OStatic

I was never one for cryptozoological taxidermic creations -- you won't find mermonkeys or crocoducks on display in my home. I have, however, for the last few weeks, been hiding a jackalope in my laptop bag. He was an experimental little guy, but the folks at Canonical and the vast community behind Ubuntu have completed the necessary gene splicing and DNA alterations and soon -- very soon -- the final, stable release of Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) will be let loose into the wild.

What's new this time around? How does it all work? And for the wilder types, where locally can you attend a Jaunty Jackalope release party?

Over at ComputerWorld, Seth Weintraub waxes poetic about Microsoft's decision to offer a Windows 7 Starter edition to keep its presence strong in the netbook arena, and why this is a huge advantage for Google's Linux-based Android.

Windows 7 Starter edition is designed to run no more than three applications simultaneously -- purchasing an upgrade allows users to run, presumably, as many apps as their netbooks can handle at one time. Now, three concurrent applications at a shot might be sufficient for a number of users; it might be all that some netbooks can handle, depending on the applications and system resources running in the background. Microsoft isn't hiding the fact it is experimenting with a limited Starter, and hopefully netbook manufacturers will also make buyers aware of this. But awareness and being almost sufficient in even most cases is irrelevant. It's the concept that there is a limit, and purchasing an upgrade for functionality that most won't need every day (but when it's needed, it's really needed) that will make netbooks running alternative operating systems increasingly attractive. It's an advantage not only for Android, but any Linux distribution netbook builders optimize for their hardware.

Late yesterday afternoon, Canonical let loose the release candidate disk images for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope). Canonical warns that while a release candidate is about as stable as one can get with a testing release, it is still a testing release, and users should hold off installing Jaunty on essential systems.

The good news, of course, is that those clamoring to install Jaunty on their essential systems haven't long to wait. The finalized, stable Jaunty release will appear on mirrors worldwide April 23rd.

Does Microsoft change prices at OEMs to block GNU/Linux sales? An allegedly leaked memo appears to show so.

Should an open source license ever be patent-agnostic? That's the question posed by a new license under review.

Where did Sun go wrong? One of Silicon Valley's biggest innovators faces a tough road alone after walking away from a deal with IBM.

Canonical vs. Microsoft: A netbook cat fight. Canonical is dismissing Microsoft's netbook market share claims.

The netbook newbie's guide to Linux. Wrestling with Linpus on a netbook.

A short piece on Xbit Labs directed me to an interesting post by Chris Kenyon, Canonical's Director of Business Development. In this piece, Kenyon tackles another absolutely critical factor in marketing Linux netbooks (I discussed a few of the others on Tuesday) -- offering quality engineered hardware and carefully configured software that's ready to go, right out of the box.

Kenyon's post offers advice and points to consider to OEMs, consumers, and yes, even Microsoft. It's sound, it's reasoned -- perhaps to the point one wonders why it needed to be said -- and it paints an encouraging picture of the future for Linux netbooks.