Last year, when my youngest son was 5 ½, he was keeping me company in my home office and found my Linux box (this was before The Big Switch, and my main laptop was still in Windows full-time). The boys each have a Windows machine in their room, and he can start a game or a browser on his own, though he still needs help on the urls (“Daddy, can you get me on power rangers dot com?”).

Canonical's leader Mark Shuttleworth has recently chimed in on an important aspect of desktop computing when it comes to Linux. Going over the role that Linux plays on the desktop and where its future lies, Shuttleworth specifically commented on a question issued about Wine – which as many of you may know, is the most popular way of running Windows-based programs on Linux.

They asked the question that all tech support are bound to ask "What operating system are you running?" Before I could say anything my landlord chimed in with "I think he uses Linux or something like that."

The Jaunty Jackalope release celebration continues. App Runner adds items to the Gnome context menu to launch executables or scripts directly from the GUI—even letting you easily run as root.

This is a rant. If you are easily offended then don't read this. I repeat. Don't read this. I am going to be ranting about how fan boyz and girlz go on and on and on about how easy it is to install programs in windows and how hard it is to install programs in Linux.

There are several myths floating around the wicked world web and I intend to address one of those today. That is installation of programs under Linux. It seems to be a common misconception that installing programs under Linux is hard or difficult and that windows is easier. I will now get up on my soapbox and proclaim to the world that it is simply not true!!!

By rights, copyright really shouldn’t apply to binary executables, because they are purely “functional” (not “expressive”) works. The decision to extend copyright to binaries was an economically-motivated anomaly, and that choice has some counter-intuitive and detrimental side-effects.

Many of us have been saying for a long time that Microsoft's Windows product would be better if the company open sourced it. But today marks the first day that the Wall Street Journal has chimed in to second the motion:

In an already tough IT environment, and with Windows 7 garnering buzz, Microsoft(MSFT Quote) may have to sleep with one eye open.One bright spot in an otherwise dampened earnings report showed that Novell's(NOVL Quote) revenue related to its Linux open-source platform -- a chief rival to Windows -- was up 25.5% to $36.6 million from the same quarter a year ago.