OStatic

It's easy for people who are skeptical of open source software to come up with a dozen reasons -- some perfectly valid -- to not give it a chance. Chief among them are uncertainty about which applications to try and an unwillingness to alter their computers in any way. Click2Try is a great way to try open source software in a virtual environment without the hassle of downloads and installation.

Launched earlier this year, Click2Try offers an assortment of open source apps and entire Linux distributions on a private virtual machine for a single session, no registration required. To save sessions and return later, you'll need to become a registered user and provide an email address.

There are several categories of software to choose from, including education, sysadmin, and productivity apps. There are also three Linux operating systems available: Ubuntu, openSUSE, and CentOS. Unfortunately, they all use the GNOME desktop so if you want to give KDE a whirl, you're out of luck. Starting an app in a virtual environment is a simple two-click affair that has you up and running in no time.?

Virtualization software vendor VirtualBox has released a new beta of version of VirtualBox 3.0 with a heavy emphasis on graphics support that's sure to please anyone who uses graphics-intensive games and applications. VirtualBox 3.0 beta 1 contains a number of improvements and updates to existing features, squashes several bugs, and it also has three new major features.

Many people love Linux but aren't able to commit to it full time. Some folks use peripherals that Linux can't yet accommodate, while others need applications for which open source options don't exist. Fortunately, virtualization makes it possible to put your favorite Linux distribution right on your Mac or Windows PC.

To virtualize a computer means to section off an area of the hard drive and put a second, fully-functional operating system on it, essentially turning one computer into two. Let's look deeper.

As Computerworld's Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols explains, Canonical has always offered commercial support for Linux, though its services largely targeted the enterprise market. Today, Canonical is announcing its plan to extend commercial support services to Ubuntu desktop users: individuals and small- and mid-sized businesses desiring a dedicated helping hand with Ubuntu installation, data migration, and network configuration.

Canonical offers three levels of support -- starter, advanced, and professional (the comparison chart breaks down coverage nicely) -- for one- or three- year periods.

Typical Linux desktop options like KDE and GNOME? limit the way computer users interact with the applications and programs on their systems. There's not much to do beyond opening and closing an app, and moving or resizing a window. The development team behind ?toil? is building a desktop interface that aims to stand that idea on its head and let users create workflows that work best for them.

The GNUstep-based environment is built with lightweight and modular components that allow users to combine project- and document-oriented activities (or, services, as the ?toil? team calls them) more easily.

Fresh out of the Mozilla Labs oven this week is a beta version of Prism, a new incarnation of WebRunner that integrates Web applications with the desktop. The idea behind Prism starts with from the premise that as more people move their computing activities to the cloud, users will become increasingly dependent on Web apps designed to replace locally-based email, calendaring, and word processing.

It's one of the biggest gotchas for alternative operating systems -- at some point in the middle of one project's release cycle, some other component that's tied in some way to the original project's functionality gets a whizbang new update that's significant enough that full-fledged integration has to wait until the next release. Of course, there are ways around this for those who just can't wait, but these work arounds might not always be as straightforward as one would hope.

The KDE team continues to roll out updates, enhancements and new features for the KDE 4 desktop environment. The sticking point here is that different users on different machines might find the updates are neat little improvements -- or absolutely vital. And a distribution needs to balance stability and utility of its official packages with the needs of its userbase.

The openSUSE community recently took charge of this particular situation in the form of the openSUSE 11.1 KDE4 Reloaded respin. The installable liveCD, masterminded by Stephan 'Beineri' Binner, incorporates the openSUSE 11.1 image (complete with updates issued since its release) and the KDE 4.2.2 desktop.

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?

With all that goes on at conferences, it would seem that a white paper presentation would be, invariably, a pretty dry event -- with the document itself being even drier. While there are many topics in the Linux Foundation-sponsored IDC white paper, The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy (linked here as a PDF), and one might choose to quickly skim the research, data and projections, this report is really well worth taking a close look through.

Overall, IDC is a projecting a rosy future for Linux-related growth in the enterprise, with a compound annual growth rate of 23.6% for the 2008-2013 period. The overall market is projected to experience a 5% growth rate over that same time frame.

Were you one of those people who turned the lights out and the power off for Earth Hour last month? Did you experience an excruciating sixty minutes of email/identi.ca/Facebook withdrawal? Userful has some good news (and a reward for your efforts) -- from now until Earth Day (April 22nd), it is giving away two-user licenses for its Userful Multiplier software.

So this time around, instead of turning the computer off, you can get the most out of its power consumption by sharing it with another user. While the Userful Multiplier software runs only on Linux, Userful is offering liveCDs bundled with the Multiplier software as part of this promotion, so those running other platforms can share the experience without making system changes.