But what is happening in the corporate environment? Well, this aren’t looking so gloomy there… InformationWeek is reporting that a staggering 83% of businesses will not upgrade to Windows 7 next year. So what is happening there?

Well of course our Redmond friends are still suffering from a big PR problem surrounding Vista. With this OS being plagued with so many problems and incompatibility, it’s only natural the corporate world is not very enthusiastic about it. While Windows 7 looks promising from an end-user point of view, IT professionals say that most of the important functionality needed for a successful deploy-scenario are still missing. One of the key ingredients here is the fact that you can’t really upgrade from XP to 7. A clean install seems necessary. Also since 7 shares the code-base of Vista, many of the compatibility problems will remain, and companies just can’t afford any major downtime in the current economical climate, at least not because of a Windows upgrade…

While XP still holds a lot of popularity, it’s death is getting very near as well. Mainstream support is ending today (Tuesday), and many businesses that won’t make the leap to 7 immediately risk of getting trapped in a no-service period spanning the duration of their waiting. Additionally, the 9 year old OS is getting out-dated, with little to no support for current hardware advances that are being sold for a couple of years now (hello!? multi-threading support?!)

Microsoft definitely needs to step it up a notch, fixing both their shattered reputation and the remaining technical issues responsible for the upgrade hold-offs.

On the software side, you can expect the usual goodies like OpenOffice (still version 2.x though), FireFox 3, The Gimp and many others. Another big improvement is better support for wireless networks, a thing that has been pushing Linux back in the past.

Actually, CRN is reporting that this new Ubuntu is outdoing Windows Vista. With faster installation time, better functionality and ease of use, and the improved wireless, this version if bound to be the best alternative for Windows so far. They also did a benchmark of both Operating Systems on the same hardware, and it seems Ubuntu is faster on almost every point.

For existing Ubuntu users, there is now an improved upgrade process. Actually, you don’t have to do much, just change your upgrade path in System >> Administration >> Software Sources to Normal releases. Next you run Update Manager, and the software automatically notifies you that there is a new release available.

The only downside for me is that this upgrade process is terribly slow. On my system it needs to get about 1300 new packages, and it seems the host serving them is having a hard time. This of course might be only a temporary problem. I’m also expecting this upgrade to break some of my customizations I did, but this is normal as I use quite the exotic setup here . For someone working with an out-of-the-box 8.04 install, this shouldn’t be an issue. This makes the upgrade-process very newbie-friendly.

All in all, I’m having high expectations of this new release, and I can’t wait for this damned upgrade to finish . Hopefully not too many hickups will happen, but if they do, stay tuned to this blog, and you’ll surely will read about it!

Included will be Windows Search 4, wireless Bluetooth support, support for the new VIA 64-bit CPU and additional application compatibility updates.

Considering that SP1 is still pretty fresh, it’s kind of a surprise to already see a second version coming out. This is probably because Microsoft wants to release the final version of SP2 well before the launch of their new OS, Windows 7. It probably is meant mostly to convince those people who have not yet made the switch from XP to Vista.

I’m seriously doubting this will work. Seeing in my own environment, most people still prefer XP over Vista, as the latter is not really conceived as being worth going through the trouble of upgrading. Also the fact that a lot of people need to upgrade their hardware only to be able to run it in a comfortable way, doesn’t strike me as a good point . And also the corporate world is still not convinced. Although some of us already switched to Vista (mainly for testing purposes), my manager even refuses to think about it, as it’s just too much of a hassle. I think there’s a lot of companies, who’s core task isn’t technology, are taking the same stance.

However for those already running Vista, this is definitely good news. Where SP1 already fixed a lot of buggy things, hopefully this new one will pick up where SP1 left off. Personally I can’t wait to get it, but I’m not that crazy to go install the beta though… In this case, and knowing Microsoft reputation, the best thing to do is wait for the stable release.

However this does not mean its development has finished. Developers will still continue to make bug-fixes and add new features, with the difference that the heart of the system, called the structure, stays identical. This means users would no longer have to check if their kernel version, utilities used and drive format match up to each other.

Of course this alone doesn’t make Ext4 ready for production use. As with any new file-system, administrators in the corporate world will wait a little longer to include this and first see how the new system performs on a day-to-day basis. Another drawback is the fact that you still have to maintain one of the older file-systems, as neither the LILO or GRUB boot-loaders can successfully load the kernel off an ext4-partition.

Another important development is that there is already talk of giving Linux a new, next-generation file-system. The system of choice would be btrfs (pronounced butter-fs). Since this system however is still quite immature, and developing a good file-system takes a lot of time, ext4 could be used to bridge the gap.

All in all, I think it’s good to see that the Linux world is working hard to give us the best systems possible. I personally eagerly await ext4, although I think I’ll also wait a little longer to include these in my systems. But maybe if you’re running a non-critical machine and feel adventurous… .

Developer Alexander Reichle-Schmehl states on his blog that this is due to too many release-critical bugs. Translated to normal english, this just means there’s too many things not working properly just yet.

Now this is not new, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m such a huge Debian addict. Releases of this distro have historically been slow, and though this means you don’t get all the newest goodies right away, it does guarantee you a rock-solid, stable system. However, those who can’t wait for these new toys do not have to worry, as Alexander stays optimistic and invites the whole community to help out.

For the normal users, this means that if you are currently using the Etch release, you should already make the necessary modifications to your system, upgrade to Lenny, and check if everything is working properly. Here’s where my concern comes in.

I mean, it’s all nice, but if you are maintaining a server running Etch, the last thing you want to do is upset your users and start upgrading to something that even the developers think is buggy. OK, I didn’t take a good look yet at what exactly is having issues, but still, this whole thing seems fishy to me at best.

I don’t think a lot of people will be eager to jump at this kind of thing. Maybe if you have a development server running that you can ticker with, yeah … but for us poor my-machine-needs-to-stay-stable admins it’s just not do-able. Maybe if they proposed a way where you could upgrade a single application/service at a time, without jeopardizing your whole system, it would be more successful.

To conclude, this admin here (meaning me ), will watch this from a distance, and I advise all of you to do the same. Of course, the decision remains up to you. If you do decide to take the jump, good luck, and maybe let me know how it went .