OStatic

Over at the Lynx blog, Dougie Richardson cast his vote for the best comment made during the course of Ubuntu's Open Week. While his choice might be completely subjective, there is no denying that Mark Shuttleworth's response when asked whether WINE (in its own right, or as a general synonym for Windows compatibility) or native Linux ports were more important to Ubuntu's success was thought provoking.

The question (and answer) invite all sorts of tangential queries. What should any desktop computer be expected, by default, to deliver? If equivalent applications on different platforms have identical features and functionality, and content produced by one application can be opened and modified on the other, will user interfaces and familiarity matter less -- or more? If Microsoft made every last line of its code available to peruse and modify right now -- how would Windows change? How would Linux change? If you need a Philips head screwdriver, is it possible to squeak by with an approximately sized flat head type?

If you're a Linux user waiting to try out the Chrome browser, CNet offers some bad news, tempered by a tiny ray of good news.

It seems the Google developed browser, released approximately two months ago, is showing the first signs of growing Linux legs, and is making its way towards the operating system. It takes time, a few dead ends, and maybe even requires losing a link or two before it really works -- Google suggests it might be quite some time.

We've written about the folks at CodeWeavers before. They make a customized, commercial version of Wine called CrossOverLinux. and have been major contributors to Wine. (Wine allows Linux users to run Windows applications.) This post from the CodeWeavers blog details how the company has succesfully ported versions of Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser--for Mac and Linux. The ports are free and available here. You won't want to run these ports as your main browser, but as proof-of-concept for cross-platform versions of Chrome, this is good news.

Where is Rodney Dangerfield when we need him? There are some heated messages flying around in the Ubuntu forums because NBC has announced that it will offer its online video coverage of the Beijing Olympics to Internet Explorer and Firefox users on the Mac and Windows, but not to Linux browser users. This means the considerable amount of online video available to other users is out of reach of the Linux crowd, writes one forum poster. You wonder why they'd want to kiss off 2%-3% of the desktops, writes another. Would it really be so difficult to offer video to users of Firefox on Linux?

As the LinuxWorld trade show continues in San Francisco, lots of announcements and events are arriving, although there are some rumblings about the show catering too much to the establishment. There is an Installfest going on, where volunteers are building Linux-based systems for needy schools. If you remember the gOS, which was the Linux OS inside the $199 Wal-Mart gPC, it is now reaching out to Google Gadgets, and preloads WINE for users who want to reach out to Windows applications. There are also several awards being given to some of the innovative products at the show. Here's the upshot.

We covered the SourceForge Community Choice Awards announcement in early July, and now the winners have been named. This marks the first year when SourceForge's awards for the best open source projects have been open to all open source projects. OpenOffice is far and away the big winner, but I was pleased to see some lesser known projects get recognition, too. Here, below the fold, are the winners.

This is a 1.0 that I wasn't sure would ever come. No, I'm not talking about the Duke Nukem game that's been vaporware for the last decade or so. I'm talking about Wine 1.0, which is slated for release on June 6th of this year. That's a mere 15 years after development was started.

Wine, if you're not already familiar with it, is an application that allows Windows apps to run unmodified on Linux and other *nix operating systems.