FOSSwire

The Inquirer is reporting that in the UK, 2.8% of PCs are now preinstalled with Linux. That figure has multiplied more than 28 times since January 2007.

The number of machines shipped with Linux preloaded on them has multiplied a whopping 28 times since Microsoft launched its Vista operating system in January 2007.

Sounds impressive, but Linux was starting from a rather small base in traditional sales channels: of all PCs sold in the UK last January through indirect channels, a feeble 0.1 per cent had Linux preloaded, according to numbers given to us by market research firm Context.

The article hints quite strongly towards public dissatisfaction at Windows Vista being a factor. Personally I doubt that Vista has much to do with this, as I think it more likely those consumers would 'downgrade' to XP.

Personally, I am inclined to believe that much of this rise can be attributed to machines like Asus' Eee PC, i.e. cut-down compact laptops running customised Linux distros.

While some larger OEM vendors are now shipping Linux on selected desktop machines (including big names like Dell), I would imagine most of this statistic would be on novel computing platforms, as opposed to the humble desktop.

So how far can desktop Linux go? Is it possible to get relatively widespread desktop usage?

The difficulty is convincing an average user to make a conscious choice away from Windows, to something that have no familiarity with. Unless you can demonstrate extremely attractive benefits of an alternative, most people won't bother to investigate. Hence, no demand and no supply.

[via Slashdot]

Eee PC image licensed under CC BY 3.0, source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:ASUS_Eee_White_Alt-small.png

We're human. We need time off. Instead of showing you how to actually do something useful today, I'm going to show you some great distractions.

They're coming!

This one is simple. Press Alt+F2 to bring up the Run Application dialog. Without thinking too hard, type in gegls from outer space and hit Enter. The controls are simple: Space to shoot, the arrow keys to move.

Need a companion?

There's always the Fish applet that can be added to the panel, but why confine it to a small 20 pixel space? Right-click a blank area on the panel and select About Panels. Now, press the F key three times. That's "fff". Wanda the Fish will swim onto your screen and watch what you are doing. Try clicking on her now!

Protip: To kill Wanda (how could you?!) you'll need to sign out and back in again, or alternatively kill the panel, but that may have weird side-effects. An alternate way to show Wanda again is to hit Alt+F2 and type free the fish.

Everyone's secret ambition

At the top of the random list, it's Zenity. Open your friend the Alt+F2 dialog again, and type:
zenity --about
Now, type in the word zen into the About dialog for a game of dress-up! Yay!

Mom, I'm out of money!

This one is my personal favorite, and is a great, friendly prank to pull on a coworker or relative. At the GDM login screen, type Require Quarter (with capitals) into the Username field and press Enter. If done correctly, there will still be a Username field, but it will be blank. Now wait for your unsuspecting victim to log in and... I'll let you try this one out for yourself.

Back in May 2007, I took a look at Kompare, a graphical utility for KDE which allows you to compare two files side-by-side, a bit like a graphical version of the diff tool.

A similar application for GNOME is Meld.

As you can see if you compare it with Kompare, the interface is quite similar. Any additions made to the original are highlighted in a green block. Deletions and differences between the two files are by default done with a blue highlight and red text colour.

Personally I think I prefer Kompare in terms of how the colour scheme works, as I think it makes it more clear, but nevertheless, Meld is a worthy GNOME counterpart for the application.

True to GNOME style and in contrast to the KDE app, the application is kept nice and simple. The Preferences window does allow you however to configure fonts, the displaying of changes, filters, encoding and support for pulling files from CVS.

All in all, Meld is a nice simple app that does its job well. If you're not too much a fan of diff's command line output and the format that it is in, and you want to see the differences between two files in a more graphical way, Meld works.