Growing consumer disappointment with Windows Vista, coupled with the need of major businesses and government agencies to begin assessing long-term computing needs, seems to be forcing IT professionals to consider non-Microsoft alternatives for their operating system and office suite applications.

Reports have surfaced throughout the blogosphere that Dell may be considering offering its customers the choice of a preinstalled Linux distribution when purchasing new PCs from the company.

The speculation stems from Dell’s IdeaStorm website, where the discussion surrounding the possibility of Linux distribution and support is currently dominating the community consciousness.

Advocates for Linux want Microsoft and their CEO, Steve Ballmer, to dispense with the threats and show which code in the Linux world infringes on Microsoft’s property.

A survey by Pingdom of seven heavily visited websites found plenty of Apache web servers and PHP coding on their platforms, where Linux carries the platform and MySQL handles the database needs.

Earlier this week, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev sent forth a public plea to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates concerning the prosecution of a Russian man charged with installing pirated copies of Windows on his classroom’s computers.

Microsoft has declined to drop the charges against the teacher, and the move has the county’s educational system reconsidering its choice of operating systems.

Consequently, it looks like Windows is will lose out to Linux in another market.

The blogosphere has been singing both positive and negative tunes about Microsoft’s latest offering in its long line of operating systems. Vista has been the talk of the town as of late, but there are still some of us who envision a world where more than one platform can thrive in the OS marketplace.

Make a deal with a big closed source company and the FSF (Free Software Foundation) may pull your access rights to Linux Distro’s. At least that is what Novell is facing this week.

By now, you’ve probably heard about or read Mark Shuttleworth’s view on keeping free software free. Matt Asay has a take on Mark’s post here.

Adobe released the Flash Player 9 for Linux 2 days ago. Here are the list of known issues:

This analysis was conceived when the coauthors discovered we’d each been independently seriously tempted to buy a Mac Mini, and realized what that temptation implied.

When you write data, it doesn’t necessarily get written to disk right then. The kernel maintains caches of many things, and disk data is something where a lot of work is done to keep everything fast and efficient.

Red Herring’s Falguni Bhuta predicts “More (Open Source) momentum in developing countries“:

There were a lot of significant advances in 2006 in the digital realm. Google prospered, YouTube exploded onto the scene, and the Internet overtook newspapers in the hierarchy of information consumption. What does this year hold in store for the technological landscape?

The agreement between Novell and Microsoft on marketing SuSE Linux to Microsoft customers seeking a heterogenous environment of Windows and Linux servers has been bolstered by a trio of deals with financial institutions.

For several years now I’ve been looking for something Bill Gates said. Unfortunately I had misremembered the actual words, and every time I found someone who thought they remembered it, they had the wrong words too and I’d come up dry yet again.

The One Laptop Per Child project received its first shipment of $100 Linux laptops yesterday, making the dream of providing free laptops to children around the world a reality.

Fedora Core is Red Hat’s Linux distribution for testing new technologies.

I did a lot of clean-up work at this website over the long Thanksgiving weekend. This was all due to radically changing the layout. Some of that was quick and simple do do, but for older pages I needed to do some hand editing before switching to the new format.

The agreement between Novell and Microsoft that will have salespeople offering Windows and Linux to customers had triggered substantial criticism, to which Novell has responded.

Microsoft to Offer Sales Support for Novell’s Suse Linux… Huh? Did I hear that right? Yep, there it is again: Linux to work with Windows.

With Microsoft agreeing not to sue Novell SLES Support Subscription customers for patent infringement issues, maybe it’s time to reconsider the value of OSS indemnification?