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A lot of people view Windows as Linux’s main competition, largely because Microsoft has, by far, the majority of the market and is considered “the standard” by most people. Mark Shuttleworth and I disagree.

The Var Guy, and plenty of other people, are reporting that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, said during his keynote at OSCON, that Linux must not just match but exceed Apple’s Mac OS X, strongly implying that Apple - not Microsoft - is Linux’s main competitor. I agree. Here is why:

Read more at Linux Loop

Ahead of its official opening on Saturday, Apple offered a look inside its flagship store in Beijing on Thursday — it’s first in China.

The two-level store is in Beijing’s Sanlitun [ph:SAHN LEE TWUN] entertainment district, which is about 6 kilometers northeast of Tiananmen Square. The store, which is Apple’s 219th worldwide, is overshadowed by another flagship retail outlet that has given the complex its informal name: the “Adidas mall.” Whereas the sporting goods giant’s emporium faces Workers Stadium North Road, one of Beijing’s busiest streets, the Apple Store dominates the inner courtyard, with the storefront and a facing video screen playing the “dancing iPod” video.

Read more at LinuxWorld

Recently a blog post entitled “Why Desktop Linux is its own worst enemy has come across my feed-radar a few times. It’s yet another in the long line of “Linux ain’t ready yet” jeremiads and it doesn’t really say anything new yet it got on my nerves. Why?
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Like many such pieces, this one starts by making a statement as if it were fact while presenting no actual evidence. The “fact” used here goes along the lines of “Microsoft has shot itself in the foot with Vista and the only ones benefiting are Apple”. Even if there were statistical evidence, the premise is mistaken.

Read more at FreeSoftwareMagazine

Apple Inc.’s operating system market share has increased by nearly 32% in the last year, according to data collected by an Internet metrics company.

Last month, Apple’s Mac OS X accounted for 7.94% of the operating systems powering computers that accessed the 40,000 Web sites Net Applications monitors for its clients, the company reported yesterday. A year ago, Mac OS X’s usage share stood at 6.03%.

Read more at ComputerWorld

Apple’s OS X, which has been an official certified Unix system for some time now, is often installed onto Internet-exposed or intranet-only Web servers for serving up dynamic content. I’ve worked with such configurations for a couple of years, and with GNU/Linux alternatives for even longer. There are at least three reasons why GNU/Linux systems do the job better.

Read more at Linux.com

Apple and Microsoft are both in a situation where they are essentially forced, due to past mistakes or a lack of foresight, to spend a significant amount of time making behind-the-scenes changes. In this time, Linux could potentially get a real leg up on other OSs.

First, what happened with Microsoft and Apple? In Microsoft’s case, the main mistake was making Vista so resource intensive. When the Eee PC suddenly appeared as a major threat to Windows, Microsoft was not prepared.

Read more at Linux Loop

Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard, may only be six months old, but rumours are already abound as to the next update to Apple’s operating system. According to several sources, it’s going to be called Snow Leopard, it won’t contain any major new features, and is planned to go gold master December 2008, available a month later. The big rumour: it’s going to be available for 64bit Intel machines only.

Read more at OSNews

Apple has updated its Leopard operating system by releasing Mac OS X 10.5.3. “The Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update is recommended for Mac OS X 10.5, 10.5.1, and 10.5.2 Leopard. It includes general operating system improvements that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac.”

Read more at OSNews

Public embarrassment at a hacking contest and vulnerability disclosures for a new browser made for a discouraging week for Mac security folks.

It was one security embarrassment after another for Apple the week of March 24.

It began at the CanSecWest show, where the annual hacker contest challenged attendees to compromise a Vista system, a Ubuntu Linux system and a MacBook Air. The first day was reserved for preauthentication attacks and would have netted $20,000, but nobody took the prize.

On the second day, attackers were allowed to use default-installed client applications. Within minutes of the opening of the second day, the Mac was hijacked by security researcher Charlie Miller, who won the machine and a $10,000 prize for his efforts. Miller attacked the brand new Safari 3.1 browser through a new vulnerability, the details of which he declined to provide. The Vista and Ubuntu boxes survived the day.

Read more at eWeek

The MacBook Air went first; a tiny Fujitsu laptop running Vista was hacked on the last day of the contest; but it was Linux, running on a Sony Vaio, that remained undefeated as conference organizers ended a three-way computer hacking challenge Friday at the CanSecWest conference.

Earlier this week, contest sponsors had put three laptops up for grabs to anyone who could hack into one of the systems and run their own software. A US$20,000 cash prize sweetened the deal, but the payout was halved each day as contest rules were relaxed and it became easier to penetrate the computers.

Read more at Yahoo

The OpenOffice.org Mac Porting team has announced the third development snapshot of its Aqua version of OpenOffice for Mac OS X. The most recent version is still a “snapshot,” not yet beta, and has many improvements. However, the release still has some things that do not work correctly, and users are sternly warned that data loss could occur, and Time Machine should be used to recover any lost data. Improvements include Aqua native print dialog, fixes to the file picker, copy and paste now working in the Hyperlink dialog and improved scrolling with a scroll wheel.

Read more at LinuxInsider

Apple updated its Safari Web browser for Mac and Windows on Tuesday and offered the new version for download from its Web site. The company also began pushing the browser to Windows users — whether it was previously installed or not — via the Apple Software Update, a practice Mozilla CEO John Lilly said is just “wrong.”
“It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web,” said Lilly in a post on his blog.

The Apple Software Update application is installed on Windows PCs when iTunes and QuickTime are installed. With so many people owning an iPod and installing iTunes, there are quite a few people Apple could potentially reach using the updater.

Read more at InfoWorld

Everyone likes a good “I’m a Mac/I’m a PC” commercial, but how do you really decide between today’s operating systems?

All the major OSs run on Intel chips, so the playing field has leveled quite a bit. Running multiple operating systems on each computer you own, be it a Mac or a PC, is no big deal these days. Why choose just one?

The field may have leveled, but it’s not flat. The OSs still differ in many ways, not all of which are on the surface.

We help average users — people with enough tech savvy to install and an own OS and serve as tech support to friends and family, even if they don’t consider themselves tech gurus.

How do they choose between Mac “Leopard” (Mac OS 10.5.1 after the first automatic update), Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista (pre-Service Pack 1), and Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon (Linux)?

Read more at FOXNews.com

A Macintosh IIci — with 25 MHz of CPU power — equipped with NetBSD is currently serving up Web pages and somehow surviving.

If you want to turn your ancient Mac into a server, start here (to use Mac software and find out about other ancient Mac servers), or here (to use NetBSD).

Read more at CLICK

We focus quite a lot on Linux stuff here at FOSSwire, which is fine, because it is a very important open source system, but it’s easy to forget that there are other platforms out there, and even if the platform itself isn’t open source, there are plenty of applications you can be using which are.

In this post, I’m going to run through five top open source applications for Mac OS X.

Read more at FOSSwire

After many of the Linux expos/conventions/meetings/whatever people point out that there seem to be a lot of Macs. So the first question is why do Linux people buy Macs? While, I think few people would dispute that Apples is really good at design. When you look at a standard Dell computer and a MacBook, the MacBook looks way, way better. There are a few other small reasons a Linux geek might use a Mac, such as already owning one, but I doubt that sort of thing is really the explanation for all the Macs.

Read more at Linux Loop

Hackers usually enjoy a good challenge and next month they’ll be tearing up Linux, Windows Vista and Mac OS X in a race to see which operating system cracks first under pressure.

CanSecWest is a security conference held annually and this year it’s hosting a contest which sets competitors “head-to-head in an “ethical” hacking contest to determine which system is more secure,” according to Wired.

On its front page, CanSecWest describes itself as “the world’s most advanced conference focusing on applied digital security, is about bringing the industry luminaries together in a relaxed environment which promotes collaboration and social networking.”

Read more at Blorge.com

The open-source KDE desktop environment is making the jump across platforms with broad support for Windows and Mac OS X. The core KDE desktop programs, the KOffice suite, and the Amarok music player are actively being ported.

• Read more: KDE goes cross-platform with Windows, Mac OS X support

I haven’t really been keeping track of how the OLPC project has been evolving for the past few months, honesty. I truly admire the motivation behind what they’re doing, and I wish them all the best, so when I heard about their Give One Get One program, I was instantly intrigued.

Read more at OSWeekly

Apple is not the most open source-friendly company around. But when it comes to hardware there are few companies that can make hardware look so good that it makes you just want one, even if you can’t afford it or you don’t need it.

Read more at Tectonic