Weekly news wrap-up: Lindows beta released; Loki mourned

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Author: JT Smith

– By Grant Gross –

One company related to the Linux desktop pulled the plug this week, while another finally released an early version of its product. NewsForge’s Tina Gasperson got a sneak peak at the LindowsOS sneak preview, while leading Linux gaming company Loki Entertainment Software shut down.

Gasperson’s review, the first available for the much hyped LindowsOS, noted that the claims of easily running Windows software on a Linux-based operating system don’t exactly ring true yet, but it is only a beta-type release. At least LindowsOS, which seems to a customized version of the long-active Wine Windows emulator for Linux tied to the Xandros Linux distribution, can’t be called vaporware anymore.

Over at Loki, company president Scott Draeker talked to NewsForge about the decision to shut down and what’s next for him.
The news of his company’s demise came from a leaked memo, but you heard it first from Draeker on NewsForge/Linux.com. A lot of the discussion on NewsForge centered around mourning for Loki and what happens to gaming in Linux next.

Meanwhile, back at AOL Red Hat …

Last weekend, the Washington Post reported that AOL Time Warner was in talks to buy Red Hat. After a firestorm of debate in the Linux community, with leading Linux kernel contributor Alan Cox saying he’d leave Red Hat if AOL bought it, AOL denied the report.

That didn’t stop the debate from continuing. NewsForge business columnist Jack Bryar suggested that if AOL and Red Hat aren’t talking, maybe they should be. A columnist at osOpinion suggested an AOL alliance with Linux could finally compete with Microsoft.

Other interesting news

  • A Gartner Group survey found 15% of Asian companies running Linux in one form or another.

  • A columnist at BusinessWeek suggested the hassle of learning alternatives to Microsoft Office like StarOffice aren’t worth the $400-plus cost savings. And I thought businesses were trying to save money these days.

  • The headline on the story by a writer from The Register just about says it all: “How Microsoft drove me to Linux.”

    Success story of the week

    DesktopLinux.com details the switch to Linux by TrustCommerce. It’s interesting, but certainly not the first time we’ve seen Linux used on the desktop in an office-like setting. Check out the NewsForge reports on the city of Largo, Florida, schools in India.

    New releases

  • A couple sites noted the release of Wine 1.0 coming soon. So it’s not really a new release, yet, but worth watching, because Wine is what projects like Lindows are built on.

    Newly reviewed

  • NetworkComputing.com says Evolution 1.0, the Outlook-like mail and calendaring program for Linux, “revolutionizes the Open Source desktop>.” Now if I could get it working with my company mail server …

  • LinuxJournal.com likes Red Hat 7.2. “Apart from my bias, however, it installs cleanly, comes up without any problems, and it simply works. “

    New at NewsForge and Linux.com

    Other stories that NewsForge and Linux.com reported first this week:

  • For all you people new to Linux, NewsForge’s Robin “Roblimo” Miller answers the question, “Why bother to use Linux?” It’s a pragmatist’s answer to the question.

  • Russell Pavlicek takes a look at NetBSD through the eyes of a long-time Linux user. It’s not that easy to set up, he says, but it’s a good, compact operating system.

  • We check out User-mode Linux and some other Open Source Linux virtual machine projects.

    Stock news

    The Nasdaq ended the week at 1,937.70, up just over seven points from Jan. 18’s close of
    1.930.34, but down nearly five points Friday itself. Our list of 11 Open Source and related companies reflected that small growth, with seven companies posting mostly modest gains in their stock prices, and four companies posting losses.

    Red Hat’s rumored dance with AOL Time Warner released its fourth quarter results, a 17% increase from the third quarter and up 7% from a year ago. Its stock rose a few cents on the news.

    IBM announced the result of Linux-only mainframes this week.

    Here’s how Open Source and related stocks ended this past week:

    Company Name Symbol 1/18 Close 1/25 Close
    Apple AAPL 22.17 23.25
    Borland Software Int’l BORL 15.39 15.65
    Caldera International CALD 0.86 0.87
    Hewlett-Packard HWP 22.61 22.47
    IBM IBM 114.25 109.28
    MandrakeSoft 4477.PA e4.63 e4.44
    Red Hat RHAT 8.41 8.56
    Sun Microsystems SUNW 12.12 11.16
    TiVo TIVO 6.34 6.76
    VA Software LNUX 2.40 2.42
    Wind River Systems WIND 18.03 18.13

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