Firefox

Can Ubuntu Linux become a Windows killer?

There have been a number of articles written recently talking about Windows 7 being a Linux killer.

• Windows 7 as “Linux killer”? How times have changed!
• Windows 7: Microsoft’s Linux killer?
• Windows 7 The Linux killer and Ubuntu Going Mainstream

Linux was thought to be a player in the netbook business, but a Spring 2009 NPD Group study shows that Windows has a 90% share of the netbook OS market. It seems silly to be talking about any Windows desktop operating system as a Linux killer. There are so few Linux client operating systems deployed compared to Windows that this discussion is off target, especially because it appears that Windows 7 is an improvement over Windows Vista.

Today, about 25 or 26 paid Windows client operating systems are shipped for each paid Linux client shipped, according to IDC. Paid Windows client operating systems have more than 90% market share while Mac and Linux make up most of the remaining share. The market share lead that Windows has over Linux is not expected to change much for the foreseeable future.

There are about 30 times as many paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are paid Linux client operating systems deployed. And there are about 13 times as many non-paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are non-paid Linux clients.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 with new features and more security

Red Hat released version 5.3 of its Enterprise Linux distribution on Tuesday, about eight months after version 5.2. We gave an overview of the new features of the beta version of RHEL 5.3 in November. Now, it’s here. The new version offers enhanced virtualization scalability, OpenJDK functionality and Intel Nehalem processor support.

The company released a risk report comparing RHEL 5.2 to RHEL 5.3. Briefly, the report explains that 61 advisories were released to address the 181 vulnerabilities found in version 5.2. The seven critical advisories were for Firefox, Samba, and OpenSSH. The new version has all the updated security features, and the risk report shows that Red Hat saw fewer vulnerabilities with 5.2 than it did in 5.1 and 5.0.

The author of the risk report, Mark Cox, explains that “for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 since release and to date, every critical vulnerability has had an update to address it available from the Red Hat Network either the same day or the next calendar day after the issue was public.”

Let us know how your update goes — were there lags or glitches? What do you think about the new functionalities — are they useful in your enterprise? Is there more you want to see?