Xandros 4: The best desktop Linux for Windows users

What's the best desktop Linux? For me, it's SimplyMEPIS 6.5, soon to be replaced by 7.0. But this is both a dumb question and a dumb answer. The real question is: What's the best desktop operating system for you?

If I told you the best 2007 car is a Mazda MX-5 Miata, I'd also be right, according to Consumer Reports. But what's right for me, a middle-aged gent with a lovely wife and no kids at home, is not what's right for a family of four. For them, a Honda Accord or a Toyota Sienna makes more sense.

It's the exact same thing with desktop operating systems. With that idea firmly in mind, I've started looking at Linux desktops not for me but for particular groups of users.

For my tests, I'm going to use my Insignia 300a, an older, Best Buy house-brand desktop PC with a 2.8GHz Pentium IV CPU, a GB of RAM and an Ultra ATA/100 60GB hard drive. In short, it's a decent, but in no way, shape or form, cutting-edge system.

I'm going to be starting my "best Linux desktop" series with a review of the best Linux for a Windows user who's willing to install his or her own distribution. Don't get me wrong. My pick for this user, Xandros' Xandros Desktop Professional 4.1, could be installed by anyone who's ever used a computer, but, and it's a big but, some people get twitchy at the very idea of touching an operating system. For those users, there's another story, but that's a tale for another day.

Let's start with the basics. Why is Xandros a good Linux for Windows users? Well, for starters, you can use it as a drop-in replacement for most Windows XP uses.

It works in both Linux- and Windows-based office networks. I've used Xandros Pro 4 on NT domains, AD (Active Directory) forests and Linux/Unix NIS (Network Information Service)-based LANs with no trouble at all. It just works. Frankly, it's a lot easier to integrate Xandros into a Windows network than it is Vista.

Xandros 4 is designed for seamless integration into existing Windows-centric networks. It doesn't just support the basics of domain and AD authentication. It also supports logon scripts and group policy profiles.

If you use the pre-installed Evolution 2.6.3 for your e-mail client and organizer, which I highly recommend, you'll also find it integrates very smoothly with Microsoft Exchange e-mail and groupware. Since I consider Outlook as a security hole that pretends to be an e-mail client, I vastly prefer Evolution for use with Exchange or any other mail server, including Xandros recently acquired Scalix, a well-regarded open-source mail server. In addition, Microsoft recently licensed its Exchange protocols to Xandros for use in Scalix. This, in turn, means we can expect even better Exchange compatibility in Xandros Pro.

OK, so let's say you're not a Windows business user. What's in Xandros for you? For starters, this distribution enables to both read and write to Microsoft's NTFS (New Technology File System) partitions with Paragon Software Group's NTFS for Linux 5.0. With it, you can read and write to your hard drive's Windows NTFS partitions. Other Linuxes will let you read from NTFS, but Xandros makes it easy to get full use out of a dual Windows/Linux boot PC's hard disk.

In addition, Xandros Professional deploys a customized KDE 3.4.2 desktop interface that looks and acts a great deal like the Windows XP interface. Trick the desktop out with Windows applications and an XP user could probably use Xandros for several days before figuring out that it really wasn't XP.

Oh, yes, I did say Windows applications. Xandros includes CodeWeavers's CrossOver Office 5.9.1. While not the newest version of this program that enables users to run many of the most popular Windows applications on Linux (that honor goes to CrossOver 6.1), it will give many Windows users all the applications they need. I've successfully run Office 2000 and 2003 suites, Quicken 2005, Windows Media Player 6.4 and iTunes 5.01 on it.

If you can live without Microsoft Office, the distribution also includes OpenOffice.org 2.0.6. It also includes a selection of some of the latest open-source software that appears on both Linux and Windows, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

Xandros also includes the Xandros Network Connection System. I have to say it, combined with the file manager, makes accessing wired, wireless, mobile and VPN network-connected file and print servers easier than on any other system I've ever used. Hooking it up to any network is mindlessly easy. Want to use a printer on a Samba server? An NTFS drive hanging off an AD server? An NFS (Network File System) RAID running on Solaris? Click it, put in your user ID and password and you're in business.

Underneath all this Windows-friendly goodness beats a heart based on Debian 3.1 Sarge. The Linux kernel, however, has been upgraded to version 2.6.18, with additional updates to proprietary ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers. This is certainly no bleeding-edge distribution. On the other hand, even by Linux's high standards, Xandros is remarkably stable. Short of a power outage, I haven't found anything that will take it down.

The distribution is also LSB (Linux Standards Base) 3.1 compliant. It is also one of the first commercial distributions to integrate the Portland 1.0 tools. Developers can use these tools to create applications that can easily integrate into a Linux desktop regardless of whether the desktop is GNOME or KDE based.

That's all well and good, but here's the important part. This really is a Linux distribution that a Windows user can use without tears. To quote Kim Brebach, from his recent overview of Linux desktops, "Xandros did exactly what it claimed: open an easy passage for Windows users through the mountains of Linux."

Exactly. That's why, for me, Xandros is the Linux for Windows users who have grown sick and tired of Windows' endless security holes and the occasional crash. Xandros just works, and it works enough like Windows XP that even the most Linux-phobic user will be able to appreciate it.

Xandros Desktop Professional pricing starts at $99.99 per desktop. There is also a free version of Xandros 4.1, this Open Circulation edition, but for some reason Xandros makes it difficult to find. A BitTorrent link to it can be found on an otherwise idle Xandros fan site. You can also download a 30-day trial version for free.
Source :http://www.desktoplinux.com

Bhutan Deploys Linux

The Bhutan government liked its first taste of Linux so much that it has come back for seconds, releasing an updated version of its Debian-based operating system that it launched last year.

Launched at the start of this month, Dzongkha Debian Linux is a Debian-based Linux operating system built in and for the national language, Dzongkha. It can be easily installed on any PC or used as a Live CD.

The updated version will fully support Dzongkha computing on standard programs and applications like word processing, spreadsheets, power point presentations, Web browsing and chatting.

Department of information and technology officials said this version also has the provision to use Dzongkha in graphics software like Adobe Photoshop, and multimedia applications.

Head developer of the Dzongkha Debian Linux project, Pema Geley said in a press statement that the first version of Dzongkha Linux was not compatible with most computers, so the operating system has now been updated and made stable.

Developed over a period of 13 months and at about US$80,000, the upgraded version has also dual booting system. It can coexist with both Mac and Windows operating systems.

Plans are apparently also underway to develop software like Text to Speech, Speech Recognition, and Optical Character Recognition on Dzongkha Debian Linux in the second phase.

The Live CDs are available for free from the Department of Information and Technology.

The Debian installer supports 58 languages in total. Several languages even have all texts translated in the installer. KDE and GNOME are also available in many languages.
Source :http://www.pcworld.com

Linux Startup Moves Desktop Windows to the Data Center

Qumranet, the company behind one of the hottest Linux kernel features, is scheduled to announce its first product, a new desktop virtualization system, offering today at the DEMOfall conference in San Diego. Qumranet's Solid ICE product moves desktop users' Linux or Microsoft Windows installs onto virtual machines in the data center, allowing the users to run their applications and OS of choice from thin clients or from Windows or Linux PC clients. Unlike VMWare's ESX server, the Solid ICE server runs on a host with a standard Linux distribution from Red Hat, Novell, or Canonical.

The company already has five Fortune 1000 customers participating in an early adopter program, says John-Marc Clark, the company's VP of Marketing.

Qumranet offers a physical to virtual (P2V) tool for converting a customer's physical OS images to virtual machine templates, says Rami Tamir, the company's President, VP of R&D, and co-founder. The company offers a remote desktop protocol it calls SPICE, which Tamir says is suitable for use over a LAN and supports high-bandwidth uses such as bidirectional audio and video. Solid ICE also supports RDP for lower-bandwidth links, but Tamir recommends "remote presence" --moving a running guest machine from its original server to one closer to the user. Solid ICE does not have support for offline use independent of the server.

The number of users per server is limited by available memory, Tamir says. "we are typically quoting from 5 to 10 users per core," he says, but the number could go up or down depending on applications. Solid ICE "oversubscribes" the server's memory by 40 percent, so a server with 10GB of RAM could accomodate 14GB of guests. Qumranet's management interface allows for guest systems to migrate transparently from host to host to balance the load.

In the Solid ICE client interface, users can browse a selection of virtual machines and start the ones with the applications they need. Client systems may be Linux or Microsoft Windows PCs, thin clients, or, for customers who want to convert old PCs to lightweight systems, Linux machines running Qumranet's "miniOS." miniOS is just enough to get the Solid ICE session started and let the user launch his or her virtual system.

Based on the results of the early access program, Clark says he anticipates that a common use of Qumranet's technology will be to faciliate upgrades and migrations. Companies will be able to keep old OS and application installs around if needed in a transition. And the virtual machine images are stored in a compressed format that encourages users to keep several, Tamir says. "Keeping an old desktop costs you nothing -- you just keep a diff from a template," he says.

The user interface simulates the controls of a desktop PC, so a user can power off a virtual machine or leave it running. A helpdesk worker can "clone" a problem system to test a fix while the user continues to work on the original, or view or take over a user's session.

Solid ICE supports Microsoft's Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, and Windows Server 2003 as guests, along with Linux.

Stealth product, but open source fanfare

Although KVM entered the mainstream Linux kernel with version 2.6.20 in February, Qumranet has backported KVM to run on the earlier kernels on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Besides those two Linux distributions, Qumranet also supports Canonical Ltd.'s Ubuntu Linux as a server platform.

KVM requires Intel VT or AMD-V virtualization support in the hardware on the host system, but Qumranet's co-founder and VP of R&D says he doesn't see that as a problem. "Going forward all new servers are going to be VT," he says. However, IBM researchers are working on a version of KVM that will not require hardware virtualization support, he adds.

In the months before the product announcement, KVM built a fan base among kernel developers, getting into the kernel.org kernel before the older and better-known Xen.

Kernel developer and author Jonathan Corbet wrote, "The speed with which the KVM developers have been able to add relatively advanced features is impressive; equally impressive is just how simple the code which implements live migration is."

At LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco, kernel maintainer Andrew Morton also had a good word for KVM. "It looked like the guys had been working in kernel land for years," he said in a conference kickoff talk on kernel development.
Source :http://www.pcworld.com

SCO Blames Linux For Bankruptcy Filing

SCO Group CEO Darl McBride says competition from the open source Linux operating system was a major reason why the company was forced to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.

In a court filing in support of SCO's bankruptcy petition, McBride noted that SCO's sales of Unix-based products "have been declining over the past several years."

The slump, McBride said, "has been primarily attributable to significant competition from alternative operating systems, including Linux." McBride listedIBM ( IBM), Red Hat, Microsoft (MSFT), and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) as distributors of Linux or other software that is "aggressively taking market share away from Unix."

SCO claims it owns all copyrights over Unix and that Linux infringes on those copyrights. In what were widely seen as bet-the-company moves, SCO, beginning in 2003, launched a series of lawsuits against rivals and customers claiming their use of Linux was violating the copyrights. The campaign was dealt a crushing blow on Aug. 10 when federal court Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell (NOVL), and not SCO, owns the copyrights to Unix.

As a result, Kimball said that SCO must remit to Novell a portion of the fees it has collected from selling Unix licenses -- mostly to Sun and Microsoft. That could amount to as much as $25 million. The total is to be decided at a trial that's set to start today. The case is scheduled to proceed as a bench trial, meaning that Kimball -- not a jury -- will decide the outcome.

As of April 2007, the latest date for which financial numbers were available, SCO had just $7.8 million in cash or equivalents and total assets of only $20 million, SEC records show. That's not enough to cover the penalties SCO may be forced to pay Novell.

In a statement issued Friday, SCO said its board of directors "unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders and employees."

SCO has also filed a petition for reorganization in addition to the Chapter 11 filing. SCO said the filings will help ensure that it "will not have any interruption in maintaining and honoring all of its commitments to its customers" and will allow it to pay its vendors.
Source :http://www.informationweek.com

Damn Small Linux V4.0 RC3 released

The latest version, V4.0 RC3, of Damn Small Linux was released today and it is really very small indeed. Described as a 50Mb mini-desktop oriented Linux OS, DSL is actually small enough to fit and boot from a business card CD as a live Linux distribution.

Originally developed as something of an experiment in order to try and find out just how many perfectly usable desktop applications can fit inside such a small live CD, DSL has grown from a personal toy to a fully fledged community project. A community project which has seen hundreds of hours of development time resulting in an accomplished automatic remote and local application installation system, versatile backup and restore system and the ability to boot from within a host operating system. Yes, DSL can run inside Windows if the user so wishes. Perhaps most interestingly of all, it will transform into a Debian OS with a traditional hard drive install.

Using a JWM window manager, DSL loads four usable desktops with applications including a swathe of web browsers (Firefox, Dillo and Netrik), MP3, CD and MPEG players (XMMS), email (Sylpheed), word processor (TED), graphics editor (Xpaint) PDF viewer (Xpdf) file manager (emelFM), a web server, FTP client, and even a selection of games.

Sure, there are going to be some compromises with a distribution this size, but there aren't many desktop operating systems that will fit on a business card, now are there? If you need any more convincing of the innovation that DSL has brought with it, how about this list of firsts:

* First liveCD desktop offering backup/restore capability
* First Live CD which used download scripts to add additionally software to ramdisk.
* First complete Linux distribution to also deploy extendable modules which may be used either from a Live CD or on a partitioned hard drive.
* And, of course, the first desktop oriented Live CD small enough to fit on a business card CD…
Source :http://www.daniweb.com

Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card offers Plug and Play Linux support

Having grown up with Windows as my primary operating system, I’ve taken for granted how easy it is to find compatible hardware. Recently, I learned that life isn’t as user-friendly for Linux users. After migrating one of my computers to Linux, I noticed that the operating system wouldn’t detect the machine’s Microsoft PCI Wi-Fi card. After scouring the Internet, I found instructions for making wireless cards work with NDIS Wrapper and similar applications, but no references to a card with Plug and Play Linux support. It took hours of effort and several trips to local hardware retailers, but eventually I found a Linux distribution and Wi-Fi card combination that worked-SUSE 10 and a specific version of the Belkin Wireless G Desktop card.

I performed a fresh install of SUSE 10 on my machine and went off to find a compatible PCI 802.11g card. I went first to Best Buy and browsed their wireless cards. A salesperson approached me and offered their assistance. I explained that I wanted a PCI card that would work with Linux “out-of-the-box”. Unfortunately, the salesperson had no clue which card would work. After researching several cards that Best Buy had in-stock, I decided to try the Linksys 54g PCI card. I took that card home, but had no luck. I tried five different card brands from Best Buy, but none offered Plug and Play support for Linux.

Finding the Belkin F5D7000 Wireless G Desktop card

After more Internet research, I found several people also searching for a Plug and Play Linux solution, but no answers. It was during this search that I also realized I had yet tried a Belkin wireless card. I went off to Walmart and purchased a Belkin wireless G card for $29.95, see Figure A.

I took the card home, installed it and turned on the computer. To my surprise, when SUSE 10 a wireless dialog box appeared with a list of three detected SSIDs. I selected my router’s SSID, typed in my encryption code, opened Firefox and accessed the Internet. My search was over.

Since my first glorious moment of wireless connectivity, I have changed Linux distributions several times. The Belkin wireless G card worked with almost every Linux flavor, but only SUSE 10 and Ubuntu worked right out of the box.

It’s all about the Atheros chipset

The Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card isn’t the only Wi-Fi card that works with Linux. The Wireless G Desktop Card’s Linux compatibility lies within the card’s Atheros chipset. According to the company’s Web site, Atheros Communications has offered “open source Linux and FreeBSD software drivers for 802.11b/g and universal 802.11a/b/g products” since July, 2003. Mandy laptops with integrated Wi-Fi support use the Atheros chipset. This is a reason many laptops will automatically connect to the Internet after you install Linux.

Unfortunately, manufacturers, including Belkin, sometimes vary the chipset on the same model Wi-Fi card. Since discovering the Belkin card, I have visited three different Walmart stores and found three different versions. Version 5100 contains the Atheros chipset. The version number is printed on a white sticker located to the right of the barcode, see Figure B. I have tried other versions of the Belkin Wireless G Desktop, but all have failed. If your local Walmart doesn’t carry this specific version, I have also found the card at Staples.
Source :http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com

open source Silverlight design tool for Linux

Alan McGovern, the creator of MonoTorrent, has spent the past 12 weeks developing a visual design tool for XAML that runs on Mono. Although McGovern had no previous experience with either Silverlight or XAML when he started working on his XAML designer, he has successfully created an impressive working prototype.

McGovern's XAML tool—which he calls Lunar Eclipse—was designed to work with Moonlight, Novell's open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight rich-media application development framework. Novell's developers produced their Moonlight prototype during a 20 day hackathon in June, during which McGovern started working on Lunar Eclipse.

McGovern's current Lunar Eclipse prototype supports basic animation as well as creating, moving, resizing, and changing the properties of basic shapes. "The basics are there for recording animations. Not everything can be animated as of yet. The supporting infrastructure is all there. It's just currently it can only animate properties which take doubles as their value," writes McGovern in a blog entry. "You can do cool stuff like record several keyframes, then move them around to make the time longer, or shorter, or you can completely rearrange the keyframes so things happen in a different order. You can also seek along the storyboard and see the positions of the elements at different times in the animation."

Although the user interface of Lunar Eclipse is still extremely primitive, the underlying functionality is shaping up nicely. According to McGovern, the eventual goal is to make it possible for Lunar Eclipse to be integrated into MonoDevelop. There are also plans to make a XAML-based interface for Lunar Eclipse so that it can be used in a web browser.

According to lead Mono developer Miguel de Icaza, most of the components required for the open source Silverlight development stack are working, and will be part of Mono 1.2.6, which is scheduled for release in October or November.
Source :http://arstechnica.com

Sun Courts Developers

Sun Microsystems Inc. has ambitious plans for the commercial and open-source versions of its Solaris operating system, hoping to achieve for Solaris the kind of ubiquity already enjoyed by Java. To come close to reaching that goal, Sun needs to reach out more to developers and endeavor to overcome some long-held prejudices against the OS.

Sun's Java programming language, which debuted in 1995, is present in most of today's PCs, mobile devices and embedded systems. The vendor is now seeking that same kind of omnipresence for Solaris, its flavor of Unix. Sun intends to take the operating system into markets where it hasn't traditionally been a force, such as desktop and embedded systems, according to Marc Hamilton, vice president of Solaris marketing at Sun. The vendor is also keen to position OpenSolaris as a real alternative to Linux.

"There's an enormous momentum building behind Solaris," said Ian Murdock, chief operating platforms officer at Sun. He joined Sun in March after serving as the chief technology officer of the Linux Foundation. Murdock's also the creator of the Debian Linux distribution and is keen to take the lessons he's learned in the Linux community and apply them to Solaris.

Sun is preparing to release OpenSolaris binaries early next year in a distribution code-named "Project Indiana" that will be similar to Linux distributions. The work, which is getting under way in the OpenSolaris community, is aimed at creating a single CD installation of the basic OS and desktop environment, giving developers the option to install additional software from network repositories. Developers also will be able to create limited releases of the distribution targeted at attendees of a particular event.

The whole idea behind Indiana is to build more of a developer community around Solaris, Murdock said. "How can we lower the barriers to programmers and run OpenSolaris as an ideal open-source operating system not originating from Sun?" he asked. Indiana will also enable faster release cycles, with a new version appearing every six months.

With Indiana in place, Sun will adopt a two-tier development model, Murdock said, establishing a clear path from Indiana and OpenSolaris -- for developers and early adopters -- to Solaris, which will be largely used by more conservative enterprise users. The challenge will be delivering what's effectively a single Solaris platform to two very different communities, he added.

Sun has already managed various versions of Java, including mobile, standard and enterprise editions of the software. But whereas with Java, the challenge was getting developers interested in a new technology, with Solaris, Sun needs to appeal to people who may have had previous negative experiences with the OS.

Founded in 2004, online messaging security provider DigiTar begun life as an all-Linux shop, using Suse Linux, according to Jason Williams, chief technology officer and chief operating officer of the Boise, Idaho, company.

"We had a very anti-Sun bias," he said, dating back to the frustration he and a colleague experienced in college trying to use Solaris 8, which they quickly abandoned in favor of Suse. However, DigiTar ran into problems with the way Linux handled a storage subsystem in 2005. With OpenSolaris freely available, they tried out the OS and it worked well. "Solaris has resolved a lot of issues that Linux is just getting hit by," Williams said.

Over time, DigiTar has made use of new Solaris features such as DTrace and ZFS (Zettabyte File System), which have helped the company quickly pin down the locations of performance bottlenecks and better optimize the system. "Our experience with Solaris has been very evolutionary," Williams said. "We came for one thing, then other benefits emerged."

"We very much want to move to Indiana," Williams said, since it will fix two immediate issues DigiTar has with OpenSolaris: ease of use and ease of installation.

The company's keen to migrate all its software to Solaris, but compiling applications on Solaris has always been a little different from compiling on a GNU Linux distribution. Today, about 60 percent of its software runs on Gentoo Linux, versus 40 percent on OpenSolaris. Indiana will support GNU userland, the part of an application that requests system activities from the operating system kernel, making it easier to move Linux applications to Solaris. The other feature Indiana offers over previous versions of OpenSolaris is its packaging, so it can be more easily installed.

Williams is impressed by the community that's already grown up around OpenSolaris. "It's the most productive community I've ever been a part of," he said, with a posted query drawing 4 to 5 informed responses within an hour from both third parties and Sun engineers. Sun's approach to open source is "very mature and adult," Williams added, largely because Sun engineers are used to fielding customers' questions and know it's important to respond rapidly.

In order to win other converts, Williams recommends that Sun go back to school. "The key thing they need to do is get back into the colleges," he said. "That's where we formed our opinion of Sun." Making Solaris easy to use and highlighting useful tools such as DTrace could go a long way toward wooing developers, Williams added.

Sun is encouraging more use of OpenSolaris in universities, with plans to add 500 more Campus Ambassadors around the world to the several hundred that were already in academia, Hamilton said. The Ambassadors are students who receive free training and support from Sun and then establish open-source developer communities in their colleges and evangelize OpenSolaris and Java to their peers and teachers.

Williams also recommends letting Indiana "splinter" so that developers can freely create their own distributions and further spread the Solaris technology. Sun hopes that if it establishes Indiana as a reference platform for OpenSolaris, people are less likely to seek out or develop other distributions, Hamilton said.

"With Linux, what happened was there was a void and people filled it," Murdock said, referring to the large number of Linux distributions in the market. "Everything we do here is to allow for flexibility, so there is the possibility of multiple distributions."

Going after developers is only one of several strategies Sun is pursuing to raise the profile of Solaris. The vendor's also keen to increase the number of hardware platforms on which the OS is available on. Earlier this month, in a deal that would have been unthinkable a few years back, IBM Corp., one of Sun's main hardware rivals, agreed to redistribute Solaris OS and Solaris Subscriptions for some of its System x and BladeCenter servers.

From IBM's perspective, the move is in line with its pledge to offer users a range of operating systems and also will enable the vendor to make money on support calls involving Solaris running on IBM hardware. Hamilton said Sun's in discussions with about 40 original equipment manufacturers to make the OS available on their hardware. The companies include smaller hardware vendors that operate in particular geographies, but he's also interested in having IBM-like relationships with HP and Dell Inc.
Source :http://www.pcworld.com/

Hewlett-Packard Brings Linux To Select Desktops

Tatey writes "Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's largest PC manufacturers, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs aimed at the consumer market ... in Australia. For the time being it appears the HP Linux models will only be available down under, with prices starting at $AU600 (just under $500 USD). 'This PC is a low-end business PC. It comes powered by any of a variety of AMD processors. These range from the 1.60 GHz AMD Sempron 3000+ processor to the speedy 2.8 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 5600+ processor. The dx2250 can hold up to 2GB of RAM. For storage, it maxes out with a 250 GB hard drive. It comes with a variety of optical drive options, ranging from ordinary CDs to a DVD+/-RW LightScribe, Double Layer/Dual Format drive. At this time, it is not clear exactly what options HP will be offering with the RHEL-based system. Previously, HP had offered this desktop computer with a choice of Vista Business, XP, and FreeDOS. In the latter case, this was almost always replaced by users with a Linux distribution.'"


Source :http://linux.slashdot.org