Welcome Back, Old Fruit

The Apricot brand for computers goes back a long way - I was there, unfortunately. Remarkably, it consistently managed to misread the market at just about every turn - from choosing a daft name that was so obviously modelled on Apple's, to the decision to offer only MS-DOS rather than PC-DOS with its PC line ("good enough" we were told at the time), to the hopelessly premature voice-controlled portable system (I'll never forget the sight of Apricot managers shouting, red-faced, into the weird microphone in a desperate attempt to get it to recognise something - anything). And don't even ask about the dancing girls at the launches of their business machines....

Well, Apricot is back with a bang:

Apricot has pulled the plug on its Linux-based netbook, choosing instead to offer the pint-sized Picobook Pro only with Windows XP.

...


"Apricot will not be selling with Linux variants," a company missive revealed, which suggests it's not merely dropping SuSE for Ubuntu or another netbook-friendly distro.

"Apricot has made this decision to ensure customers have a smooth installation of their operating system," the company told Register Hardware.

"The Linux version proved too complicated with initial testers, who would opt to purchase and install XP any way.

"Apricot believes that this will be a more attractive product offering for their target customers, because as soon as it is switched on, it is ready for use."

Strange, then, that Asus has managed to make GNU/Linux ultraportables that are not only "ready for use" as soon as you switch them on, but extremely easy to use, too; and strange that Asus is so successful with these models. Just a coincidence, presumably.

Open BIOSes

BIOS: Basic Input/Output System. We rarely give it a thought as we boot up a machine. But it turns out that there's a lot of clutter in your common or garden BIOS that GNU/Linux in particular could do with out. As this excellent article explains:

On many systems, a large portion of boot time goes into providing legacy support for MS-DOS. Various projects, including LinuxBIOS and Open Firmware, are trying to replace the proprietary BIOS systems with streamlined pieces of code able to do only what is necessary to get a Linux kernel loaded and running.

Of course: if you've got an open operating system, it makes sense to use an open BIOS. I don't think I'll hold my breath waiting for PC manufacturers to offer that particular option, though. (Via OSNews.)

Wine is Not the Only Fruit

Many people have heared about Wine - which describes itself as follows:

Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X and Unix.

Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available.

Less well-known, though is FreeDOS, which does something similar for MS-DOS. This project has been going for ages (there's a good history here), and now it seems almost done. Quite whether the world needs an MS-DOS clone is another matter, but it's good to see it reaching fruition.

Word (Im)Perfect

Remember when WordPerfect was king of the castle? No, not many people do. But once upon a time, WordPerfect occupied the same position that Microsoft Word does today.

If nothing else, that should teach companies that nothing is permanent (and hence that there is hope even for the underdog), and that they should always listen to their customers (which WordPerfect signally failed to do by not coming out with a Microsoft Windows version alongside the one for MS-DOS).

Unfortunately, Corel, the current owners of WordPerfect, don't seem to have got either message. The latest version of its office suite, WordPerfect Office X3 meekly goes along with Microsoft's dominance of the office sector, and does not support the new OpenDocument format which is fast building into the first serious rival to Office formats since, well, WordPerfect.

This is a pity, both for WordPerfect and for OpenDocument. If Corel wants to be anything other than a me-too product, it needs to support OpenDocument. Its failure in this regard is particularly odd since it sits on the technical committee that drew up OpenDocument in the first place. Somehow, I don't think WordPerfect is going to be king of the castle again anytime in the near future.

One Door Closes, Another Door Opens

Tomorrow is the end of an era - though you might be forgiven if you failed to notice. Back in July, IBM announced that it was ending support for its OS/2 operating system.

Now, for younger readers, this may not mean much: after all, few today use OS/2. But once upon a time, OS/2 was the Great White Hope - not just for IBM, but apparently for Microsoft too. Both positioned it as the "serious" version of Windows, which was merely a kind of mickey-mouse entry-level system. Of course, it didn't quite work out that way.

What's amazing is not so much that Microsoft managed to outwit IBM (again - after doing it for the first time with MS-DOS), but that IBM stuck with its poor old OS/2 for so long. What's also interesting - and yet another straw in the wind - is that in its migration page, IBM suggests GNU/Linux as the most natural successor.

But it is much more than merely a make-do substitute. OS/2 being closed, dies tomorrow. The open GNU/Linux can never die (though it might go into hibernation). A similar observation was made by this perceptive story on lwn.net in the context of browsers, rather than operating systems.