Dell will soon offer more personal computers that use the Linux operating system as opposed to Microsoft Windows, said the founder of a company that offers Linux support services.

Mark Shuttleworth, who created the Ubuntu version of Linux and founded Canonical to provide support for it, said that Dell is happy with the demand it has seen for Linux PCs, which Dell introduced in May.

Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker after Hewlett-Packard, now offers five consumer PCs that run Ubuntu Linux...(more)

Speaking to a crowd of hardware engineers last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates trumpeted the fact that the company has sold 40 million copies of Vista since the operating system hit the market.

But does that milestone mean the operating system is causing more PCs to be sold?

It's a natural question to ask, but a difficult one to answer. One reason it's hard to suss out Vista's impact on PC sales is that consumers don't really decide whether they prefer a new operating system. When Microsoft releases a new operating system, it becomes the default on nearly all machines sold at retail stores. So if consumers want a new PC, they basically get Vista...(more)

Red Hat has launched its Red Hat Exchange, a site where customers can buy a range of open-source applications from the company's business partners.

The Red Hat Exchange offers a much wider range of software than Red Hat's two core products, Enterprise Linux and the JBoss Java server software. Red Hat will sell and support the software, but the business partners will get a percentage of the proceeds and provide deeper support when necessary.

The company announced the Red Hat Exchange in March while launching its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, a major update to its core product. It announced the RHX launch Thursday at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego...(more)