Martijn @ opensource

Last week the hardware company Foxconn came in the news in a pretty interesting way. An angry Linux user by the name of 'TheAlmightyCthulhu' posted the statement that Foxconn would be sabotaging Linux with their motherboards and collaborating secretly with Microsoft. These are quite serious statements in the world of 'Linux vs Windows' so some explanation is in place.

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For the average Linux user, software can be a bitch to install if you can't find your software package in the normal repositories. Kevin Thompson thought of a solution for this, he started Tux Software with a couple of friends.

Tux Software is a new website (they just moved from Alpha to Beta stage) that provides you with a nice service of searching and installing popular and less-popular software. After adding their repositories and installing a small tool (Linux Software Installer), you can search the database for software that is supported for your Linux distribution. Next thing, you download the .deb package and install it. An other way of using their website is installing the LSI tool, and browse the website for your software. After finding the tool you want, you can click on the link: INSTALL NOW with L.S.I and the L.S.I takes over from there... Pretty smart system for the beginning user I'd say.

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Usually I don't put 'news' on the frontpage, that's what news-websites do... Yet I found this a very interesting one, too interesting to keep to myself.

Canonical has planned five major Ubuntu features for the release of this Octobre, version 8.10 (Interpid Ibex). As always, Canonical surprises us twice a year with a new and shiny distro, there's always a few things in these that get the community excited. This Octobre is no different...

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Yeeeey! I'm proud I contributed to Mozilla's download record. This morning I got an e-mail from Mozilla with the title "We did it!". And the following text:

We set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. With your help we reached 8,002,530 downloads.

You are now part of a World Record and the proud owner of the best version of Firefox yet!

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I believe that a lot of people are actually ready for opensource products, at least an opensource operating system like Linux (I'm thinking openSUSE, Ubuntu or CentOS). I've written down a few 'known reasons' I've heard over the years why people wouldn't migrate to Linux:

1. Installation of Linux requires expert nerd-knowledge
2. Linux is buggy and crashes a lot (heard that from computerstore clerks!)
3. If Linux gives errors, you have to know elite terminal commands to fix it
4. Linux doesn’t run on common hardware, most hardware isn’t supported!
5. The games you can buy in every store don't run on Linux

Let’s clarify some of these things up…

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