Linux Fedora 7

RedHat introduced Fedora 7 offering a build capability that enables custom distributions, in an open-source process, thus attracting new products/developers to RedHat to develop custom Linux configurations.

It offers a number of key features as described in Red Hat's Fedora site. The most prominent enhancements include:

• Open build process. Custom Linux configurations can use the same build process and tools used by Red Hat; these tools and processes are open-sourced.
• Architectures. Supports Intel/AMD x-86 32-and-64-bit, and Power PC, ppc.
• Virtualization. Virtualization is supported via KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and Qemu technologies, and by Xen.
• Virtualization manager. The Fedora graphical virtualization manager can be used to manage Virtual Machine instances.
• Kernel. Fedora 7 is built on top of 2.6.21 Linux-kernel.

Along with Ubuntu, Fedora and other Linux distributions have a great feature that differentiates these products from Novell's SuSE and Xandros: free of patent agreements with Microsoft.

Palm's Foleo

Palm's Foleo is a small Linux-based laptop introduced as a companion to a cell-phone.

I would buy one, and see wide acceptance and use in a number of fields such as education and health, should it have Ubuntu, Ethernet in addition to WiFi, supporting c, perl, php and java. A number of generic and custom applications will find this unit and form-factor useful.

As is, Foleo may not gain wide acceptance designed and marketed as an additional gadget to a cell-phone; why use a Laptop that depends on the availability of a Cell-phone for its operation?

The upside of Foleo may be that Palm will evolve it to offer standalone operation, e.g without requiring a Cell-phone, Ubuntu, or Ubuntu-like Linux 'presentation', possibly using tools such as Google's Gears, resulting in a powerful compact unit while connected to the Internet, corporate network and as a standalone computing device.