The Gospel According to St. Klaus

Klaus Knopper, the man behind the trailblazing Knoppix live distro, is brave enough to offer some thoughts on computing in the long term:

If proprietary software continues to dominate, within 10 years no one will be able to store any file and even view their own content without first paying a service provider to see it and the PC as we know it will be gone within 30 years.

Live a Little: Try Knoppix

How can anyone resist this sort of thing? Go on, live a little: you know it makes sense.

Last Night a DVD Saved My Life

Last night, my Windows 2000 box died. To be fair, it was nothing to do with Windows, but a dodgy hard disc. And yes, of course I have backups...it's just that they're not entirely up-to-date, and missing even a few days' data is a pain. I could re-install Windows and hope that gave me access to my data (stored on a separate partition), but this would take a few hours that I don't have, and might not work. Luckily there's a better way.

Booting up the PC with the Knoppix 5.0 Live DVD inside produced not only a working machine in a couple of minutes, with access to all of my data, but a cool 5000 programs at my beck and call. Including K3b, which meant that I could simply burn copies of the data I was missing. Problem solved.

Thanks, Knoppix: you're a gent.

Is KDE Winning?

Wow. Linus "my name is Linus and I am your god" Torvalds has spoken - and the answer is KDE.

If you haven't been following the great war between GNOME and KDE - and frankly, if you haven't, you probably made a wise decision - over what the face of GNU/Linux will be on the desktop, this news may not mean much. After all, Linus is just one voice, right?

Well, no: Linus is *the* voice when it comes to the Linux kernel, and his views carry enormous weight within the free software world. For this reason, he has always assiduously avoided coming down on one side of the other regarding desktop interfaces - until now.

As well as this flat-out endorsement from the man himself, there are other straws in the wind that suggest that KDE may emerge as the preferred desktop environment. For example, the amazing Knoppix live CD system, which has spawned dozens of other live CD systems, has always opted for KDE. More recently, the increasingly popular Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, which uses GNOME, has appeared in an KDE incarnation known as Kubuntu, and received the blessing of He Who Is Known As The SABDFL.

The reason this all matters is that 2006 may well prove the year that GNU/Linux makes its big breakthrough on the desktop. Just like 2005 and 2004.