Is Linux the de facto operating system of choice for cloud computing? The Linux Foundation believes so, according to a new report out today from the group that examines Linux’s role in cloud computing — past, present and future.

“Virtually every cloud player of any significance features Linux in either primary or supporting capacities, and this adoption is accelerating,” writes The Linux Foundation’s Amanda McPherson. “Google’s App Engine and Amazon’s competitive EC2 product both leverage the Linux kernel, as do cloud offerings from vendors such as 10gen, 3Tera, Media Temple, Mosso, and Zimory.” Once cloud computing crosses over to mainstream adoption, she says, “it will be powered by Linux.”

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

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VMware, which last year watched its stock plummet and replaced its CEO with a seasoned Microsoft executive, faces headwinds from two trends: 1) open-source virtualization offerings; and 2) free virtualization within operating systems. With that in mind, VMware today made its shrewdest possible: launching an open-source client for virtual desktops. Indeed, the VMware View Open Client may help VMware stave off competition from Microsoft, other open-source offerings, and more.

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

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Netbooks are all the rage at the moment, with Asus predicting that it will sell 5 million of its Asus Eee PC netbooks by the end of this year. However, one of the tricky aspects of netbooks is that they have much more limited hardware resources than larger, traditional notebooks. For that reason, it makes sense to put applications on your machine that are both lightweight and powerful. The good news is that many of the best choices are free. In this post, you’ll find 10 ways to pimp out your Windows or Linux netbook, without breaking the hardware resources bank.

OpenOffice Whether your netbook is Linux- or Windows-based, one of the best free downloads you can get is this suite of open-source productivity applications. OpenOffice includes lightweight but robust applications that compete with the expensive Microsoft Office alternatives: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentations), Base (database), Draw (diagram creator) and Math (editor for math formulas).

PortableApps For Windows-based netbooks, this is a great collection of pre-selected free and primarily open source applications that you can stick on a netbook — or even a USB drive — in one quick download. It includes the portable editions of ClamWin (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Gaim (instant messaging), OpenOffice (office suite), Sudoku (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird (email client), among other applications. You can cherry-pick the applications you want, or run the whole suite in under 512MB.

Google Chrome I usually favor Firefox when using a high-end computer or laptop, but on a netbook, Google’s open source Chrome browser is an extremely lightweight browser that is winning lots of speed competitions. It’s only available for Windows for the moment, but will be out in a Linux version early next year.

LXDE The “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is a fast, energy-saving Linux desktop environment maintained by an international community of developers. It has a slick interface and lots of useful features, including tabbed file browsing. Plus, it takes fewer resources than the popular KDE and GNOME Linux desktop environments.

GNOME The GNOME desktop environment is very popular with many Linux users, and is lightweight enough for netbooks. Within GNOME, you get e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia, games and more. The new version 2.24 includes the GNOME Mobile Platform for the first time, which will keep developers focused on mobile applications for GNOME on an ongoing basis.

KDE The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project is a very good choice for Linux-based netbooks. It includes slick desktop applications, including the Kontact personal information manager, Dragon Player for multimedia applications, and the Konqueror web browser.

RocketDock RocketDock is an animated application launcher that I highly recommend for owners of Windows-based netbooks. It is much faster and more flexible than the object docks on most netbooks, and it has an easy drag-and-drop interface. Check out a video of it here.

TinyResMeter TinyResMeter is a lightweight application for tracking system resources in use. Netbooks, of course, often have stripped down hardware resources, so this is a good way to get on-the-fly views of memory usage, CPU usage and much more. Keeping it on hand will help you stay under the system resource wire.

VLC Media Player Depending what hardware resources you have on your netbook and the media player you currently use, you may occasionally run into problems running video and audio content. VLC Media Player is a lightweight, free and open source media player that will work on either a Windows or Linux netbook. It supports nearly every popular file format and is specifically designed for portability.

Online Hosted Apps. Of course, one of the fundamental concepts behind netbooks is that you can use them with applications that are hosted online. If you don’t already use these, there are excellent, free choices from Zoho and Google Apps. Ulteo gives you 1GB of free online storage, and access to all of the OpenOffice productivity apps online.

Finally, don’t forget that a USB thumb drive can be an excellent adjunct to your netbook. You can get lots of capacity for very little money, and one simple download such as the PortableApps download above can put countless free applications in your pocket for use on your netbook whenever you want.

Image courtesy Asus

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

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Tags: asus eee pc, cloud clients, netbooks

Last week, OStatic noted the rumor, first reported by VentureBeat, that Microsoft intended to buy Silicon Valley semantic search engine Powerset for $100 million. Lo and behold, Microsoft and Powerset are confirming today that an acquisition agreement has been signed. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but the rumored $100 million figure was in line with valuations put on Powerset based on its early financing.

Powerset’s search technology uses the open-source, cluster-based technology Hadoop, which provides fast answers to queries by using the resources of many computers. Hadoop, a project from the Apache Software Foundation, is also behind Yahoo’s search.

Natural language search got a bad rap early on in the rise of the web as players such as AskJeeves stumbled, but clustered query technology like Hadoop’s may represent a game-changer. Microsoft, of course, has been desperately trying to catch up in search, where it is a distant third to Google and Yahoo. It won’t be surprising to see large portions of Microsoft’s LiveSearch start to depend on Powerset, and in so doing, depend on open-source upstart Hadoop.

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Tags: hadoop, Microsoft, Powerset

It may be a little too early for a full laundry list of technology predictions for 2008, but one forecast I’m very confident in is that multiple types of wireless technologies will transform how people use their various devices next year. By the end of 2008, we are going to see countless devices with embedded Wireless USB technology, a much faster upgrade to Bluetooth, and likely the final ratification of the next-generation 802.11n Wi-Fi standard.

Wireless USB hubs, adapters, and laptops have already appeared, of course. You can easily set up a hub-and-adapter solution for about $200, but widespread adoption of this technology will come when it’s embedded into computers, digital cameras, camcorders, MP3 players, printers, external hard drives and numerous other types of hardware.

Certified Wireless USB chipsets, such as Alereon’s, arrived only last summer, and a large wave of devices embedded with the technology is coming in the first quarter of 2008. In fact, if you’re in the market for a new digital camera or camcorder, you might want to postpone your purchase for a few months. Remember that Bluetooth wasn’t widely used until it became embedded in arrays of products and transparent to technology users. Lots of people who do things like use hands-free systems in cars don’t even realize they’re using Bluetooth.

Many Mac users are already using draft 802.11n Wi-Fi technology simply because they get it embedded into their notebooks; it’s also embedded in Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless router, the best-selling draft 802.11n router so far. Likewise, popular sources for rigorous testing of draft 802.11n routers and access points, such as PC Magazine, have given the nod to products for PC users.

Nevertheless, it’s worth keeping in mind that the vast majority of businesses won’t move to a new Wi-Fi standard until it is ratified, and 802.11n is slated for ratification next year. Likewise, many device makers won’t embed 802.11n into their products until the standard is ratified. Even on the consumer side, 802.11n looks poised for much greater success when people can do things like send multiple HDTV streams around their homes without worrying about any setup issues. So 2008 promises to a big year for Wi-Fi, too.

Finally, the Bluetooth SIG announced in 2006 that it would embrace Ultra Wideband technology (UWB) for delivering High Speed Bluetooth, bringing significant speed improvements, but the effort has been stalled by the many false starts and standards debates that have gone on in the UWB space. Just recently, the Bluetooth SIG said it would shift gears and turn to Wi-Fi technology as a stopgap, moving full steam ahead with High Speed Bluetooth (it has not shelved plans for a merger with UWB technology). Look for much faster Bluetooth-enabled devices in 2008 — one of three arenas in which next-generation wireless technologies will shake things up next year.

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

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ASUS Taiwan recently confirmed plans to deliver its eagerly awaited Eee PCs to the U.S. in November, and even though the company is targeting the devices squarely at the education market, they may end up challenging the pricing model for all portable computers.

When rumors began swirling in the blogosphere a few months back about the Eee PCs, they were equated with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) systems, and were expected to sell for under $200. And much as the prices of the OLPC systems have risen to just under $200 from a previous target of $100, ASUS has said the Eee PCs will come in three different models, ranging from $299 to $399.

So ASUS didn’t hit what was purportedly its lowball price target, but still, a portable computer for under $300? In my book, that qualifies as an impulse buy. Compare that price to some of the other new miniature PCs, which Web Worker Daily rounded up recently. The much ballyhooed new Nokia n810 Internet Tablet, for example, is $479, while the OQO Model 02 starts at $1,299. Of course, those have features that the Eee PCs are unlikely to have.

Ahead of the PC’s launch, ASUS provided the following detail:

“The Eee PC is a 7-inch gadget designed for first-time mobile Internet gadget users including young students, children, housewives, the elderly, individual stock investors, and anyone who enjoys mobility as a part of their web surfing experience.”

Open-source fans will be pleased to hear that the Eee PCs will have Open Office, so users will be able to produce documents, spreadsheets and presentations compatible with other productivity applications. Photos of the systems confirm that they have a GUI OS, and they are described as ideal for movies, music, videogames and pictures. Videoconferencing, VoIP calls, and instant messaging will also apparently be doable.

Although the exact chips being used haven’t been confirmed, the ASUS systems have Intel (INTC) processors, as well as 7-inch LCD displays, and Ethernet and 802.11g Wi-Fi networking options. Local storage will be Flash-based and will top out at 8GB.

These may sound like kiddie PCs at this point, but miniature, inexpensive portable computers are a hot category right now, and it’s tough to buy anything for under $300 that will give you access to the most popular types of applications. Might the Eee PCs be holiday hits, or make it into the hands of kids who can’t afford computers? Those are possibilities, but one of the most interesting things to watch as these systems arrive will be the effect they have on pricing for other portable computers. At under $300, the low-end Eee PCs will be much cheaper than other Windows-based miniature computers.

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10 Things to Be Thankful For in Greentech Earth2Tech – by Josie Garthwaite "; Europe Struggles With Three Strikes, Fox Exec Wants It Anyway NewTeeVee – by Janko Roettgers "; Desert Bus For Hope Rides Again for the Third Year NewTeeVee – by Liz Shannon Miller "; Smartbook No More — What Should We Call Them? jkOnTheRun – by James Kendrick ";

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