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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Technorati Tags: acquisition, Linspire, Linux Desktop, Microsoft, Open Source, Scalix, Xandros

From TechIQ Magazine by Mike Perkowski:

While I contemplate the fate of our desktop PC, my wife is chomping at the bit to get back online; I told her she could use my Dell Inspiron notebook. She asked if it also was a Windows XP machine. When I said it was, her reply was prompt and emphatic: �Never mind.�

(via� E@zyVG)

Technorati Tags: Humor, Linux Desktop, Windows Vista

I was a little surprised today when I woke up and had all this activity from last night’s 10 Reasons Not to Use Ubuntu I was reading through the comments and saw a note about it’s ironic that I posted a YouTube video that requires Flash, a non-free as in freedom technology.

Okay, fair point and at one point in time I would have been the guy jumping on that bandwagon. However, last year I started using Automatix2 and it’s part of my Ubuntu install ritual now, it automates the installs lots of things many users might go out and grab after they get a new machine include Flash Player and Sun Java (which is on it’s way to becoming free). Once you have support for that in your Firefox or SwiftFox browser you don’t (or at least I didn’t) think about it again. I also read about but have yet to try out – Easy Ubuntu which is somewhat similar in automating the installation of additional software. Automatix2 is shown below:

Also, you can play flash with free software and not the Flash Player for Linux from using Gnash :

Gnash is a GNU Flash movie player. Previously, it was only possible to play flash movies with proprietary software. While there are some other free flash players, none support anything beyond SWF v4. Gnash is based on GameSWF, and supports many SWF v7 features.

So hopefully that helps, for anyone who’s trying to watch the Ubuntu/Beryl movie I posted earlier they won’t have any trouble installing a Flash player.

Technorati Tags: Automatix, Beryl, Easy Ubuntu, Firefox, Flash, Gnash, Java, Linux Desktop, Ubuntu