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So what happened in four short days? The news of SolusOS and Numix collaboration was a pretty big deal. It combined two potential FOSS powerhouses under one roof. It was certainly an exciting partnership.

What can you do when you can’t use Linux at work? You can still promote free open source! The best way to promote FOSS is to use it and to tell people who wonder what you use about free open source alternatives to commercial software.

It’s becoming more and more difficult to remember that only a few short years ago, GNOME won nearly every popularity poll and it seemed as if KDE was in danger of becoming the best desktop without users. Now, hardly a days goes by when we don’t hear of yet another project abandoning the GNOME desktop environment.

Ikey came to make news with his SolusOS 1.X releases. Even as a young distro, SolusOS broke the 20th place at Distrowatch and ultimately climbed to the 14th position. Based on Debian, he wanted to change some things that were happening in other Debian-based distros. But even the most stable of foundations are made less stable by other things.

You can be certain of one thing; if you’re a penguinista I’ll have your back at the All Things Open conference. I’ll be paying attention. Plenty of good companies and organizations will be represented at the the conference, to be held next week in Raleigh, but it is an enterprise conference so there will be a few snakes slithering about.

Back before the iPhone came along, when netbooks running GNU/Linux were threatening Redmond’s monopoly, it was said the company was allowing OEMs to install XP on the economy devices for as little as seven dollars, which was practically giving the OS away in those days. That may soon seem like a king’s ransom. If the likes of Bloomberg are to be believed, now Microsoft might be offering Windows Phone to HTC for gratis.

We see the usefulness of phone, tablet and desktop sharing a common interface. This would not only make it less of a brain strain on the user when moving from one device to the other, it would also come in handy for syncing devices, etc. The trouble is, the dynamics of a small phone screen compared to a large PC or laptop screen makes an exact copy unrealistic, something Steve Ballmer would’ve realized by now if he listened to his users.

“We love Raleigh, Durham and the RTP and hope to have a presence here very soon. We’ve been looking to do something here for a while. It’s a national center for IT and open source and it’s growing rapidly. In short, we’re long on the area. Having Red Hat and other prominent companies and educational institutions located here certainly helps of course.”

A number of reasons are often cited for disliking Ubuntu. Top of the list seems to be Unity. I maintain that Unity is a really good desktop environment. I spent some time working with it and I find it incredibly intuitive but my view of Unity is in the minority. I think that people coming to Linux for the first time and choosing Ubuntu as their distribution of choice will probably not be as put off by the experience as users that were brought up on Gnome 2.

A round up of a number of events relevant to the Linux world for the past week.

Usually when we run a poll we’re not surprised by the answers. We’re certainly surprised by these results, however.

The desktop market is shrinking and they have no market share to speak of in mobile. Windows 8 hasn’t yet worked out well for them. So far, their biggest growth in smartphones and tablets seems to be in selling patent protection for Android devices from the likes of Samsung and HTC. This comes as they’re attempting to create the perception that their attitude toward open source has changed. The Microsoft FUD machine has been relatively quiet for some time and it’s been years since Mr. Ballmer publicly referred to open source as “communist” or claimed Linux to be “a cancer.”

Sometimes the manual is of little use, however. Such was the case in a recent Zen Cart migration I undertook. However, even in cases where the manual is being ignored, it should still be read first. Before going off book, it helps to understand the process behind what you are doing.

This has the look and smell of a business play all the way through, although that might not be immediately evident when reading what ad giant Google and open source Mozilla have to say. At first glance, their reasoning makes sense. Flash is just too darn ubiquitous. It’s everywhere; buried in everything. Including Flash in “click to play” would put too much of a burden on the user.

Microsoft unveiled their new and improved lineup of Surface tablets on Monday. You know, the tablets they’re hoping you’ll buy just before selling your old Nexus through their buyback program. Remember, this is an upgrade on a product line that Microsoft is hoping will turn damp and rainy Redmond into sunny Cupertino; the line that was behind a $900 million write-down just a few months back. Just in case you went to a public school in the U.S., 900 million is getting pretty darn close to a billion.

Back on June 30th we asked you, “Which of the following best describes your thoughts about the GPL?” The poll’s been active since, though for most of that time it’s been buried in the article What’s Your Take on the GPL? back in our archives. We took it down just this morning.

“Click to play” means that every time a webpage wants to take advantage of a plugin, the user will have to click to give it permission. Eventually, Google hopes to replace the old architecture with PPAPI or the Pepper Plugin API, which supposedly fixes a lot of NPAPI’s problems, if they can get traction outside of Google which doesn’t seem likely at this juncture. The folks at Mozilla have already said, “Mozilla is not interested in or working on Pepper at this time.” That sounds like a “no” to me.

The next morning there were two emails from site visitors informing me that FOSS Force was serving blank pages, one even sending a screen shot that showed our logo up top with nothing but white space below. However, our site looked fine on the company desktop and on my laptop so I figured they’d been attempting to access the site while the upgrade was in process and paid them no mind. I also noted that when I checked our AdSense account we’d only earned a couple of cents so far for the day, a fraction of a percent of what I would expect for the amount of traffic we were having, but I chalked that up to the inconsistency of online advertising.

When IT-oLogy opens the doors to the All Things Open conference in Raleigh on October 23, the focus will be on open source in the enterprise. Every hour during the two day conference there will be six lectures or workshops with at least four of them tailored especially for the business IT crowd. There’ll be tech-centric workshops on Python, databases, big data, Github, PHP and more.

Steve Ballmer may be a lame duck CEO, but Microsoft is still up to its usual tricks. We learned last Friday from the BBC that the Microsoft store website is offering a minimum of a $200 Microsoft store gift card for “gently used” iPads. Covered under the deal are iPads 2, 3, or 4.