myopiclunacy.com

With all the attention that Leopard (MacOs X 10.5) is getting in some circles as the preferred alternative to a Microsoft world, it seems that the Linux train, which had already arrived in other segments, is silently creeping up on consumer America. As Gizmodo points out  look at the two products ready for the Christmas season - the $200 Linux desktop at WalMart and the $3-400 Asus EEE ultra portable Linux laptop. They’re attacking first at the pocketbook and then at the experience.

Asus released their highly anticipated eee PC, a 2lb Linux-derivative laptop that runs just $400. The reason they get the plus? Early reviews have been quite positive. (We’ll give you a full rundown next week when the verdict’s in.)

Then Wal-Mart starts offering the Everex $200 Linux PC. Since 5% of the Wal-Mart computer buyers are looking for their first computer, why not try something without an Apple or Microsoft badge of approval?

Linux is already a staple in corporate America and government running some of the very websites that users interact with daily, and has made its way into appliances including some cell phones. Why? Because it’s cheap and stable, 2 things that are prerequisites.

But no longer the fussy ugly duckling, the Linux user interface has matured over the years to be just a friendly as Windows and Macs and sports a deep network of support online. The experience is becoming less and less painful, something which is more and more desired in a world with constant Internet Explorer virus/malware attacks and Windows security holes. And literally with a few keystrokes or mouse clicks, you can add a variety of new, stable, powerful, and (most importantly) free software to your machine to take the place of Office, iTunes, Windows Media Player or even Freecell. Even your mom can use it. Dell has already been selling desktops and laptops with Ubuntu Linux - breaking the Windows-only stranglehold they’ve had for years. And there’s a $300 Linux Laptop coming to Wal-Mart soon from the same guys behind the $200 PC.
Linux has already been pushed as a way to bridge the digital divide both home and abroad. Who knows - maybe someday soon YOU will have a positive Linux experience that will make you want to save your Vista and Leopard money for something else - maybe gas money?

Popularity: 9% [?]

I can’t believe I just found out about this. When I heard the term Google Apps before I figured it was just the collection of applications that accompanied Gmail - like Reader, Docs, and Calendar. But I found out that Google Apps has an entire mobile and hosting strategy around it. If you have your own domain, you can use Google Apps to host your mail -
and use Gmail to send mail as me@mydomain.com.

I have to admit that Google does do some things extremely well and I have successfully integrated some of these services into my own business. One service that Google offers that has particularly been beneficial to me and my clientèle is Google Apps.

I signed up for Google Apps when it first came out in Beta. At the time, I only had a shared hosting account and I was having a lot of problems with spam and lost emails. I had a GMail account for my personal mail and I knew how well that had worked. When I learned that I would be able to use Google Apps with my own domain, thereby harnessing the power of GMail for my own domain, I jumped at the opportunity. This just made good sense to me. Google has one of the largest infrastructures in the world and one of the largest budgets to manage it. Granted, my hosting company is no small potato, but they are hardly Google scale.

And with Gmail now adding IMAP - you can even use Outlook or Thunderbird to get to your mailbox AND all its folders. Even the most complex setups can have all their old mail migrated. I’m not sure if the newest apps by Google are included.

Google Notebook added the most requested feature: labels. Now you can label each note and see all the notes that have a certain label.

The application imports all the labels and web pages from Google Bookmarks and places them in a new notebook titled “Unfiled”. Adding a new note in this special notebook actually creates a new bookmark.

Links to the Google office suite and a bunch of other Google tools are even being loaded on that $200 PC that Wal-Mart is selling. But gOS doesn’t stand for googleOS.

This week Wal-Mart started selling a $199 PC with a Linux based operating system called gOS pre-loaded. A lot of websites mistakenly reported that the “g” stands for Gogole, because this stripped down operating system has direct links to a bunch of Google services like YouTube, Docs & Spreadsheets, and Blogger. But gOS is actually a stripped down “green” operating system based on Ubuntu.

And you don’t need to buy a $199 PC to load it. You can download gOS right now. Unfortunately, the developer’s site seems to be down at the moment, but you can find gOS on several Torrent trackers.

And if that weren’t enough - Google Apps is being pushed to cell phones as well as being loaded on it’s own Google Phone - which should be making it’s debut in the next week or so.

• The Journal’s sources say it will be T-Mobile and Sprint on board to begin with (Yesterday, it was Verizon and Sprint!)
• International carriers seem to be in on the action too: Bharti Airtel’s leaking info like a sieve over in the subcontinent.
• Om Malik says the hardware’s coming from everyone except Nokia.
• The phone will be running a “highly optimized Mobile Linux” with a strong Java flavor, again according to Om Malik.
• The Journal’s Amol Sharma says to expect HTC as the “likely bet” for the manufacturer of the first set of phones.

Google seems to be embracing a lot of open source standards and trying to do the right thing while secretly also providing a Microsoft-free world. But one only wonders when the anti-trust behavior will start.

Popularity: 9% [?]