06.14.08

Do-No-Evil Saturday – Part III: Eyes on Three ‘Tainted’ GNU/Linux Distributions (SUSE’s Siblings)

Posted in Asia, GNU/Linux, GPL, Linspire, Microsoft, Novell, Scalix, Turbolinux, Ubuntu, Xandros at 5:42 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Xandros from the east coast, Linspire from the west coast and Turbolinux from the far east, all of which sold out to the Beast

Xandros

The media has begun focusing a little less on the ASUS sub-notebooks as more and more Eee wannabes emerge and require reviewing.

In the past week, the appearance of Xandros in the press has actually been due to Scalix, which it had acquired last year.

Here is a new press release about Scalix.

Scalix, the award-winning Linux email, calendaring and messaging company, today announced the implementation of the first stage of a new, flexible, workgroup collaboration technology with a new ‘Proxy Folder’ feature in the latest 11.4 Scalix release.

Here is an extensive little chapter about Scalix administration.

This article deals with the Scalix Administration Console (SAC). This web interface is the central point of administration for the Scalix server. User, group, and resource management are done here as well as controlling services and settings. In this article by Markus Feilner, we will take a short tour through the interface, add a first user, and have a closer look at the configuration options available for him/her. Towards the end, we will test the account by logging into the web client, and sending (and receiving) emails.

We wrote about IIRA twice before [1, 2] and here is it boasting another Xandros+Scalix deployment.

The research organisation Authbridge Research Services is trying to migrate all its process to open source, IIRA Technologies pioneer in Open Source and Linux provide them all its support to migrate its mail server to Scalix and server on Xandros. Scalix is the award winning MS Exchange alternative e-mail and group calendering solution.

IIRA, if you read this, you are advised to move over to a Free GNU/Linux distribution that won’t be run over by the provisions of GPLv3 and be also forced to pay unspecified tax to Microsoft. India has no software patents.

Linspire

Not much from Linspire in weeks. Not even a press release. Nothing about CNR. It just happens to be mentioned here very briefly, indicating that some people still use or choose Linspire.

It doesn’t take much digging to see you are a fan of Linux. I run Linux, I basically got fed up continually reloading Windows, I saw a press release for Linspire, and have been running it for over 6 months. What is your story?

My story is that my laptop hard drive died, but the backup disks were in Chicago. I could either use illegal Windows or legal Linux. Out of curiosity, I tried Linux, and it works fine, so I kept it.

Linspire was also mentioned in a Thursday’s Linux Magazine article about Ubuntu derivatives.

Turbolinux

Turbolinux 12 has just reached beta.

This is the first time a Turbolinux release comes in the form of an installable live CD, with the major components being Linux kernel 2.6.24.4 (co-developed with Mandriva at Mambo Labs), KDE 3.5.9 as the default desktop, X.Org 1.4.0.90, glibc 2.7 and Tomoyo Linux as the distribution’s security framework.

Other than security advisories, there has been virtually nothing in the English-speaking press about Turbolinux. █

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