ROSALabs, Mandriva’s partner on their last desktop, has been working on their own Linux distribution and have recently announced their latest release. If you liked Mandriva 2011, then you’ll probably like ROSA Marathon 2012. In fact, to the casual observer, it looks like ROSA 2012 is Mandriva 2011.

While trying to find differences in Mandriva 2011, ROSA 2011, and ROSA 2012, one finds very little. Firefox, kdelibs, and qt are among the few updated software versions. The release announcement states, "ROSA Marathon 2012 operating system is the first product of ROSA company created using our own software development and build environment – ROSA ABF – that gives us complete control of package base and development tools, guarantying technological independence and high quality of the distribution." So, it sounds as though ROSA’s experience mirrors Magiea’s. After a fork, one needs to concentrate on their infrastructure, so users should see more divergence in the future.

In fact, the release announcement continues in saying, "With the release of ROSA Marathon 2012, the main focus of ROSA company will switch to preparation of a new operating system – ROSA Desktop 2012, which is planned to be released in the end of the year. Compared to Marathon, the Desktop version will primarily target desktop users, looking for leading-edge features, wide range of system customization possibilities and large variety of applications. Developers will concentrate efforts on system acceleration, improvement and finalization of boot loader and installer, update of system components, and surely on adding the freshest versions of different applications, including large variety of games." So, it sounds to me like folks should just wait for that release.

Some of the features ROSA is touting includes their RocketBar, or panel to most people. It’s been simplified because humans become so confused with too many buttons on the panel. SimpleWelcome is a "single launch point for applications" that saves users the trouble of hunting through a menu for certain application launchers. StackFolder "allows [users] to organize fast access to frequently used folders and files."

Technical specifications are pretty much the same as Mandriva’s or any another modern full-sized, full-featured distribution. They specifically state:

- a PC with CPU equivalent to Intel Pentium III 1 GHz (Pentium 4 or higher is recommended);
– 640 MB RAM (768 MB and more is recommended);
– VGA video adapter and display supporting 1024×768 resolution, 24-bit color depth;
– DVD drive or SSD of at least 4 GB in size for installation;
– minimum 20 GB of hard drive free space;
– keyboard and mouse.

Unfortunately, the download link on the Website leads to the wrong directory, but the mirrors listed in the release announcement are correct. You’ll find two images for the two main architectures, one is comparable to Mandriva Free in that it only contains Open Source software. The other contains codecs and other proprietary code.

In recent years, content management systems (CMS) have become very powerful tools for building, deploying and managing web sites, blogs and more. And, along with that trend, open course CMS platforms have absolutely flourished. You’re probably familiar with some of the big names in this arena, including As we noted in this post, selecting a CMS to build around can be a complicated process, since the publishing tools provided are hardly the only issue. What many people don’t realize, though, is that you can try out the major CMS platforms at OpenSource CMS, a great site for gaining experience for free.

"OpenSourceCMS.com is a central resource for all things Open Source CMS and gives you the opportunity to ‘try out’ most of the best Open Source CMS tools in the world without marketing fluff and sales people," notes the site. You can find a huge array of open source CMS demos and portals to sample here. 

There are many other demos, news feeds, and discussion forums related to free, open-source CMS platforms at OpenSourceCMS. Especially if you’re paying or considering paying for a proprietary solution, take some of the demos for a spin.

Over time, OpenSource CMS has branched out from simply offering demos of the well-known content management systems to offering demos of ecommerce-focused platforms. For example, you can demo Magento, one of the most popular open source ecommerce environments. You can also discuss these ecommerce platforms with people who have already built online stores around them.

Needles to say, there are also many proprietary CMS platforms, and some CMS platforms come in open source and paid versions. It may be worth evaluating the proprietary platforms, but lots of users want the customization flexibility that the open source CMS platforms provide. For example, here at OStatic, we like the modular aspects of Drupal, and have had success incorporating things like outside search features into our Drupal-based deployment.

In any case, OpenSource CMS lets you put on your site administrator gloves before you’ve committed to a full deployment around any given platform. Take it for a spin.

Today marks the tenth anniversary of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and many people who have followed the rise of the RHEL platform may be surprised that it is so young. Released while the burning embers of the dot-com boom were still smoldering, it–along with Red Hat’s comprehensive support for an open source platform–appealed to many businesses who wanted a low-cost way to facilitate useful workplace applications without massive IT headaches. And, as Red Hat itself notes, RHEL has also found a home in government installations.

According to a tenth anniversary statement from Red Hat:

"In 2003, the U.S. Army commissioned a study on ‘The Business Case for Open Source Software’ and the then DOD CIO John Stenbit released the first DOD-wide guidance on open source software, which implicitly permitted its acquisition, development, and use. Nine months later, in July of 2004, the Office of Management and Budget issued a similar memo that covered the government as a whole."

"At the same time, Red Hat released the first version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. The Army deployed Red Hat’s operating system in its Blue Force Tracker system, which lived in jeeps and tanks on the battlefield. Major General Nicholas Justice, the man responsible for Blue Force Tracker, said later: “When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source.”

The Register also has an interesting summary of RHEL’s earliest days attempting to gain traction with businesses:

"RHEL emerged from the craze for Linux company IPOs that went hand-in-hand with the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Red Hat went public in August 1999 and Linux was on fire with Red Hat, as the first big Linux distro offering commercial support, the hottest. Red Hat had lined up partnerships with Compaq, IBM, Oracle, Computer Associates, and others in the systems racket after Linux was enthusiastically embraced years earlier by academics and the supercomputing labs."

To this day, a big part of Red Hat’s strategy remains renewing support subscriptions from its most loyal users, and banking on positive word of mouth generated by these loyal users. The company’s model of providing top-notch support for open source software is being copied by many commercial open source companies.

At this point, Red Hat is the only public, U.S company focused exclusively on open source, now that Sun Microsystems and Novell are no longer independent entities. Both Novell and Sun had lots of capital expenditures and operating expenses over time, and lots of fat of other kinds built into their business models. Red Hat’s lesson is that a company can run lean simply supporting open source software and still fare well over the long run.

While waiting for the Mandriva management to decide the future direction of the distribution, the community is taking matters into their own hands and beginning the planning stages for the next release, assumed to be Mandriva Linux 2012.

In a posting on the Mandriva wiki, development community members stated that even though there is no official roadmap as of yet, "there is a Mandriva community effort around a new Mandriva release, in order to keep people stimulated to contribute." The community draft is not hosted or sponsored by Mandriva, so any plans are tentative on Mandriva’s official position to come.

In the Development Community Draft, a few details are emerging. The first was the assumption that the next release will be dubbed Mandriva Linux 2012, "scheduled to be released in 2012."

Per Øyvind Karlsen will be acting as project leader with Bernhard Rosenkränzer & Matthew Dawkins serving as release managers. They figure the desktop edition will be released in "i586, x32, & x86_64 DVDs live and installable images." A technology preview is planned before the end of the month with an alpha to arrive in June. Beyond that is to come.

The draft points to a spec proposal and an idea list as possible features. Some of the spec proposals include things like Switch to eglibc, Switch to gcc 4.7.x, Adopt prelink by default, and Revive Aurora bootloader. The list of features will firm up in the weeks to come.

No mention was made on whether Mandriva will be staying with the ROSA desktop other than a reference to the "Mandriva Desktop," which almost sounds like Mandriva 2012 will be using ROSA or a ROSA-like desktop. Some were hoping to see a more default KDE return.

Of course, nothing is written in stone as of yet.

Fresh on the heels of releasing Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Canonical has delivered an updated version of its Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix. As found in previous versions, this new update features applications likely to be appreciated by business users, and doesn’t include various games and other entertainment-focused options. The update is based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and here’s more on what you’ll find in it.

Canonical, of course, has made much noise recently about how it wants more enterprises and businesses of all sizes to adopt Ubuntu. The 12.04 release expanded long-term support and added cloud computing options for just that reason. The new Business Desktop Remix is squarely focused on business users, as noted on the Canonical blog:

"Designed for corporate and government organisations evaluating Ubuntu for their desktop infrastructure, the Business Desktop Remix is a simple base image that can be deployed into your corporate environment or used as a starting point for further customisation."

The post also clarifies some of the choices regarding bundled applications:

"To save time in deployment, we’ve removed games, social networking programs, file sharing apps and technical tools. In their place, you’ll find software more appropriate for a corporate environment, including VMware View, the Adobe Flash Plugin and the OpenJDK 6 Java runtime environment. Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix provides full language support in both 32 and 64-bit builds, just like the standard Ubuntu. Users also benefit from the great new productivity features introduced in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, including built-in support for Microsoft Windows RDP 7.1 and the Microsoft Visio diagram importer in LibreOffice Draw."

Can a combination of long-term support, and a set of applications optimized for business users help Ubuntu become more entrenched in businesses? Many businesses are standardized on Microsoft’s platforms, and in some cases extricating these businesses from those platforms is a tall order. However, just as Red Hat has found success aggressively supporting open source software, Canonical can definitely increase Ubuntu’s footprint in businesses.

The Business Desktop Remix requires registration, and you can register and download here.