Open source in 2010

Is 2010 the "year of open source"? Probably not, but by the end of the year expect to see open source software everywhere. 

Mobile Linux


2010 is going to be a huge year for open source software (OSS) in the mobile sector and we can expect to see OSS appearing on everything from mobile phones to netbooks to tablets.
Of course, thanks mostly to the open source Symbian operating system, open source is already the dominant player on mobile phones, despite the disproportional hype given to proprietary systems such as Apple's iPhone and RIM's Blackberry. But Nokia hasn't done a particularly good job of promoting Symbian's openness since it acquired it in 2008.
Google, on the other hand, has done wonders with its Android OS which is now right up there with the likes of the iPhone and is getting better all the time. Android will, without a doubt, be in the headlines throughout the coming year as Google takes other mobile makers on head-to-head.


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Fedora, Debian, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris Benchmarks

With Debian GNU/kFreeBSD using the FreeBSD 7.2 kernel, we threw the full FreeBSD 7.2 operating system into the comparison mix. FreeBSD 8.0 was added in since that is the latest FreeBSD stable release at this time. OpenBSD 4.6 was used as another *BSD comparison while OpenSolaris 2009.06 was used to represent some Sun Solaris numbers. Fedora 12 provides a look at some of the latest Linux packages available more so than the Debian snapshot from 2010-01-14. The 64-bit versions of all operating systems were used during this testing process.

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openSUSE Brings New Li-F-E To School

With education budget trends resembling a ski slope (downhill) it only makes sense to look to open source for help. With the 11.2 release of openSUSE comes a separate project targeted at schools and school children.

openSUSE for Schools (or Linux for education aka Li-f-e) packs a huge number of applications targeted at all grade levels. Packages for both desktop and server are included. They've also provided things like Internet filtering software to help parents and educators protect kids from potential problems. For classroom use you'll find tools for creating a kiosk mode or live CD bootable on older machines.

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1. Desktop Options
2. Server Option
3. Applications Galore!

openSUSE-Edu Li-f-e represents a significant step forward in delivering the tools needed to support virtually any school or educational requirement.

Linux and USB 3.0

The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0, is finally out, but only one operating system has native support for it: Linux.

Ever get tired of Windows people proclaiming how their operating system has device support for this, that, and the other thing and Linux doesn't? Well, now you have a perfect come-back. The newest, fast interface, USB 3.0 is out and only Linux has native support for it.

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Linux started supporting USB 3.0 in the September 2009 release of the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. Neither Windows 7 nor Snow Leopard currently supports USB 3. Windows support? That will have to wait for Windows 7 SP1 ---whenever that shows up.

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Users who have been around for a while may be saying what about Firewire, aka the IEEE 1394 interface standard. It's true that Firewire, Apple's name for their implementation for the technology, was faster than USB 2.0. Firewire 400 could reach a peak throughput of
400Mbps and 800 could, as you might have guessed, hit 800Mbps.

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