GNOME desktop project co-founder Miguel de Icaza has finally reaped the benefits of being in bed with Microsoft, with the Redmond-based software behemoth buying Xamarin, de Icaza's company, for a sum said to be between US$400 million and US$500 million.

A longer and more detailed analysis of Microsoft’s official takeover of the Mono team (and by extension a so-called ‘company’, whose finances are secret but are linkable back to Microsoft through Ignition Partners)

Today in his personal blog, Miguel de Icaza, founder of Gnome, and one of the most polarizing personalities in the free software world, announced that he is finished with the Linux platform –at least for personal use.

Miguel de Icaza took time out from his hectic starting-a-company schedule to chat with me this morning about his new Mono venture, Xamarin, which he and other Novell ex-pats are just getting off the ground.

For the past week, the Moonlight team has been busy porting Moonlight to Android devices and today, showed it off at Mix 11.

Sqlite-Commander - A ncurses based tool to display the records and tables of a sqlite database, right in the terminal

Since we’re at it – we not only took the new Mono garbage col-lec-tor through it’s paces regard-ing lin-ear scal-ing but we also made some inter-est-ing mea-sure-ments when it comes to query per-for-mance on the two .NET plat-form alternatives.

Sometimes a system administrator needs to get around a few rules that are in place for good (or not) reasons. One example is when networks have ICMP turned off (or even just a portion of it). With ICMP off it can be difficult to configure tools like Nagios for simple up and down checks. In this text getting around the no ICMP problem and a script to handle it for Nagios.

The Mono team is proud to bring you a preview of C# 5.0 a few years before our friends in Building 41 do. A snapshot of the code is available in the demo-repl.zip file. This contains the csharp.exe C# REPL shell and the Mono.CSharp.dll compiler-as-a-service assembly.

I wanted to give my readers a little bit of an insight of the various things that we are doing at Novell in my team. This is just focused on the work that we do at Novell, and not on the work of the larger Mono community which is helping us fill in the blanks in many areas of Mono.

The sysadmin community, once the backbone of Linux adoption, keeps asking "but what about me?". Indeed. What about them? What are we doing about these heroes? The heroes that ssh in the middle of the night to a remote server to fix a database; The heroes that remove a chubby log file clogging the web server arteries; The very same heroes that restore a backup after we drag and dropped the /bin directory into the trashcan?

Last weekend, during the tenth edition of FOSDEM, we had the joy of organizing the first ever Mono developer room. While there had been talks about Mono before (including Miguel's great presentation at FOSDEM 2007), it was still a rather underrepresented topic. For that reason, Stephane and I requested a developer room and gladly we got it.

After nearly 7 years at Novell and over 11 years in the Linux business, the newly-wed Nat Friedman will take a trip around the world before founding a startup in the U.S.A..

About nine months ago we released MonoDevelop 2.0 and Mono 2.4. Today we are releasing the much anticipated upgrades to both. Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2. The Mono team and contributors worked on this release like we have never worked before. Thanks to everyone that reported bugs, filed feature requests, contributed code and helped newcomers with Mono.

I am very happy to announce that the Mono C# compiler is now C# 4.0 feature complete.

We’ve been using Mono for the production server of Orion’s Belt for a couple of months now. On this article I’d like to share our experiences using Mono. We developed our project fully on Windows with Visual Studio 2005, and at a time we started to consider Mono for a production server. Do note that the Orion’s Belt team has a Windows background, and little experience administrating Linux machines.

Today is the ten year anniversary of the incorporation of Ximian, Inc. A company founded by Nat Friedman and myself whose goal was to advance the state of the Linux desktop. It was also an excuse for Nat and myself to hang out as we had become best friends forever in the previous two years.

SUSE Linux used to be a very KDE-centric distribution. Then Novell came around, bought SUSE and Ximian, and slowely but surely they turned the now-openSUSE distribution into effectively a GNOME-centric distribution with KDE as its sidekick. The openSUSE community, however, doesn't appear to be particularly happy with KDE being a sidekick.

Even though the ECMA standard allows the index of arrays to be a long, .NET on Windows64 does not support this and Java would require modifications to the bytecode format. Altering Mono became the natural choice for those looking to host very large arrays in an advanced and managed VM.

Microsoft has published its .NET architectural pattern under an OSI-approved open-source license to a mixed reception. The company's ASP.NET Model View Controller (MVC), released at Mix 09 just last month, has been published under the Microsoft Public License (MS-PL).

Scott Guthrie ---the inventor of ASP.NET--- just announced that Microsoft is open sourcing the ASP.NET MVC stack under the MS-PL license.

Moonlight, the open source implementation of Silverlight for Unix systems has officially reached its 1.0 level. We are feature complete, we pass all the Microsoft regression test suites and we shipped support for Microsoft's Media Pack for x86 and x86-64 architectures.

Novell's open-source .Net clone is alive and well, and it's turning up in surprising, useful places. You may remember Mono, the open-source implementation of Microsoft's .Net platform spearheaded by Miguel de Icaza of Gnome fame. It's been a controversial project since its inception. Detractors among the open-source community have variously described it as a trap, a kludge, or simply a waste of effort.

If Microsoft would pursue one of their own MVPs so viciously and tenaciously, over nothing more than a damned plugin, what do you suppose they’ll start doing once their “IP” has well and truly infested Free Software?

I used to think that Gnome 1.4 was the Last Good Gnome. Because when Gnome 2.0 came along, everything I liked was gone. It was dumbed-down to the point of unusability, and the roadmap called for yet more dumbing-down. So I switched to KDE for my main workstation, and IceWM, XFCE, and Blackbox for lower-powered PCs. For all these years I haven't seen much to like in Gnome. Not until Ubuntu Hardy Heron, that is.

There's been a lot of discussion about which open source application works best as a replacement for Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Outlook: Evolution, Ximian, Thunderbird, and so on. Let's add another contender to that list, shall we? Meet Spicebird, currently in beta 0.4 form.

Open-source pioneer and Novell Vice President Miguel de Icaza Thursday for the first time publicly slammed his company's cross-patent licensing agreement with Microsoft as he defended himself against lack of patent protection for third parties that distribute his company's Moonlight project, which ports Microsoft's Silverlight technology to Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth, whom we have great respect for after maintaining his stern stance against intimidation tactics, has responded to our concerns regarding the existence of Mono in Ubuntu. His message to us was CC’d to the Technical Board and the leader of Fedora. It would be worth bringing it to our readers’ attention because some were concerned (if not outraged) about the subject.

It seems like Novell’s role in GNOME is not healthy to GNOME’s existence (let alone the success of ODF), to say the very least. Only yesterday, we delved deeper into the connections between Microsoft and Novell, which desperately needs Microsoft’s money. It is worth stressing that Novell should be approached very cautiously by the Free software world.

Novells CTO / Open Source doesn't see long term problems from the Microsoft deal - an interview with the online edition of the Austrian newspaper "Der Standard" about the future of the Linux desktop, legal DVD-support and the mistakes of the Hula project

I’ve used both Windows and Mac OS X, and I don’t know how people manage to install software on them. Yes, I’m a fan of aptitude (and I’ve had good experiences with Yum). It’s pretty clear to me that this software installation system has tremendous advantages over the traditional “download a random binary package from somewhere” approach common to Windows and Mac OS X, as long as the package you want is in the proper repository.

One of the age-long problems with the Linux operating system was never the lack of functionality but the lack of major commercial applications porting their software to Linux. The movie industry has shown high demand for such software to be ported and, after a long wait, companies such as Autodesk and Softimage have ported fully supported Linux versions of their applications for their dedicated customers.

To quote from the book's preface: "Building PCs isn't just for techies any more. It used to be, certainly. Only gamers and other geeks actually built their PCs from the ground up. Everyone else just called the Dell Dude and ordered a system. That started to change a few years ago. The first sign was when general merchandisers like Best Buy started stocking upgrade components." Someone told me years ago that building a PC was like building something with Legos. While I don't think it's a perfect analogy, it comes close. Building a PC or small server is well within the grasp of anyone who can use a screwdriver and likes to tinker. Building the Perfect PC, 2nd Edition makes it a snap.

Return values are not just important but as age has taught me - essential. Use return values to your advantage and wrangle them when you can. Breaking things out helps, but making sure you let everyone know that you did break out some code might be just as important.

So what if Novell had not sold out? If we consider that the Novell executives are not the donkeys some would like to see in order to give way to their own arguments, the scenario of the ? Novell's Cunning Plan ? ? comes to mind. What this means is that Novell may perhaps have defined a strategy that would trap Microsoft and let Novell grow its market share of Linux and other software.

When OSDL announced the first release of its Portland initiative at LinuxWorld Boston in April, heralding it "a breakthrough in desktop Linux," I muttered my skepticism to a co-worker. He expressed surprise at my reaction, noting that the initiative employs extremely smart people. I don't doubt their intelligence, or their sincerity, but I wouldn't bet a penny on the project living up to its initial claim, because you can't conjure a silver bullet out of intelligence and sincerity.

[Frankly, I'm not sure we should make a unified desktop our goal. What would be the downside? What would be the point of being different? It's kind of like living in a subdivision.

LXer Feature: 04-Aug-2006

GNU/Linux -- Like No Other Hotrod, Ever

While others appear to be going backwards, Linux just keeps racing ahead.

'Linux supports more devices, "out of the box", than any other operating system ever has.'

"Yes, that's right, we support more things than anyone else. And more than anyone else ever has in the past. Linux has a very long list of things that we have supported before anyone else ever did."
-- Greg Kroah-Hartman, OLS 2006 Keynote

The term "Add/Remove Programs" seems more appropriate to Windows than to Linux however, Ubuntu does offer this option (besides apt-get and synamptic) to locate and install software on your Dapper Drake machine.

[Thanks to tripwire45 for this story. -- grouch]

Columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols thinks he has found a pattern in Novell's pursuit of the enterprise desktop. For a while, Novell has produced great Linux desktops, like OpenSUSE, he writes. At the same time, though, Novell has insisted that for businesses, its only desktop interest was in thin-client-style worker-bee desktops. But things have changed. [Ed: From the videos I have seen, it blows Vista away! - sharkscott]

Author of “Crossing the Chasm” Headlines Agenda of Open Source Thought Leaders at Event, April 24-25 in San Diego

The world swooned at the Consumer Electronics Show unveiling of Google Pack, an easily installed almost-all-in-one Internet experience. Too bad it suffers from the same maladies as the rest of the One Size Fits All packages:

How do you try to explain a bad rap spread by interested parties that call their campaign, "Get the Facts"? How do you explain it when it isn't deserved? Open Source Software development suffers from widespread misunderstandings in the media from myths, false claims and disinformation. As someone who spent over a decade as a commercial software program and development manager, I view Open Source Software methods as simply a way to build applications. It happens to be the most efficient one.

Aside from the general unwillingness of VC's to invest in startups, Linux is a no go. Many factors come into play with the primary lack of an exit strategy topping the list. When will Linux companies see the light at the end of the tunel? Or will they?

"I have the sad duty to announce that Dr. Frederick H. Berenstein, our co-founder and Chairman, died on September 6, 2005, after a courageous battle over many years," Xandros CEO, Andreas Typaldos, announced today. "Beyond Rick’s vision, inspiration, and leadership, which our industry, our company, and all of us will miss, I will personally miss his example of quiet courage, and his indomitable will, and determination. It is that courage and will, which enabled him to fight his illness, that also inspired Rick to push Linux forward, ahead of most other people, through visionary investments in companies such as Ximian, CodeWeavers, and finally Xandros. His belief in the inevitability of Linux, from the days when I first met Rick in 1999 as one of his founding group of investors in Linux Global Partners, the Linux incubator that he had co-founded with Wm. Jay Roseman, was infectious and hard to argue with," Typaldos continued. "There simply will not be another like him."

Welcome to Security Alerts, an overview of recent Unix and open source security advisories. In this column, we look at problems in KDE, MySQL, Perl, Ximian Evolution, GnuPG, OpenSLP, Ringtone Tools, LuxMan, and Ethereal.

Novell Evolution (nee Ximian Evolution) has become a world-class email client. It's sleek, beautiful, and very powerful. Because it can do so many things, it can be a bit intimidating for first-time users. We put together this guide to help new Evolution users do one thing: filter the mail. Here is a brief overview of filtering and nine tips to help you take advantage of Evolution's sophisticated filtering capabilities.

When I first saw rumblings in the trade press about Novell's new Novell Linux Desktop (NLD) distribution, I was confused at best. Novell's own press corps, impressive in terms of sheer volume, didn't make this clear. As shown in Figure 1, the splash screen for the installer leaves no doubt that this is a new and unique Novell product. However, there's a good deal of general confusion about how NetWare, SUSE Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server, various mail products, eDirectory, ZENworks, Ximian's desktop and Evolution mail client, and now the Novell Linux Desktop all fit together.

Seeks Damages for Anticompetitive Microsoft Business Practices in 1994-96 Period

Desktop Linux is almost soup. We only have a few items left on the short list. Will we do it? If history is an indicator, the answer is yes.

With the recent acquisitions of Ximian and SuSE, Novell Chief Executive Officer Jack Messman has transformed a marginalized company into a mover-and-shaker. Look out, Red Hat - and Microsoft - Novell has big plans for Linux.