There’s been a lot of talk today about Microsoft’s effort to acquire Yahoo and what a successful takeover might mean for various open source software work with which Yahoo is associated. I’m not sure what to make of all that, but I am struck by the fact investors seem to think that a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo will make the combined company worth about $8 billion less than the sum of the values of the separate companies. How did I get this number? Well, the merger became public information before the stock market opened this morning. At the end of today’s trading, Microsoft’s stock price had fallen by $2.15 per share, while Yahoo’s stock price had risen by $9.20 per share. Multiplying these share price changes by the number of shares for each respective company, the implied value of Microsoft was reduced by $20 billion, while that of Yahoo was increased by only $12 billion. Investors, at least, are betting that Microsoft cannot successfully integrate Yahoo’s business into its own, and that the takeover will effectively waste $8 billion.

Just a quick reminder:  Later today I will go through all the comments on “Our Linux Dream” and come up with a list of the most popular/interesting wishes. If you have not yet said what you want for Linux in 2008 (realistic or crazy), you still have a few hours, but you better get started.

A LXer article points out that despite all the attention being given to the gPC, there are others out there with similar price points. MadTux offers a a few $150 PCs, and The Linux Store is offering a $200 dollar one. (all with various Linux distros) If you want REALLY cheap PCs, you should check out E-Way.

(I don’t know anything about these company’s reputations.)

I don’t think I will do a full review, but here are my thoughts on OpenSUSE 10.3. I am writing them down as I install/use 10.3. (This time not in a virtual machine.)

- The green theme is nice.
- The installer is nice for new users, but annoying if you need to change the advanced settings you need to find them yourself from the “Installation Settings” screen.
- The partitioner is one of the worst I have ever seen. There is no graphical representation of the partitions. There is no way to see the amount of space used in each partition. To make a new partition you need to tell it the number of the cylinder to start at! Do your partitioning in GParted!
- Under advanced on the “Installation Settings” are the boot loader settings. The default location for my hard drive setup is the partition I am installing it to. Yay!!! It also picked up the other Linux distros on this computer!
- Now installing…
- There is a slide show of cool features of OpenSUSE (although it changes kind of slowly), detailed information about the installation, and release notes to look at while the installer works away. It is not a live CD, though, so no surfing the web while you wait.
- Now rebooting… choosing to install again… Oops! That was wrong! I was supposed to choose “Boot from Hard Disk”, I think.
- Hmm… it booted into the first time setup… I think that means that it overwrote my GRUB…, grr… (It did, but it also recognized the other OSs.)
- Allows you to update from within the installer.
- Installation Done!

- Seems like a very nice distro, but only time will tell. Compiz Fusion is pre-installed and easy to set up. I have only two complaints: It did not detect the right resolution automatically and the Install Software application gives the name of the packages, not the name of the program which can be confusing to new users.

Overall, I like OpenSUSE 10.3 so far. I will update you if I have anything new and interesting.

I am sure many of you have seen stories like this about some business switching to Ubuntu and saving a ton of money, but the reason why this got my attention is that I have been noticing recently that Ubuntu really seems smoother then other Linux distros. I am sure many of you will disagree, but I now see why everyone calls it the best distro for newbies. Granted, there are many other newbie-friendly distros, but Ubuntu really seems to just work. Some things that really stand out to me (not that I am saying these features are specific to Ubuntu) are the Add/Remove programs application being the obvious package manager and the more advanced version which controls individual packages hidden in the System menu, the restricted drivers manager making it easy to use non-free drivers easily, and just generally the hardware support.

This InformationWeek Article makes a very good point about Linux and success. Many people seem to believe that in order for Linux to “win” or “succeed” it needs to “beat” Windows and OS X, but does it? Has Linux not yet succeeded? It sure does not look that way.

I agree with the article that Linux does not need to “beat” Windows. I just need to be the best solution out there for some people. Also, how do we know that if Linux was put under the same amount of strain hackers put on Windows it would remain virus-free? I am not saying that Linux is in-secure or that Windows is, I am just saying that it is incredibly hard to prevent hackers once they decide that want to do something.

Hi! I am having some (lots) of blog issues. I had a post about skype, but I am having tons of issues with it.

Well, just about nothing happened today, as far as I can tell. I even saw a story about the iPhone on a Linux news site. Hmm… talk about slow news day.

Luckily, one thing did happen after all. OpenSUSE put out beta 2 of their 10.3 release. The list of improvements don’t look all that interesting except for one point:

“Bootloader-related improvements: openSUSE 10.3 will use “chainloader” if it detects additional installations’ bootloader code in other partitions, otherwise “configfile” sections will be used (see Call for Testing below!)”

Looks like openSUSE is going to start supporting multi-booters better. (I never tested it before, so I don’t know how it handled GRUB in the past.) I might have to take back what I said about Dreamlinux being the only distro that I have tried that handles multi-boot computers well. (PCLinuxOS does it fairly well.)

For those who do not know, GRUB is what is called a “boot loader”. Most Linux distros install GRUB into the mater boot record of the hard drive. This is where your computer looks on the HD to start up. In some cases, such as if you already have a working GRUB, you may want to install it to the same partition that the distro is installed to and “chainload”. Only a few distros make this easy.  For more details Google “dual boot with grub” or something, but keep in mind there are many ways to dual boot and this is just one of them.

Welcome! Just a quick note on what to expect. Generally at least one story per day and not more than a few. Also, weekly updates on what to expect next week.