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Finnix is designed for system administrators. It can be used to mount and access hard disks and partitions, probe networks and more. It’s small enough to fit on a single mini-CD, doesn’t include a GUI, office tools or sound support. However, it does seem like it would be a useful distro to keep around, just in case. Bill Dwyer has posted a review of this distro.

Anyway, they’re in the record books now, and I’ve got a new trivia question to throw at some of my know-it-all techie friends.

Ironically, up until that time, Novell and Microsoft had been archenemies, and much of Novell’s market share loses had been due to Redmond’s aggressive marketing. At the time of the SUSE purchase, many in the FOSS community had high hopes that Novell would become an open source asset, even though they had shown a proclivity in the past for snatching defeat out of the arms of victory. All hopes were dashed, however, when they embraced their old enemy with a deal they had to know wouldn’t set well in the FOSS world.

Google may be willing to negotiate, however, as they’re suddenly remembering once talking to Sun about licensing Java for Android and recollect that Sun had offered a license for a mere $100 million. Anyway, it’s becoming pretty evident that Google’s probably going to pay something, but don’t look for it to be a deal breaker for Android. That’s another fight, that involves Apple, Microsoft and HTC…

As soon as Oracle announced they were offering OpenOffice.org to The Apache Software Foundation, there went up a collective sigh of relief from the FOSS community. Some, no doubt, would have preferred the project to be turned over to the folks at The Document Foundation, whose members had worked with the code for the better part of a decade and who’d already done a bang-up job improving OOo with their fork LibreOffice, but you don’t always get what you want, and Apache is an open source organization not lacking in credibility. At least now OpenOffice is out of the hands of Larry Ellison, who is a friend to open source the same way that a fox is a friend to a chicken.

Is it really a news story that IBM has decided to support OpenOffice.org? Considering the fact that Oracle’s move to push the project over to Apache was at Big Blue’s prodding, I’d say not. Still, at least now the players are clearly defined. In addition to lending moral support and giving Larry Ellison a shoulder to cry on, IBM is also donating the code from IBM Lotus Symphony.

Quite a few years ago, a popular Linux site began displaying ads from Microsoft on their home page. Big ones, at a prominent location above the fold. Some were fancy Flash ads, attention getters, mainly for branding purposes. Others were FUD, “independent” TCO studies bought and paid for by Redmond that “proved” it was cheaper to hand MS a wheelbarrow of money to run a Windows server than to run a free Linux server.

Does Microsoft actually hold valid patents being infringed by Android? Who knows? That would be for the courts to decide and, so far, nothing’s gone to court. OEMs are just ponying up and buying MS licenses on the strength of Microsoft threats. So much so that Redmond is evidently making more money on Android than on Windows Phone 7.

My response to this news was to go into denial. This couldn’t be, I told myself. The magazine wouldn’t let it happen. eWeek without Spencer Katt would be like Kellogg’s without high fructose corn syrup. When the next week’s issue arrived, I quickly turned to the page where I would normally expect to find Spencer’s purrings, only to find some boring article (an opinion piece, I believe) in it’s place. I felt betrayed. Spencer Katt had deserted me.

“Shark Cloud is an online cloud application platform. It’s a complete suite of office tools: word processing, spread sheets, contacts, email and forms. The user can go online and have those tools, like Google Apps, but if they ever get tired of our service they can always download the software, just like they do with WordPress or any other online open source package, load it to their server and continue going like nothing’s happened. Totally free. Totally open sourced.”

After you’ve installed plugins to configure your WordPress site for your server and protect your site from spam, it’s time to get your site up to speed. You may have guessed this will partly require more plugins. Some will be for the purpose of visibility, to help people find you. Others will enable you to offer different kinds of content. For example, a music site would probably install a plugin to work with YouTube videos; a photography site would want to make sure to have an effective way to offer slide shows. At this point, every site’s needs are unique.

Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.

Is Ballmer nuts or, more precisely, is he even more nuts that I already thought him to be, paying billions for a company worth thousands? Doesn’t Google own the patent on paying way to much for much too little? It seems I’m not the only one asking such questions.