(http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS4537608418.html)
===== Linux desktop revolution Aug. 07, 2007 Opinion -- Dell and Ubuntu fired the first shots. Together, they delivered the first mainstream consumer Linux desktops and laptops. Then, on Aug. 6, Novell and Lenovo blew open the business laptop market with the first regular listing of a Linux-powered business desktop, the T-series ThinkPads with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. Then, just to underline the point that we're seeing a Linux desktop revolution, Dell announced that it too would be offering SLED on business systems. In Dell's case, the company will start by offering SLED in China. [...] I also saw Dell Chief Technology Officer Kevin Kettler demonstrate in his keynote speech the power of desktop Linux and virtualization. On one high-powered Dell laptop, he used SLED 10 Service Pack 1 as his base operating system and proceeded to show how he was able to use Xen to run -- all at the same time, mind you -- Vista, Windows XP SP2, a Windows client instance using Terminal Server, Ubuntu 7.04 and at least one other SLED instance. His point: Worried about keeping your legacy applications running if you move to Linux? Big deal, run an instance of XP on top of Linux and run your older application in it. No fuss. No muss. Do you absolutely need a Vista application? Fine, run it in a Vista virtual machine. Worried about people bringing in malware from browsing the Web? Stick the browser in a Xen-based VM of its own and, if something goes horribly wrong, kill off the instance, leaving all the other programs and operating systems running along as usual, and restart it. That's it, and that's the end of a commonplace security problem. Oh, and not sure that Linux application will work the way you want? Again, no problem: Start it in an Ubuntu or SLED VM, while keeping your day-to-day programs running in XP running on top of SLED. Yes, Windows has virtualization too. But, while this is cutting-edge stuff for any desktop system, Linux and Xen let you do it without paying Microsoft an arm and a leg. Having used both Microsoft and Linux virtualization programs, I would say that virtualization also runs a lot better with Linux as its foundation than it does with Windows. [...] ===== -- Soh Kam Yung my Google Reader Shared links: (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/16851815156817689753) my delicious links: (http://del.icio.us/SohKamYung) my simpy links: (http://www.simpy.com/user/kysoh/links) _______________________________________________ Slugnet mailing list [email protected] http://www.lugs.org.sg/mailman/listinfo/slugnet
