Weekly news wrap-up: Linux offers new desktop options

It was a Linux desktop kind of news week. Our own Robin “Roblimo” Miller reviewed the Internet Computer from OEone, which he says is so easy it makes using an iMac look tough. And among the predictions for 2002, PC Magazine suggested Linux would “emerge as a true desktop operating system.” Perhaps the editors there got a sneak peak at the OEone machine?

Or perhaps they got a look at Lindows, the Linux-based operating system that’s finally supposed to run Windows programs easily. While SiliconValley.com suggested Lindows could worry Microsoft, Lindows CEO Michael Robertson released a statement explaining why the OS hasn’t been released by now, as promised. Robertson also recently wrote a chairman-to-chairman note to Microsoft’s Bill Gates, suggesting some resolution to a trademark lawsuit being pursued by Microsoft.

A few words about Word

Also somewhat desktop related was Free Software Foundation leader Richard Stallman’s suggestions of ways to get people to stop emailing you documents in Word doc format. Stallman’s We can put an end to Word attachments at NewsForge caused quite the debate; check out the more than 250 comments on the story.

No, you can’t give away software to schools

Well, at least Microsoft can’t. A federal judge tossed out that proposed settlement of Microsoft antitrust case, saying it would give a large benefit to the software giant. Well, no kidding.

In related news, the Schoolforge Open Source schools coalition officially launched this week. The coalition of more than 40 groups interested in Open Source education efforts seeks to give schools an alternative to Microsoft products.

The strange SuSE trademark issue

This was an odd court case that lasted all of about four days. As far as we can tell, early in the week, a German judge stopped shipments of SuSE, the popular Linux distribution, because of a trademark violation alleged by Crayon Vertriebs for a defunct KDE app called Krayon that was still listed in SuSE’s startup menu. Within a couple of days, SuSE and the company reached an out-of-court settlement, which The Register characterized as SuSE buying off a trademark “extortionist.”

Linux trojan? Community yawns

This week brought several reports of a “smarter” version of the “smarter” variant of the Remote Shell Trojan that did minor damage to Linux systems last September, but most security experts dismissed the risk, saying the trojan required the unlikely event that a Linux user to ran an infected binary.

Other miscellaneous stuff