New year brings new opportunities, work and responsibilities

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous new year.

Linux really has started creeping into the desktop market. With good dektops like JDS, Xandros, Linspire (aka Lindows), although not as user friendly as windows, competition among the linux desktop providers seems to be getting more bitter with everyday passing by. And almost at the same time the microsoft seems to be working hard on their next desktop windows "LongHorn Client" which is out in beta form for ong time.... I tried installing it once and had to spend almost whole day for it, resulting in hard experience that it would suck without atleast 512 MB of RAM :( .

It seems for the LDS (Linux Desktop Systems) to get better we would always need a microsoft to invent or re-search things and then LDS to re-invent the applications, although free :).

With almost upteen number of LDS coming up in the market, the market looks to be completed broken until the LDS providers start working on Statndards based interfaces etc... so that if we plpan to switch from one LDS to another, the amount of overhead is minimal. Linux is more about freedom in the right context and the right way. If we start getting a proprietary LDS with in-compatibilities with other LDS locking user into one particular LDS vendor, Is it something different than what Microsoft does?? Atleast windows has most of the applications coming from third party vendors and not Microsoft as opposed to the LDS systems, where momst of the applications are bundled with the OS in propreitary forms/optimized for those system.. so even for the applications they are locking us to the particular LDS vendor.

Had some time to check on a few Bootable ISO, Knoppix etc are great they provide amazingly great amount of utilities/feature set within hardly 3-5 minutes from boot process. I came across a linux bootable ISO distribution named "Dyne-Bolic" linux version 1.3. I tried running on top of my virtual PC with only 64 MB RAM and was amazed to see it getting fully loaded within a minute (yes I meant 1 Min., with 64MB RAM and within VPC) with WindowMaker. It also provides some cool feature like create current ISO, wherein you can create ISO outof the current snapshot of the system. it provides feature for Nesting to save state to the USB/Hard-disk. It had only single terminal (with multiple desktops within WindowMaker).

Linspire looks promising, however with its CNR dependeny I consider it to be much more worse option than Windows.. and over long period of time maintaining Linspire may not even be worth replacing Windows (atleast in corporate environment).