OStatic

When did you use Linux for the first time? The question was posed at the Linux Collaboration Summit earlier this month, and has prompted many Linux users to take a trip down memory lane.

I'm not sure if the admission that I remember my first Linux installation much more clearly than any date with my first boyfriend or my first date with my husband is a really wise thing to put in writing. I will freely admit it wasn't quite as anxiety-inducing as a date, and the long-term relationship that sprang from it taught me quite a bit about myself, how I learn, and how to passionately load kernel modules at boot.

What do Pamela Jones, Chris Messina, Doc Searls, and Angela Byron all have in common? Aside from being very cool people, they?re also all past winners of a Google-O?Reilly Open Source Award.

The honor is bestowed on people in the FOSS community? who have ?demonstrated exceptional leadership, creativity, and collaboration in the development of open source software. The 2009 award winner will be announced at this? year?s O?Reilly Open Source Convention 2009 (OSCON) later this summer so if you know someone who you?d like to see win, there are still a few weeks left to nominate your favorite geek.

In spite of rumblings that the Android operating system isn't spreading out to more handsets, consider this finding from researchers at AdMob: The Android OS now has 6 percent of the U.S. smartphone market and is tied with Palm as the fourth-largest OS. AdMob's latest research on the smartphone market also found that growth in requests [to AdMob's network] from devices running the Android and iPhone operating systems continued to outpace other platforms in March, despite the relatively limited number of devices in market. The growth in requests from devices is largely being driven by very healthy growth in usage of the app stores for both Android and the iPhone. Here are some of the other key points from AdMob's report.

In November, I wrote about Ulteo's Open Virtual Desktop, an open source desktop delivery utility. Simply described, the Ulteo Open Virtual Desktop (OVD) is a browser-based operating system and applications suite that is controlled and configured, ideally, by your organization's systems administrators. This makes managing, working, and collaborating from remote locations possible so long as there is a computer nearby with a Java-enabled browser and internet connection.

This week, Ulteo announced some major updates to its OVD, including the ability to deliver Linux and Windows applications (or a mix of both), Active Directory and LDAP authentication capabilities, several file server options, and collaboration support.

Apple needs open source in the enterprise. Open source software apps are often multi-platform, which makes open source a potentially useful tool for Apple.

Open source NFS client on tap for Windows? Microsoft has sponsored research at the University of Michigan to develop an open source Network File System client.

Opinion: Microsoft still harming netbook markets. A memo that Microsoft reportedly issued to its Top 20 OEMs told them what they could and could not have in a Windows netbook computer. Is the company imposing restrictive limitations on what hardware can run what operating system?

Security flaw leads Twitter, others to pull OAuth support. The open source OAuth protocol acts as a valet key for users' log-in information at both Twitter and Yahoo!.

Appetizer is a slick, dock-style open source application launcher for Windows. You can run it from a USB thumb drive.

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?