One of my current areas of focus is making the Linux desktop a viable option for enterprises. The question I'm trying to answer is "how do we help corporations adopt Linux as a desktop operating system?"
I could make the question "how do we make it easy for corporations ...", but I don't think that's the right way to approach the problem. It'll never be easy to move a Fortune 500 company's thousands of desktop users to a new operating system, whether that means upgrading to a newer release of Windows XP or migrating to Linux. What we need to do is make moving to Linux a reachable goal.
In researching the question, I've found a few desktop Linux resources on the web, groups that are trying to approach the same goal, and sites that are tracking the efforts of those groups.
OSDL has a Desktop Linux Working Group, whose charter is "[to work] with the open source community to identify a broad set of Linux desktop models, develop specifications and deliver reference implementations to accelerate their growth."
There's also FreeDesktop.org,, which hosts "open source / open discussion software projects working on interoperability and shared technology for X Window System desktops."
The Desktop Linux Consortium, founded in 2003, seems to be mostly a non-starter. There's been no activity in the last year or so.
For news sources, besides filtering through the usual aggregators, there's DesktopLinux.com, dedicated to "using Linux on enterprise and end user desktops". I've found DesktopLinux.com to be a good source of news and information on the players in the desktop Linux arena.
Finally, there's the Desktop Developers' Conference, in association with the Linux Symposium next month in Ottawa.
Anything I'm missing?
Niel M. Bornstein is a Senior Architect for Novell's Systems and Resource Management Business Unit specializing in data center automation.
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