized development. Premium subscribers will have access to an additional set of customization options.”

Consulting services are also available to assist customers in tailoring their bespoke configurations or adding further features and functionality. Since enterprise adoption of the NGINX is trending up as one of the top 5 business open-source applications, I expect many commercial customers to be interested in these service level agreement (SLA) support plans.

“These options were designed with NGINX business users in mind,” said Andrey Alexeev, co-founder of NGINX in a statement. “Whether you are using a NGINX in a single instance or thousands of NGINX-based Web servers for commercial applications, we now have direct vendor support to suit all levels of demand. We listen very carefully to our customers, and the commercial technical support packages are designed to address their most common needs. Several enterprises have already subscribed, and in the future we will be offering more services based on customer feedback.”

That said, NGINX also promises that it will not be abandoning its open-source roots. “Open-source community users will continue to have access to an extensive range of free support and advice from a variety of online resources. Documentation, knowledge base, mailing lists and forums that provide insights on how to work with NGINX, address bug fixes, obtain workarounds, and build applications are being constantly improved. Users can also download and browse complete source code and binary packages from NGINX web sites, and report and track bug fixes.

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Bill Flora, a key leader on the team that created Microsoft's Metro... and his MacBook Pro.

When I first saw this image of Bill Flora, a key leader on the team that created Microsoft’s Windows 8 Metro interface, I almost laughed myself silly. Notice what Flora, who had left Microsoft after 19-years as a creative director in September to start TECTONIC, a user experience design firm, uses for his main computer? That sure looks a MacBook Pro to me!

Seriously? One of Microsoft’s go-to Metro guys left the company ahead of Windows 8’s launch and now uses a Mac? The picture says it all. Of course, Floria’s not the only Metro developer to abandon ship. Brandon Watson, head of developer experiences for Windows Phone, is the latest executive to leave the Microsoft’s phone unit. Between Flora and Watson’s departure, Matt Bencke, General Manager for Windows Phone Developer and Marketplace, left the Windows Phone team, but he did, at least, stay in Microsoft. He’s now over with the to Xbox Live crew.

OK, so Metro, while it’s getting closer to beta, is still too wet behind the ears for serious work. That said, I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s a little odd that Metro developers are running out the door so late in the game and with so much Metro development and design work still to be done. I wonder what they know that Microsoft isn’t telling us. Mind you, Microsoft isn’t telling users or developers that much about Metro applications and programming.

We do know, however, that it seems Microsoft may just be supporting both Metro-style and Desktop apps, aka classic Windows, on Windows 8 on ARM. That tells me Microsoft is starting to hedge its bets that dyed in the wool Windows users are really going to take up a radically new interface to do the same old things.

That said, I also doubt that Microsoft can bring its old x86 Windows look and applications to ARM in a way that will work. I think the Metro interface will be a total failure on the desktop, but I think that “Classic” Windows on a tablet or a smartphone will be even more of a design flop.

Leaving aside the foolishness of trying to use a Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointer (WIMP) interface on a tablet, there’s the engineering problems behind the display. It’s not that easy to port old x86 code and recompile it for ARM.

You could, I suppose use an Apple-style  Rosetta x86 binary emulator for ARM, but that approach has three major problems: 1) It’s slow; 2) It eats power like an elephant eats peanuts; and 3) you’re still stuck with very different screen architectures.

Sure, I can see why the idea of using Desktop on ARM sounds attractive at first glance: “Give the people the interface and apps they already know,” but practically speaking it comes with a host of problems. Not least of these is that it makes me wonder, yet again just how really ready Metro is for any users on any platforms.

Bill Flora image. (Credit: Jay Greene/CNET)

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New Desktop Interface Flops

On Tuesday, Google showed off a preview of the new Chrome browser for its latest mobile phone operating system, Android 4.0, which debuted last quarter. Google will not say when the browser update for Android 4.0 will appear.

Android+Chrome

What does it have? Much of what the desktop version has, notably an Omnibox for searching, seamless sign-in and sync of bookmarks and data, a toolbar with direct access to search, navigation and tabs, unimited tabs, support for many HTML5 features for enhanced web experience and remote debugging of web sites.

The developer opined in an online company video, the enhanced Chrome browser for Android on smartphones and tablets is designed from the ground up as a multiprocessor browser and is no “Chrome Lite.

The multiprocessor architecture of the browser allows for significant performance, navigation and simplicity of web computing. It has, for example, support for unlimited tabs and a web pages stack for organization on a small screen.It also has excellent syncing capabilities with the desktop edition.

“You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web,” said one Google blog about the preview Chrome browser for Android on Feb 7. “Seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalized web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.”

Key new mobile oriented features include font boosting for better viewing of text on small devices and Link Preview, which zooms in on keyword links, especially if they are tightly snug on a page, and displays them in a translucent sidebar.

The Chrome browser also offers “incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’) and:

View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.

Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you’ll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.

Marrying the two projects is a no-brainer from a marketing point of view. Chrome is among the top web browsers and Google’s other top open source project — Android — has been a big hit on the smartphone.

The move unifies the code base and rationalizes two of the company’s open source projects that competed directly in some instances. ChromeOS (with Chrome browser) and Android with its own nondescript web browser were both designed for tablets.

Has this hurt Google’s tablet aspirations? I don’t know, but I’d much rather have one horse to bet on to compete against Apple’s astronomically successful iPad.

Product consolidation is good for Google. The debut of Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich, for both the tablet and smartphone last quarter, was another good move to stop fears about fragmentation. Previously, Google had two different Android code bases for its smartphone and laptop.The emergence of a clear winner will send a strong signal to OEMs which Google tablet OS to back and to consumers which tablets to buy.

The only big problem is product delivery, it seems. To date, one a handful of OEMs have delivered Android 4.0 smartphones — including the Nexus Galaxy — and Motorola’s next-generation of ICS-based Droids is only promised for sometime in the first half of 2012.

Are Google and Motorola awaiting word from the government on their proposed merger before launching ICS devices?

“Ice Cream Sandwich brings an entirely new look and feel to Android. It has a redesigned user interface with improved multi-tasking, notifications, Wi-Fi hotspot, NFC support and a full web browsing experience. With Ice Cream Sandwich, Android has been rethought and redesigned to be simple, beautiful and useful,” one Motorola exec said in a blog. “Ice Cream Sandwich introduces innovations such as Face Unlock to unlock your phone, a Data Manager to control your network data usage, and advanced multimedia and imaging features. Ice Cream Sandwich also provides developers with new APIs, unified U.I for phones and Tablets, and improved performance by enabling developers to leverage hardware graphic acceleration.”

“We don’t have an timeframe at this moment for Ice Cream Sandwich but so far to my knowledge the following devices will get the Ice Cream Sandwich update: Droid Bionic, Droid Razr, HTC Rezound, Spectrum by LG, Droid Xyboard, Motorola Xoom and Droid 4,” said Motorola Mobility spokesman Albert Aydin.

In a recently published report outlining key trends and challenges for the open source community, Olliance’s Andrew Aitken notes that the emergence of vertically oriented super communities such as Polarsys, for the aerospace community, and financial-industry led OpenMama, are not only indicative of the maturing of the  the open source industry but the evolution of open source supply chains serving industries which share significant economies of scale, regulatory overhead, technological requirements and standards.  

Polarsys was created at the Eclipse Foundation and OpenMama is hosted by the Linux Foundation.

Olliance identified four examples of emerging super-communities emerging:

• Polarsys, an aerospace community launched by Airbus and hosted by the Eclipse Foundation
• New York Stock Exchange-led OpenMama project, hosted by the Linux Foundation
• The GENIVI Alliance, a consortium of automotive OEMs and suppliers building an open source in-vehicle-infotainment platform
• OSEHRA, an open source community focused around electronic health care records management seeded by U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

These super-communities allow various players in the industries including OEMs, developers and service providers to share code and learnings, thus increasing efficiencies and profits.

Here’s Aiken’s take on the advent of super-communities:

“One of the common fictions about open source software projects is that they are not started for financial gain. That may have been true a decade ago, but it is hardly the norm today,” wrote Aitken, whose Olliance Group is now owned by Black Duck Software. ” These industry super communities, with the exception of OSEHRA, are started almost exclusively for financial gain.  By reducing the overhead of non-differentiated software and developing shared industry support models, the participating organizations expect to reduce software maintenance overhead, allowing them to invest more resources in developing innovative solutions that help them compete in their markets.”

Aitken also points out that a “potential negative” is possible fragmentation if vendors in these open source supply chains “restrict their developers to contributing to narrow, vertically-oriented open source solutions.

But he’s not super worried. The maturity and complexity of the open source community — and solutions to fragmentation issued arrived at by the Eclipse Foundation and Apache   — demonstrate a broad understanding and acceptance of openness as a key requirement within each community.

“Unlike Polarsys, OSEHRA and OpenMama, which were initially launched by a single or very small group of closed source vendors to promote an open source technology and standard, the GENIVI Alliance is a broad industry-specific coalition of automotive OEMs and their supply chain, dedicated to developing an open source automotive in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) platform,” Aitken noted.

The model for these super-communities will likely be a blend of open source and supply chain methodologies, he added.

“It will be interesting to see how the structure and governance of these communities evolve. Will they embrace the open source ethos of collaboration, meritocracy and transparency or will they stay wedded to the hierarchical structures typical of highly-regulated industries?  Will we see a harmonic convergence of two distinct models? Or a flexible structure that adheres to industry requirements while allowing competitors and partners to contribute together and share the common denominator software while driving innovation on top?”

Windows 8's Metro: The face of a DOA operating system.

Some of my die-hard Windows friends are very excited by Windows 8 arrival later this year. Others fear that Windows 8 will be a repeat of Microsoft’s Vista disaster. Me? I know Windows 8 will be a Vista-sized fiasco.

Before jumping into why I think far more PC users will still be running Windows 7 in 2016 than Windows 8, let me explain that while I prefer Linux as my desktop operating system, I don’t see Windows 8 charge into a brick wall as being a pro-Linux or anti-Microsoft issue.

In fact, as desktop operating systems go, I rather like Windows 7.  Yes, really. Besides, it’s not like Windows 8’s forthcoming failure will help desktop Linux. Looking back, when Vista flopped, in the long run it actually hurt desktop Linux. That’s because Vista’s failure, combined with the threat of netbooks, caused Microsoft to revive Windows XP. If Windows 8 goes down the same path, I’m sure Microsoft will extend Windows 7’s lifespan.

So, why is Windows 8 destined to be a non-starter? Simple:

1. No one needs Windows 8 on the desktop.

Quick: Name one thing about Windows 8 that they don’t already get from Windows 7-or a great desktop Linux like Mint or Mac OS X Lion? I can’t.

Indeed, I can’t think of a single significant new improvement in Windows 8. The ability to refresh the operating system? Faster booting? A Windows Store? Live boot from a USB drive? Come on! All these features have been around in other operating systems for years, and while sure, they’re nice, put them all together and at most they’re worth a Windows 7 Service Patch–not a whole new operating system.

2. Metro: An ugly, useless interface.

As everyone knows, Windows 8 has a totally new default interface: Metro. When I look at Metro, however, I see gaudy colors, boxy designs, applications that can either run as a small tile or as full screen with no way to resize or move windows. Where have I seen this before? Wait, I know! Windows 1.0!

More to the point, almost everyone knows the current Windows interface. It’s changed over the years, but you could take someone who last touched Windows back in the Windows 95 days and drop that in front of them of Windows 7 and they’d be able to get work done. Metro? It’s entirely different. Heck, Microsoft has even dropped the Start button in the latest version!

In short, even if Metro was the best thing since sliced bread, which it isn’t, it will still require users to learn a new way of doing the same old thing. That’s a failure of an idea right here. Sure, you can use the ‘Classic’ desktop experience instead, but hey, I have an idea! Why not just use the Windows XP or 7 “classic” interface instead?

3. Where are the Windows 8 Applications?

The Windows 8 Consumer Preview (read Windows 8 public beta) will be here real soon now and we still don’t know next to anything about Windows 8’s applications. As Mary Jo Foley recently pointed out we still don’t even know whether Office 15 will be Metro, non-Metro, or partially Metro.

Seriously? Windows 8 will probably be out by this fall and we still don’t know jack about its apps? Not even Microsoft’s own flagship office application? Come on! How can you take this operating system seriously?

4. Vexed Windows developers.

If you’re unhappy about the state of Metro applications, think about the poor Windows programmers. You’ve spent years learning .NET, Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) and Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and now they have to learn WinRT and Jupiter/XAML.

Even developers who like WinRT give it “compliments” like “It’s a great time to get involved with WinRT, as the platform is still in its infancy, and will need a lot of developer support to build even more robust tools.” Really? That comment was made in January 2012, and the development tools are still in diapers!?

Last, but not least, Windows developers will need rewrite their Metro apps for the more traditional Windows-style desktop. Oh, and they’ll also need to build them for both x86 and ARM platforms. That’s a heck of a lot of work to do without a lot of time to do it in. Put it all together and I see little chance about Windows 8 having many mature, ready-to-run applications come launch day.

Heck, Brandon Watson, head of developer experiences for Windows Phone, just left Microsoft for Amazon’s Android-based Kindle team Think he might know something?

This reminds me, what do you call an operating system without developers or applications? The answer? Dead.

5. Too little, too late for the smartphone/tablet market

Metro’s real point, of course, isn’t for desktop users. It’s Microsoft’s last gasp attempt to be a player on tomorrow’s computers: smartphones and tablets. If Microsoft was bringing something truly revolutionary to mobile devices, or they were still able to strong-arm original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s into loading Windows on their devices, I think they’d have a shot at the mobile space. Neither is true.

Smartphones are a dog fight between Android and iOS. Tablets did belong to Apple, but now Samsung, Amazon and Barnes & Noble are giving the iPad a fight for the tablet marketplace. Android and iOS are mature, have enormous developer communities and are wildly popular. Heck, if you count smartphones, thanks to the iPhone Apple is now the number one “PC” vendor in the world.

On top of that, the U.S. phone carriers have no interest in a Windows Phone. Too old, too slow Microsoft is arriving much too late to the 2010s style of mobile computing to be a significant player and that means Windows 8 Metro won’t find an audience either. I see no room left for a major third-party platform. A minor player, like KDE or Ubuntu? Sure. A Microsoft? No.

Add it up. The majority of Windows users have only just switched over from XP to Windows 7 in, at best, November 2011. Microsoft is now asking for its users to switch to a platform with no significant improvements, a radically different interface, and which is very likely to have few applications. The result? Window 8 will be dead on arrival.

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True, Apple can still sell its current iPhone 4S in Germany, but this is a real kick in the teeth for Apple and its patent attack ways. Apple is putting the best face it can on its defeat. An Apple spokesperson said, “Even if some iPad and iPhone models are currently not available in our online store in Germany, customers should have no problem finding these devices in our stores or from authorized dealers.” Sure. Right. The bottom line is that iCloud’s functionality has been crippled and German Apple customers will have trouble getting their favorite mobile products.

Apple iPads and some iPhones are no longer available for sale online in Germany.

As always, the patents that are being used in these cases seem dubious at best to me. In the case of iCloud, Motorola used an old pager-related patent to prevent Apple from using push technology to send e-mail automatically to iCloud enabled services. Push technology, oh yeah, no one thought of that before the 90s!

The Motorola patent that’s knocked most iPhone models and iPads off German stores covers General packet radio service (GPRS). This is the data transmission standard built on top of GSM (Global System for Mobile Communication). GPRS is used for data communication on 2G and 3G GSM networks.

This patent is also stupid. It describes a way to perform a countdown function over a 3G connection. You know, “Ten seconds to complete your download, three, two, one, download complete.” Who could ever have thought of that one!

Apple argued that this countdown mechanism wasn’t essential to data transmission. I agree, but hey, what does anyone with common sense know about software patents? Therefore, Apple tried to defeat this patent lawsuit with a Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory terms (FRAND) defense (PDF Link), The German court didn’t buy this defense.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, should get on the phone to Google and Samsung’s top brass and agree to stop wasting everyone’s time and money with all the “Sue you, sue me” patent lawsuits and start competing in the market place rather than in the court room. That way, the stockholders would save money-international intellectual property lawsuits aren’t cheap!–customers would get cheaper products, and all of us could all get back to comparing products instead of lawsuits.

Apple iPhone Germany store Image via Apple/ZDNet.

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Spark, the first free software, Linux tablet is due to arrive in May 2012.

Aaron Seigo, one of the KDE’s lead developers, and a leader of the Spark free-software Linux tablet development effort, has reveled more about the Spark, including, alas, that the Spark won’t be available until May 2012.

Seigo explains, “We have a lot of pieces to coordinate, and not just technical issues like the OS image and the content add-on store, but things like packaging design, manufacturing, shipping, import, retail channel coordination. So far we’re on track, but I don’t want to offer a more precise date than ‘May’ until we pull the trigger on production.”

When it does roll down the production line, Seigo says, “the Spark will be available for order online worldwide. We will be focusing primarily on Europe first, but we will be able ship worldwide from day one. We are looking for retail partners elsewhere in the world: USA and Canada, South America, Australia, etc. to make it easier to procure.” Pricing will be around $260 or 200 Euros.

As had been speculated, the Spark will be built around the Zenithink C71. This is an inexpensive tablet with a 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor, Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal storage plus SD card slot, a 7? capacitive (16×9) multi-touch screen with 800 x 480 resolution, For connectivity it uses 802.11b/g Wi-Fi connectivity. It also has a 1.3 MPixels front camera, built-in microphone and stereo speakers. In addition, the tablet will come with 2 USB ports, a microSD slot, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

It will not, have in the first production run, 3G or GPS. Both will be supported by the system’s Linux operating system.

The Spark will run Mer, the community continuation of MeeGo, an embedded Linux. On top of Mer, the Spark will use KDE Plasma Active for its user interface (UI). Plasma Active runs on the traditional Linux desktop stack, including the Linux kernel, Qt, and KDE’s Plasma Framework. The UI uses Plasma Quick, a declarative markup language. This, in turn, is based on Qt Quick, an easy to use interface software development kit and framework.

If you’re a developer and you want to write for Spark, Seigo recommends QtQuick for applications targeting the Spark. There are also KDE libraries, including the Plasma framework, on the device. However, Spark is happy to support non-Qt apps. I play Battle for Wesnoth [a popular fantasy strategy game] on mine. ;) Developers will have access to the add-ons store as well, so getting your apps to Spark users will be dead simple.”

You will not be able to run Android applications on Spark though. Seigo notes though that “It is theoretically possible to package a Dalvik [Android's Java virtual machine] runtime for Plasma Active and make it available on the Spark. No one has attempted this yet, but it would make for a killer project.”

Programs for the Spark will be available, said Seigo on “the standard Mer repositories as well as the Open Build Service. However, that’s not overly person friendly (unless that person happens to be technically adept and familiar with Linux), so we are providing an add-on store from which people can easily download and install books, applications, desktop widgets and services … with more to be added with time.” Developers will be able to sell their programs to end-users on the Spark application store.

If you want to run the Spark operating system on other platforms, you can do that as well, but that’s not the Spark’s team goal. Seigo explains, “There are images for Intel based tablets as well as nVidia Tegra 2 and other ARM tablets available, and you can help by getting involved with the amazing Mer project. It is our hope that Spark will ignite interest in other vendors as well who will pick up the opportunity to increase the diversity of options. Yes, we’re looking to grow what would traditionally called competitors. We see them as co-conspirators. ;) Welcome to the world of Open.”

I’m a little disappointed that we won’t see the Spark until May, but I’m still hopeful for the project. Seigo hopes that his next blog posting on Spark will be to announce the pre-order Web site. I hope so too.

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Say hi to Spark, the first free software, Linux tablet.

Open-source software and Linux, thanks to Android, is well represented on tablets. But, if you didn’t want to deal with proprietary firmware and software, you were out of luck… until now. Aaron Seigo, one of the KDE’s lead developers, and his team are just about ready to roll-out the first tablet based entirely on Linux and free software: The Spark.

For those of you who are a little puzzled right now–”But, isn’t Android based on Linux??” let me start by explaining that yes, Android is Linux and open-source software. But, its implementations on various smartphones and tablets always uses some proprietary software, firmware, and/or shims to combine the code into a working device. Spark is different.

As Seigo explains, “We decided to go with Mer, the community continuation of MeeGo, as our base OSS [open-source software]. With the amazing help of the Mer community, we have been able to bring up a non-Android, built-from-source kernel on the device and even boot into Plasma Active. There is still work left, and we still do have some binary drivers, but this progress is already one massive crowbar that’s prying open the doors that have been shut on the world of ARM based devices.”

Seigo continues, “Right now we’re still stuck with a few binary drivers which is not a perfect situation. With time I’m confident we’ll get the binary drivers out of the picture, one by one, even if it takes time, effort and some pain. We’ve already managed to get source for some drivers that were not previously available so the trajectory is right. If we wait for perfection, however, we’ll never get anywhere because we need to release and push the status quo level of openness further inch my inch by making releases. It’ll be incremental, but we’re already further than others have gotten.”

Getting back to the tablet, the hardware is powered by 1GHz AMLogic ARM processor, Mali-400 GPU, 512 MB RAM, 4GB internal storage plus SD card slot, a 7″ capacitive multi-touch screen and 802.11n Wi-Fi connectivity. The list price will be 200 Euros or about $260. There’s no word yet though on where it will be available or even if it will be available in the U.S.

If the tablet is, as Kjetil Kilhavn, a SAP consultant and KDE user, speculates, is built around the A9 Zenithink ZT-280 C71 tablet, it has a 7″ (16:9) screen size with 800 x 480 resolution. It also would have a 1.3 MPixels front camera, built-in microphone and stereo speakers.

As for the software, on top of Mer, the Spark will use KDE Plasma Active for its user interface (UI). Plasma Active runs on the traditional Linux desktop stack, including the Linux kernel, Qt, and KDE’s Plasma Framework. The UI uses Plasma Quick, a declarative markup language. This, in turn, is based on Qt Quick, an easy to use interface software development kit and framework. Above that, as Seigo emphasizes, “All the code above the kernel and most of the kernel itself is already open and available for download right now.”

In addition, unlike some phone vendors and hardware manufacturers who are still fighting to keep you from booting your own operating system on their devices, in the Spark, according to Seigo, “openness and freedom goes a lot deeper in Spark than just using GPL and BSD licensed code. For instance, the boot loader isn’t locked so you can boot your own OS if you wish. You can install your own apps, you can even provide your own app delivery system. You can use the Open Build Service to deliver software on top of the Mer core. That is not a property of the open licensing, but of our desire to deliver devices that you not only purchase but wish you own.”

Seigo went on, “The content store is also going to be interesting. On release, the client will be free software and the APIs [application programming interface] openly documented so others can write front-ends. Most interestingly, however, is the server side. It has been designed in such a way that other people with other devices or concepts can use that same back end to make their own stores. It supports the idea of a single, large set of content which can then be curated into any number of different stores with different focuses and delivery targets.

But what if the project doesn’t take off, will you be left with an orphaned system ala HP and WebOS? Nope.

Seigo states, “On release, we will be providing a guarantee that if the project dies or we all fall over, the back-end code for the store will be made immediately available for download under a free software license. Hopefully it doesn’t come to that, of course. Once we are happy with the implementation and scalability of it, we will be making the back-end open as well. We have chosen to delay that release as we don’t want others setting up their own hosted stores before we are confident in the internal design ourselves.”

Want to know more? We’ll have to wait. Seigo promises he’ll answer more questions on February 2nd.

I think this is a very promising project. While the people who will immediately find it the most interesting will be open-source and free-software developers and gadget hounds, I can also see the Spark playing a role in the e-textbook of the future. As Seigo points out, the store back-end code itself could be very useful for schools “to set up a ’store’ with learning materials and content with access granted to their students.”

While no iPad killer, the Spark may be just what’s needed to ignite a fire under innovative free and open-source software tablets. I’ll be very interested in seeing where this project goes and what comes from others in response to it.

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Hey, Motorola! Where’s that unlocked bootloader you promised?

It's back to the future with Linux Mint's GNOME 2.x like Cinnamon desktop.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen radical changes to the Linux desktop. Some, despite initial opposition, such as the KDE 4.x re-start, took a while to gain favor, but eventually became popular. Others, such as GNOME 3.x have alienated many users and first Ubuntu’s Unity and now it’s Head-Up Display (HUD) have not been greeted with overwhelming approval even by hard-core Ubuntu Linux users. So, Linux Mint’s developers have decided to go back to the past with a GNOME 2.x style desktop: Cinnamon. So, how well have they done? I give them an “A” for effort, but only a “B” for execution.

To put Cinnamon to the test, I used my faithful old Lenovo ThinkPad R61. This 2008-vintage notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also used it on my Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This PC has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

For the operating system, although Cinnamon will run on Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1, Arch Linux, and Gentoo, I elected to run it on its “native” Linux Mint 12. Cinnamon runs on top of GNOME 3.2, but its look and feel comes from GNOME 2.x.

A walk through Mint Linux’s new/old Cinnamon desktop (Gallery)

As Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint’s lead developer said when he introduced Cinnamon, “I’m not going to argue whether Gnome Shell is a good or a bad desktop. It’s just not what we’re looking for. GNOME 3.x certainly wasn’t the desktop I wanted either so I was very interested in seeing what Mint’s programmers would come up with since I’ve long liked their design work.

My first impression of Cinnamon on both computers was great. It felt just as if I were back using GNOME 2.x. It was really nice to have my good-old GNOME menu back again, and better still that when I was done with a session, I could easily shut it down, suspend, or restart my desktop without the keyboard shenanigans that GNOME 3.x requires.

Cinnamon also has some nice extras added in. For example, I can automatically search in the menu, ala GNOME 3.x, by sub-string when I can’t recall exactly where a program is hiding in the menu. A related change is that, unlike GNOME 3.x in this case, when you open a new window it gets the focused by default–instead of, as Lefebvre puts it so well, “appearing in the back with an annoying ‘Your window is ready’ notification.”

You can also once more change your desktop’s layout. I, for instance, really like having the menubar at the top of the display instead of at the bottom and Cinnamon lets me set it up that away again. I could also set it with panels at both the top and bottom of the display. There is one small gotcha though: To change the layout you have to set it and then restart Cinnamon.

Cinnamon also has a new configuration tool called “Cinnamon Settings.” With it you can switch themes, apply desktop effects, add applets and extensions to your desktop and configure some of the settings of the desktop. You cannot, however, use Gnome 3.x Shell themes in Cinnamon.

Themes are also a little hard to manage in this first “shipping” version of Cinnamon. You still have to go hither and yon to manage them. The theme control problem, fortunately, is already being addressed.

The applets are what I found most interesting. There are optional desktop mini-programs. They are installed by default, but you decide if you want to use them or not. These include an excellent set of accessibility tools; the power to set up a Recent Documents icon on the system tray itself; control over your removable drives and trash; and some basic display tools. I’m already using the Recent Documents control all the time.

That’s the good news. Now, here’s why I can’t get Cinnamon an “A” yet. First, the new animation settings felt really jerky to me. Now, I’m not running Mint 12 on very fast machines, but they’re not slow either and I found the Windows effect, even after tuning them, to be just to annoying to be useful.

There are also some bugs in the Cinnamon. For example, the Pidgin, my favorite IM client, icon disappears from time to time. A more noticeable example is that I couldn’t add some applications to “Favorites” from within the menu or by using the dconf-editor. Curiously, I could add them to the Desktop or Panel. This is a known problem, and it’s already been fixed in the source code. I also see display quirks such as oddly overlapping windows from time to time.

What concerned me the most though is that some applications, the Evolution e-mail client and LibreOffice would sometime freeze up under Cinnamon. I can forgive a lot, but having my e-mail and word processor lock up on me is close to unforgivable. It doesn’t happen very often at all, but even once a day or so is really vexing.

Still, these are very early days for Cinnamon, so I’m willing to give this desktop a good solid “B.” If Mint continues to improve Cinnamon at the rate it’s been going at though it won’t be long before Cinnamon will have earned not just an “A” but an “A+” for all GNOME Linux desktop users.

Want to see if you think Cinnamon gets a passing grade? You can download Cinnamon from Mint today.

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Red Hat has extended RHEL's 5 & 6 s lifecycle to ten years.

I’m a big believer in “It’s not broke, then don’t fix it.” So is leading Linux company, Red Hat. The company has just announced that it is extending the production lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and 6 from seven to 10 years in response to enterprise customer demand and Red Hat’s hardware original equipment manufacturer (OEM) partners.

For any company, upgrading to a new version of an operating system requires detailed advance planning. Red Hat has extended the Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle so customers can remain on their current version longer. With the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle, customers will benefit from continued feature enhancements while Red Hat’s application binary interface (ABI) and application programming interface (API) compatibility for their existing application.

In addition, quite a few RHEL customers have only relatively recently adopted the Linux operating system. For many business users, RHEL 5 was the first Linux product that they had deployed in their infrastructure.

According to Red Hat, “the market adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6 has accelerated over the past two years. For example, many of our customers have adopted Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 well into its previous 7 year life cycle (i.e., first deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 in March 2010, or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6 in January 2011).” Had Red Hat stuck with its original seven-years of support, a customer adopting RHEL 5.6 in 2011 would have to upgrade to a newer RHEL in 2014. For an enterprise, that’s much too fast for comfort.

With the new plan, RHEL 5 customers will have full support until March 2017. RHEL 6 customers will be fully supported until November 2020. Specifically, the former ten-year life cycle for RHEL was comprised of 7 years of a regular life cycle, and three years of an extended life cycle. For RHEL 5 and 6, the regular life cycle is being pushed out to ten years.

The RHEL Add-Ons programs–High Availability Add-On (or Red Hat Cluster Suite), Scalable File System Add-On (or XFS), Load Balancer Add-On, and Resilient Storage Add-On (or GFS)–are also being supported with the new 10-year life cycle.

This new plan is also for all of RHEL’s supported hardware platforms. So, in addition to the Intel 32 and 64-bit families, Itanium, IBM System z, IBM POWER, HPC, and SA P Business Applications are all being supported for ten years.

Still on RHEL 4? Red Hat already has a 10-year life cycle available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. For customers who require a 10-year life cycle to include software maintenance, Red Hat recommends the Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) Add-On. This extends RHEL 4’s life cycle until February 28, 2015.

“Enterprise customers require flexibility when planning strategic, long-term technology deployments,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of Red Hat’s Platform Business Unit in a statement. “Many of our customers have come to realize that standardizing on RHEL improves efficiency and helps lower costs. With a ten-year lifecycle, customers now have additional choices when planning their RHEL deployment and overall IT strategy. We are pleased that customers are looking far into the future with Red Hat.”

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Get ready to say good-bye to IBM's Symphony office suite.

In a brief note, Ed Brill, an IBM product line manager, announced that IBM has likely seen its last release of Symphony, its OpenOffice fork. Later, in the blog’s discussion thread, Eric Otchet, Symphony’s product manager, seemingly confirmed that this was the end of the road for Symphony when he wrote about Apache OpenOffice the IBM Edition as if that would be IBM’s successor to Symphony.

In his blog posting, Brill wrote:

Lotus Symphony 3.0.1 is our latest release. There are many enhancements in this release including support for 1 million rows in spreadsheets, bubble charts and a new design for the home page.

This will also likely be the last release of IBM’s own fork of the OpenOffice codebase. Our energy from here is going into the Apache OpenOffice project, and we expect to distribute an “IBM edition” of Apache OpenOffice in the future. We have contributed the Lotus Symphony code into the OpenOffice project, along with human resource across development/product management/marketing organizations. I’m excited by what I see happening at Apache, but for now, the new release of Symphony keeps the current project updated for existing and potential customers.

What does that mean for existing Symphony developers and users? Otchet explained:

Symphony 3.0.1 add-on installer for Notes is available today in FixCentral. This will update the version of Symphony embedded in the Notes client.

The new Apache OpenOffice code will NOT be based on Eclipse. We are donating the Symphony code to the Apache project. The sidebar in Symphony is C++ code today.

Future releases of Symphony 3.0.1 ( fixpacks) will be still be based on Eclipse/Expeditor. Symphony 3.0.1 will be included in Notes 8.5.4 ( in the box) with the exception of the Mac client. Mac will be standalone only due to some Cocoa/Carbon issues.

We will continue to offer support for our Notes customers on maintenance if they want to use the Apache OpenOffice the IBM Edition when it is available instead of or in addition to Symphony. We will not have the ability to embed the Apache OpenOffice the IBM Edition into the Notes client.

We are looking at how to extend our Symphony LotusScript support to the Apache OpenOffice code in the future.

Symphony 3.0.1 will continue to be supported for the lifecycle of the Notes 8.5.x clients. This will be through fixpacks and maintenance releases as needed.

This move can’t come as too much of a surprise. In July 2011, IBM started donating its Symphony code to the Apache Foundation, which is now overseeing the remains of the OpenOffice project. I say “remains” because most of the development energy in the OpenOffice family has been going to the LibreOffice fork. Many users and Linux distributors, such as Ubuntu, have replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice.

What does this mean for users? If you’re a Symphony user, I see little reason to worry. Call it Symphony or call it Apache OpenOffice the IBM Edition, you’ll still have IBM office suite support. For other suite users, I see this as just one more bit of proof that LibreOffice, not OpenOffice, represents the future of open-source office suites.

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Users are willing to give Ubuntu's new Head-Up Display desktop a chance.

When Ubuntu announced that it was going to switch to Unity for its primary Linux desktop, some users were outraged by Ubuntu’s shift to a new interface. Many turned to Linux Mint in place of Ubuntu. So, when Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that Ubuntu would be moving from Unity to Head-Up Display (HUD), I expected Linux users to be even more annoyed. I was wrong. Instead, they are taking a wait-and-see attitude to HUD.

Welcome to Ubuntu 11.10’s Unity (Photo Gallery)

HUD, in case you haven’t heard about it yet, seeks to say good-bye to the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined desktops for the last thirty years. HUD replaces this with a search style interface. HUD uses use a vocabulary UI (VUI). In it you’ll start to type or say a command and, starting in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the HUD starts a smart look-ahead search through the app and system (indicator) menus. This uses fuzzy matching, combined with a learning function so HUD will prioritize the actions you use do.

While HUD is still alpha software, Jono Bacon, the community manager for Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, assures me that HUD’s code is well along its way. Casual users will get their first taste of it in Ubuntu 12.04 on April 26th. More adventurous users can try it now in Ubuntu 12.04’s daily builds. If that’s you, you’re also invited to help test HUD out with Ubuntu.

A first look at Ubuntu Linux’s Head-Up Display (Gallery)

The Linux users I’ve asked, many of them via my Google+ account, tell me that they’re cautiously optimistic about HUD. True, some, like Drazenko Djuricic, a Linux user since 1996, “Hate it already.” He asks, what are “they smoking. Gnome 3? Unity? Mac OS X-style menus on the top of the screen??? YUCK. I use “Lubuntu (http://lubuntu.net/)” now. It has a clean traditional desktop … In other words: I can get work done. All this fancy stuff is all nice and OK and should have been added as optional extras (e.g. Compiz Settings?). But changing the UI paradigm every now and then … seriously when will they stop this BS already??”

A programmer who goes by the non de plume, “Mikey G” adds, “Yeah, real original, basically a Siri for menus. Too bad you have to know what you are looking for before you search for it, unlike the traditional WIMP model where you can search through menu items to find things you didn’t even know existed. GIMP comes to mind. Does not sound very useful for touch screen interfaces either, seeing how you will have to pull up an on-screen keyboard and type in save’ just to save.”

Tony Sandoval, a long-time Linux user, comments, “I think that some people just keep trying to fix something that isn’t broken. Voice recognition software has improved a lot but it is not quite ready for the level of use that things like this want to do.”

Another writer points out though that “Apple’s Siri shows that voice-recognition software is up to the job. Shuttleworth is just taking it to the next logical step.”

Charlie Kravetz, a retired IT guy who now volunteers with Linux projects, thinks “the time is now for this type of system. What an idea! To have the ability to find apps without menus, to be able to use voice to get to apps, screen-reader reads to you already. This could be something really fantastic for all of us.”

Kravetz went on, “I also think the idea that you can tell the computer what you want to do, and have it give the application is great! Who ever would think GIMP when the desired outcome is ”blur a photo?’ On the other hand, when I say BLUR and it tells me use GIMP that is great! Think of the ease of use.”

Herman Aro agrees, “I think it will be a great switchable supplement and/or replacement to regular menus. This way you ease newbies and detractors into a more efficient interface. I think it will be HOT!”

You might think that William Shotts, creator of LinuxCommand.org and author of The Linux Command Line, wouldn’t care for an interface so far away from the old-school Linux shell, you’d be wrong though. Shotts says, “I disliked it at first glance, but after reading Mark Shuttleworth’s post fully, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. He seems to suggest that the interface is there to relieve some of the frustration that ‘power’ users feel about Unity, a frustration that I feel as well. The interface is being tested by developers and other advanced users to see if it can make the UI keyboard centric, which is a worthwhile goal.”

Peter H. Salus, technology historian and author of The Daemon, the Gnu & the Penguin, a history of free and open-source software, can see Shotts’ point: “I’d rather throw away the mouse and stick to the keyboard.” Or, if Ubuntu is successful with HUD, eventually the microphone.

In short, Christopher Baluyut, a long time Linux user, seems to sum up most users’ viewpoint when he says, “I’ll give my full judgment when I get to use it.”

But, if you really, really don’t like what you’re hearing about HUD or Unity makes you break into hives and want your Ubuntu Linux desktop the way it used to be, then check out Linux Mint’s new Cinnamon, a GNOME 2.x, desktop. It looks to me as if Cinnamon is going to be as close asusers are going to get to the old Ubuntu look and feel.

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Say hello to Cinnamon, Mint's new GNOME 2.x style Linux desktop.

Clement Lefebvre, lead developer of Linux Mint, has announced the first “fully stable” version of its new GNOME 2.x-like “Cinnamon 1.2″ fork of the GNOME 3.x desktop environment is now available for not only Mint, but for Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1, Arch Linux, and Gentoo.

The Cinnamon interface looks and works a lot like the popular GNOME 2.x interface, but it’s built on top of the GNOME 3.x infrastructure. It was created because many people, including Linux’s creator, Linus Torvalds dislike the new GNOME 3.x interface. Lefebvre tried to work with the GNOME developers to make a more user-friendly GNOME, but they weren’t interested.

As Lefebvre explained when he launched the Cinnamon project, “I’m not going to argue whether Gnome Shell is a good or a bad desktop. It’s just not what we’re looking for. The user experience the Gnome team is trying to create isn’t the one we’re interested in providing to our users. There are core features and components we absolutely need, and because they’re not there in Gnome Shell, we had to add them using extensions with MGSE [Linux Mint Shell Extensions for Gnome 3] and since “We’re not interested in shipping Gnome Shell ‘as is,’ or in continuing with multiple hacks and extensions,” so Lefebvre and his team started working on Cinnamon.

Now Lefebvre states the Cinnamon “APIs [application programming interfaces] and the desktop itself are now fully stable!”. While documentation is still missing, Cinnamon brings back the GNOME 2.x style interface and adds new desktop effects and layouts, a configuration tool, and five new “applets.”

For the effects, Lefebvre said, “Cinnamon 1.2 is a first step towards reintroducing desktop effects and the ability for the user to define fancy animations or to turn effects OFF altogether.

This release features 2 new animation plugins:

• Fade, which changes the opacity of windows
• Scale, which changes their dimension

In stark contrast to the GNOME 3.x shell users can also “change the layout of their desktop. Some people liked their panel on top, others liked it at the bottom, and some even liked to have two panels for their desktop. In Cinnamon 1.2, we haven’t reached the stage where each component is independent and can be moved anywhere you like, but we added support for the most common desktop layouts:”

• Traditional layout (one panel at the bottom)
• Flipped layout (one panel at the top)
• Classic layout (one panel at the bottom and one panel at the top)

This stable release of Cinnamon also includes a configuration tool called “Cinnamon Settings.” With it, you can switch themes, apply desktop effects, add applets and extensions to your desktop and configure some other desktop settings.

• Cinnamon comes with 5 new applets by default:
• Accessibility
• Recent documents
• Removable drives
• Trash
• Display (XrandR monitor control)

Lefebvre says that these “will eventually become something similar to what they were in Gnome 2, [but] ‘Applets’ are a new concept in Cinnamon 1.2.”

He continued, “To users they are optional parts of the desktop which come installed by default as part of what Cinnamon is and which place themselves in the panel, near the system tray.”

“To developers … applets are a particular type of extension. They’re specifically designed for extensions which add content to the panel and feature the following advantages:

• They benefit from an Applet API and are trivial to write (as an applet developer you only focus on the content of your applet, everything else is done for you)
• They’re consistent and feature the same common behaviours (a context menu, consistent styles for the applet container, tooltips etc..)
• They don’t depend on a particular version of Cinnamon
• They don’t specify their location or whether they’re loaded or not. In Cinnamon 1.2 they’re near the systray. In future releases the user will be able to move them around.

Eventually, all panel components in Cinnamon will be ‘applets’ and they will be loaded the same way as ‘applets’ written by other developers.”

Interested? You can download Cinnamon today and try it for yourself.

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A first look at Ubuntu's new Head-Up Display desktop.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical Ubuntu Linux’s parent company, has announced that Ubuntu will be adopting a radical new change to the interface that will do away with the “menu” in the Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer (WIMP) interface, which has defined the desktop for the last thirty years.

Shuttleworth states, “The menu has been a central part of the GUI since Xerox PARC invented ‘em in the 70?s. It’s the M in WIMP and has been there, essentially unchanged, for 30 years. We can do much better!” This new interface, which will first appear as a beta in April’s Ubuntu 12.04 release, is called Head-Up Display.

He explains:

Menus serve two purposes. They act as a standard way to invoke commands which are too infrequently used to warrant a dedicated piece of UI real-estate, like a toolbar button, and they serve as a map of the app’s functionality, almost like a table of contents that one can scan to get a feel for ‘what the app does’. Its command invocation that we think can be improved upon, and that’s where we are focusing our design exploration.

As a means of invoking commands, menus have some advantages. They are always in the same place (top of the window or screen). They are organized in a way that’s quite easy to describe over the phone, or in a text book (”click the Edit->Preferences menu”), they are pretty fast to read since they are generally arranged in tight vertical columns. They also have some disadvantages: when they get nested, navigating the tree can become fragile. They require you to read a lot when you probably already know what you want. They are more difficult to use from the keyboard than they should be, since they generally require you to remember something special (hotkeys) or use a very limited subset of the keyboard (arrow navigation). They force developers to make often arbitrary choices about the menu tree (”should Preferences be in Edit or in Tools or in Options?”), and then they force users to make equally arbitrary effort to memorize and navigate that tree.

No one would argue with that. So, what does Shuttleworth propose instead?

HUD will use a “vocabulary UI”, or VUI. In this you’ll start to type or say a command and in 12.04 LTS, the HUD starts a smart look-ahead search through the app and system (indicator) menus. This uses fuzzy matching, combined with a learning function so HUD will prioritize the actions you use do. This works with both the focused app, because that’s where you probably want to act, and the global system functionality. So, for example, if, you’re always saving your files, you could type Alt-F and instead of the file menu, you’d immediately get the file/save choice. Eventually you’ll always be able to simply say “Save” and your word processor, spreadsheet, or what have you will save your current file.

You’ll always be able to use HUD to get to other active programs, such as your instant message or Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) client through HUD, “without changing focus, because those apps all talk to the indicator system.’ Shuttleworth claims that after “you’ve been using it for a little while it seems like it’s reading your mind, in a good way.”

Shuttleworth believes that voice will be an important part of HUD “Searching is fast and familiar, especially once we integrate voice recognition, gesture and touch. We want to make it easy to talk to any application, and for any application to respond to your voice. The full integration of voice into applications will take some time. We can start by mapping voice onto the existing menu structures of your apps. And it will only get better from there.”

Still, Shuttleworth says “even without voice input, the HUD is faster than mousing through a menu, and easier to use than hotkeys since you just have to know what you want, not remember a specific key combination. We can search through everything we know about the menu, including descriptive help text, so pretty soon you will be able to find a menu entry using only vaguely related text (imagine finding an entry called Preferences when you search for “settings”).”

It’s not just speed though. Another goal, as it has been “in much of the Unity design has been to return screen real estate to the content with which the user is working; the HUD meets that goal by appearing only when invoked. Instead of cluttering up the interface ALL the time, let’s clear out the chrome, and show users just what they want, when they want it.”

The ideas for this, Shuttleworth continued, have been “inspired by many works of science, art and entertainment; from Minority Report to Modern Warfare and Jeff Raskin’s Humane Interface. We hope others will join us and accelerate the shift from pointy-clicky interfaces to natural and efficient ones.”

Although Shuttleworth doesn’t say so, part of the reason why Ubuntu is making these changes is to make Ubuntu a more attractive option to smart TVs and smartphones and tablets. On these systems, the WIMP interface doesn’t work that well. If HUD is successful, users will ultimately be able to use the same interface on any device from PC to smartphone with voice commands.

If that sounds more scary than neat, worry not. Shuttleworth isn’t going to leave you in the lurch. “We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of Ubuntu, we’ve actively diminished the visual presence of menus in anticipation of this landing. That proved controversial. In our defense, in user testing, every user finds the menu in the panel, every time, and it’s obviously a cleaner presentation of the interface. But hiding the menu before we had the replacement was overly aggressive. If the HUD lands in 12.04 LTS, we hope you’ll find yourself using the menu less and less, and be glad to have it hidden when you are not using it. You’ll definitely have that option, alongside more traditional menu styles.”

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New Desktop Interface Flops

The upgraded 2.5 version of the content management system (CMS), which becomes available on Jan. 24,  offers multi-database support, notably Microsoft SQL Server out of the gate, and Oracle support in the near future, as well as an enhanced natural language search engine and automatic notification and delivery of updates and extensions.

The addition of a database extraction layer to the PHP framework is aimed to improve its scalability, noted Andrea Tarr of Joomla’s Production Leadership Team. The previous version supported MySQL exclusively.

Tarr also pointed to the platform’s new update and notification services and search improvements in version 2.5. A release by the project, a fork of the Mambo open source CMS project, details it this way:

Automatic notification when a Joomla or extension update is available. When logged into the control panel, site administrators will instantly have access to new notification buttons that allows them to see and act on the latest updates. In addition to updates for the Joomla CMS, a second button offers third party extension notification updates.

A better natural language search engine to the Joomla core. Complete with auto-completion and stemming (for example if you type “running” in a search field you also see run), it is faster and more versatile than the standard search.

Over the last year, Microsoft and eBay have contributed code to the Joomla project.

It is the first version released under the project’s new six-month release cycle pledge. It is most popular in the small-to-medium-sized business sector but is gaining attention in the enterprise, execs said.

“We’re starting to find larger companies using Joomla more frequently,” said Ryan Ozimek, president of Open Source Matters, a non-profit that provides management, legal and financial support to the Joomla project. Ozimek said Joomla is a pure open source project not under the control of one company or “benevolent dictator.”

The six year old project is, like WordPress and Drupal, an open source CMS. Ozimek says Joomla sits somewhere in the middle of the pack in terms of features and functionality while WordPress’s easy-to-use GUI makes it suitable for the masses and Drupal is “extremely developer centric.”

Zoomla 2.5

Can you afford that for your kids? Can your school board? I could, but I’ve been lucky enough to do well in my career and I only have the one daughter. There’s certainly no way that any county I’ve ever lived in during my life in West Virginia, Maryland, or North Carolina could afford to give every student from K to 12 an iPad. They’re lucky when they can provide any kind of computer seat for each kid.

That’s why there have been programs like the so-called $100 laptop: the OLPC (One Laptop per Child). The OLPC project aimed to put first low priced notebooks, the XO-1.5 and now tablets, the OLPC XO Tablet, into the hands of kids who don’t go to private schools.

These XO Tablet is powered by a 1GHz Marvell Armada PXA618 processor, and have a mere 512MBs of RAM. It can run a minimized version of Red Hat’s Fedora Linux with the simplified Sugar interface on top of that and it can also run Android. Price: $100.

Compared to an iPad, the XO Tablet is junk. But, they’re also much more affordable and isn’t getting information into the hands of students what a textbooks are all about? Wouldn’t it be great if you could use Apple’s iBook textbooks on an OLPC? Or, for that matter, any of the other low-priced Android tablets or tablet/e-book readers like the Barnes & Noble Nook Tablet or Amazon Kindle Flame? Don’t hold your breath.

Apple seems to have no interest in bringing iBooks to Windows PCs, Linux computers, Android tablets or, for that matter, even its own MacBook Air. Low-end Android tablets? Give me a break!

What’s that you say? Why can’t you just create an ePub version of your iBook textbook and sell it to whomever? Well, first, iBooks Author can create books in iBook format, PDF and text. The iBook format appears to be a variation of the popular and open EPUB format. Closer examination of the format reveals, though, that it appears to be a proprietary fork of EPUB.

On top of that Apple’s author end-user license agreement (EULA) seems to forbid you to sell any formatted book created with iBook Author except through Apple. In other words, Apple iBooks are a closed shop for publishers and author as well as for would-be users.

Apple seems to be doing is creating a high-end, locked box for well-off students. If you can afford to get into it, good for you, if you can’t pay the price you can’t get in. Maybe Amazon can change Apple’s mind by successfully competing with them in the textbook market. I doubt that will change Apple’s policies though.

It’s a pity really. Students need low-priced computers, tablets, and e-books. OLPC does what it can, but it’s not enough. In all too many schools, students have to rely upon corporate hand-me-down technology and antique equipment. As Maria De La Vega, superintendent of East Palo Alto’s Ravenswood public school district, within an easy drive of Apple’s headquarters said to a MoblleBeat reporter, “We don’t really have a technology budget. Most of what we’ve been able to acquire has been through donations and leftovers from offices closing down.” That’s often the case.

Linux and open source can, and do, help schools get the most from their older hardware, but it’s not enough. The digital gap between the haves and have-nots grows wider every year. Just don’t look for Apple to help close that gap. That’s not their business.

Revised January 23, 2011 to reflect that the iBook format is a proprietary extension of EPUB.

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Linux has found a home for itself in the office.

Will your business move to Windows 8 server? Will your office support iPads for work? I don’t know. I do know that chances are your enterprise is very likely to increase its use of Linux.

According to new report by The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users,” in a lousy IT economy Linux is still growing by leaps and bounds.

How fast it is growing? The report states, “Eighty-four percent of respondents report that their organizations have expanded Linux usage in the last 12 months, with 82% planning on continuing that expansion into the year ahead. The 5-year outlook indicates an even longer-term commitment to the platform among 79.8% of Linux users surveyed, who say the use of Linux in their company or organization will increase relative to other operating systems during this time period.”

Windows? More than 25% are planning to decrease the number of Windows servers, while only 21.7% of respondents are planning an increase in Windows servers during this time period.

For companies that are moving to Big Data, such as Wal-Mart and Intuit, the Linux Foundation found that “nearly 72% are choosing Linux to support it. Most enterprises expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it. Only 35.9% are planning to use Windows to meet the demands of this new environment.”

As for the cloud, the Foundation found that “Cloud computing continues its steady adoption across all enterprises worldwide, and this trend is reflected in our survey. This year we saw a 34% increase in organizations migrating some of their applications to cloud-based computing. All told, 61% of organizations now cite cloud-based applications, whether public, private, or hybrid. Of those users in the cloud, 66% are using Linux as their primary platform, up 4.7% from last year. Going forward, 34.9% of organizations are planning to migrate more applications to the cloud, up from 26% last year.”

So why are people moving to Linux for their servers and cloud? Total cost of ownership (TCO), 70%; feature set/technical superiority, 68.6%; and security, 64.6% continue to be Linux’s major adoption drivers. It’s also noteworthy, when you can’t go a day without hearing about another major security problem, such as the massive holes in Oracle’s DBMS software, that 77.2% of the survey’s respondents consider Linux to be more secure than other operating systems.

It used to be that Linux gained its market-share from cannibalizing Unix servers. That seems to no longer be the case. According to this study, in the last two years 71.6% of new Linux deployments have been in brand new applications and green deployments. By comparison, 38.5% were migrations from Windows and 34.5% were from Unix.

Of course, as the Linux Foundation admits, their results come from “enterprise users who are motivated to take a survey from The Linux Foundation are not an unbiased lot, but the size of these organizations, their buying power and technical prowess - as filtered by The Linux Foundation and Yeoman - can provide important guidance both for Linux vendors and developers, as well as their competitors.”

The Foundation has a point. The survey covered 428 respondents at organizations with $500 million or more a year in revenues or greater than 500 employees. Companies surveyed included Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Bristol-Myers Squibb, NTT, Deutsche Bank, DreamWorks, ADP, Bank of New York, NYSE, NASDAQ QMX, Goodrich, MetLife, AIG, and many more. These companies aren’t using Linux for trivial jobs either. 69.1% these companies plan in the next twelve months to use Linux for more mission-critical workloads. In other words, big companies doing big work are leading the way to Linux.

Linux tie image by adpowers, CC 2.0.

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Piston Enterprise OS, or (pentOS) is a hardware agnostic OpenStack Linux distribution that utilizes the company’s Null-Tier architecture, combining storage, compute and networking on individual nodes to deliver high scalability at lower cost. This allows customers to “scale a high availability private cloud one server at a time,” the company announced Wednesday.

Piston’s CloudKey feature enables automated and hands-free installation and can be installed in less than 10 minutes, the company claims.

The OS also supports CloudAudit, an open security standard for cloud and virtualized environments.

OpenStack is a top open source project backed by Rackspace, NASA, Citrix, Intel, Cisco, AT&T, Microsoft, Dell and Arista.  Red Hat’s Gluster is also a big OpenStack supporter. pentOS is designed to run with any OpenStack product including platforms from Dell and Arista and is interoperable with any OpenStack public cloud environment including Rackspace, Dell, Amazon, InterNap and AT&T.

Piston was founded last year by several  creators of OpenStack, including former NASA Nebula Chief Technical Architect Joshua McKenty, former Rackspace guru Christopher MacGown and NASA Communications Director Gretchen Curtis.

The company’s cloud OS was originally expected to debut in late November, but is about six weeks late. No big deal. Most enterprises are still in the cloud planning process.