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Could this be the environmentally friendly laptop PC of the future? Fujitsu will unveil later this week a laptop PC with a case manufactured from wood rather than the more traditional plastic or metal.

The laptop, which is only a prototype, uses cedar wood for the case and also makes use of bio-plastics for parts. Bio-plastics are plastics produced from renewable sources such as vegetable oil rather than petroleum used in traditional plastics.

The laptop PC carries the names of Fujitsu and Monacca, a Japanese design team that specializes in wooden products. Monacca has a range of furniture and bags made from wood on sale via its Web site and recently launched a desktop calculator with a distinctive large, round wooden case.

While the all-wood PC may not be ready for commercialization Fujitsu has been pursuing the use of bio-plastics in its other laptops. In 2002 it began working on using corn to produce a bio-plastic and the result of that project can now be seen on Japanese computer store shelves. Fujitsu's Biblo NX95 laptop has a 30 percent bio-plastic case.

The two PCs will be part of the “Japan Design 2008″ exhibition that will take place as part of the Milan Salone design show in Italy.

SEATTLE - Microsoft Corp.’s operating systems run most personal computers around the globe and are a cash cow for the world’s largest software maker. But you’d never confuse a Windows user with the passionate fans of Mac OS X or even the free Linux operating system.

Unless it’s someone running Windows XP, a version Microsoft wants to retire.

Fans of the six-year-old operating system set to be pulled off store shelves in June have papered the Internet with blog posts, cartoons and petitions recently. They trumpet its superiority to Windows Vista, Microsoft’s latest PC operating system, whose consumer launch last January was greeted with lukewarm reviews.

No matter how hard Microsoft works to persuade people to embrace Vista, some just can’t be wowed. They complain about Vista’s hefty hardware requirements, its less-than-peppy performance, occasional incompatibility with other programs and devices and frequent, irritating security pop-up windows.

For them, the impending disappearance of XP computers from retailers, and the phased withdrawal of technical support in coming years, is causing a minor panic.

Take, for instance, Galen Gruman. A longtime technology journalist, Gruman is more accustomed to writing about trends than starting them.

But after talking to Windows users for months, he realized his distaste for Vista and strong attachment to XP were widespread.

“It sort of hit us that, wait a minute, XP will be gone as of June 30. What are we going to do?” he said. “If no one does something, it’s going to be gone.”

So Gruman started a Save XP Web petition, gathering since January more than 100,000 signatures and thousands of comments, mostly from die-hard XP users who want Microsoft to keep selling it until the next version of Windows is released, currently targeted for 2010.

On the petition site’s comments section, some users proclaimed they will downgrade from Vista to XP — an option available in the past to businesses, but now open for the first time to consumers who buy Vista Ultimate or Business editions — if they need to buy a new computer after XP goes off the market.

Others used the comments section to rail against the very idea that Microsoft has the power to enforce the phase-out from a stable, decent product to one that many consider worse, while profiting from the move. Many threatened to leave Windows for Apple or Linux machines.

Microsoft already extended the XP deadline once, but it shows no signs it will do so again. The company has declined to meet with Gruman to consider the petition. Microsoft is aware of the petition, it said in a statement to The Associated Press, and “will continue to be guided by feedback we hear from partners and customers about what makes sense based on their needs.”

Gruman said he’d keep pressing for a meeting.

“They really believe if they just close their eyes, people will have no choice,” he said.

In fact, most people who get a new computer will end up with Vista. In 2008, 94 percent of new Windows machines for consumers worldwide will run Vista, forecasts industry research group IDC. For businesses, about 75 percent of new PCs will have Vista. (That figure takes into account companies that choose to downgrade to XP.)

Although Microsoft may not budge on selling new copies of XP, it may have to extend support for it.

Al Gillen, an IDC analyst, estimated that at the end of 2008 nearly 60 percent of consumer PCs and almost 70 percent of business PCs worldwide will still run XP. Microsoft plans to end full support — including warranty claims and free help with problems — in April 2009. The company will continue providing a more limited level of service until April 2014.

Gillen said efforts like Gruman’s grass-roots petition may not influence the software maker, but business customers’ demands should carry more clout.

“You really can’t make 69 percent of your installed base unhappy with you,” he said.

Some companies — such as Wells Manufacturing Co. in Woodstock, Ill. — are crossing their fingers that he’s right. The company, which melts scrap steel and casts iron bars, has 200 PCs that run Windows 2000 or XP. (Windows 2000 is no longer sold on PCs. Mainstream support has ended, but limited support is available through the middle of 2010.)

Wells usually replaces 50 of its PCs every 18 months. In the most recent round of purchases, Chief Information Officer Lou Peterhans said, the company stuck with XP because several of its applications don’t run well on Vista.

“There is no strong reason to go to Vista, other than eventually losing support for XP,” he said. Peterhans added that the company isn’t planning to bring in Vista computers for 18 months to two years. If Microsoft keeps to its current timetable, its next operating system, code-named Windows 7, will be on the market by then.

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On the Net:

Save XP Petition: http://weblog.infoworld.com/save-xp/

Microsoft’s Windows support timeline: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifepolicy

Linux usage has grown fast over the past several years as the operating system moved from perimeter Web servers to workloads much closer to the heart of the business, while gaining a broad following of contributors and commercial users. But the days of these easy advances may be past.

That's the message IDC analyst Al Gillen delivered to about 300 attendees at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas, last week. Linux has made many gains at the expense of legacy Unix systems. However, server virtualization combined with head-to-head competition with revitalized competitors, both Unix and Microsoft Windows Server, will likely slow things down.

Meanwhile, other problems plague Linux, including issues with driver development stemming from an unwillingness of some peripheral device manufacturers to reveal where they've deviated from specifications, said Chris Wright, a Linux kernel developer and conference attendee. Moreover, many Linux users fail to report bugs, whether out of laziness or ignorance of the process. Bug reporting is a priority of kernel developers, who depend on the larger community to help detect and correct problems.

BILLIONS OF REASONS
Nevertheless, Gillen stressed that Linux is still a force to be reckoned with. It's more and more frequently acting as a database server, especially for Oracle, he said, while assuming heavier business application workloads, including ERP, CRM, and financial applications. “By 2011, the logistics and manufacturing applications alone will be a $1.2 billion market on Linux; human capital management will be a $2 billion market,” Gillen predicted.

Still A ForceIDC's Gillen has tracked Linux since 1999. His outlook for 2011:$50 billionSize of Linux market–server hardware plus OS$96 billionMarket for Linux and Unix business apps; Linux represents one-third of total$110 billionMarket for Windows Server applications He cited figures showing that for every supported copy of Linux running in the enterprise, there's another copy running unsupported, and thus unpaid for. The Linux ecosystem is twice as large as it appears in most revenue data because so many companies have support skills in-house or are willing to rely on advice from forums.

Part of the purpose of the summit, now in its second year, is to let business users interact with Linux kernel developers. One IT pro glad to have the opportunity was Ed Reaves, a Nortel technology platform manager from Research Triangle Park, N.C.

End users and server admins are happy with Linux's current five-nines uptime, Reaves said, but Nortel and other telecom companies would like to move Linux reliability to six nines, or one outage of about 30 seconds a year. In response, Nortel's Linux developers produced a block of code that restarts Linux in 20 seconds in the event of a glitch; however, that patch doesn't appear to be moving into the kernel, to the dismay of Nortel executives.

“How do you get a kernel patch released into the mainline?” Reaves asked, referring to the development process that steers additions to the kernel past reviewers and into a hierarchical code tree maintained by Linus Torvalds. That led to a discussion of the difficulties inherent in the code review process that must happen before a proposed patch makes its way into the kernel.

“The limiting resource is not development of code but review of code,” said Jonathan Corbet, a kernel developer. The Nortel patch, it turns out, is a sizable block of code requiring reviewers with knowledge of a particular part of the kernel.

The first day of the summit ended with energetic debate among mobile device makers who use Linux over who was following standards and how mobile Linux devices should be developed.

“There was an amazing amount of contention. I love to see the passion,” said Linux user Stefano De Panfilis, laboratory director at Engineering Informatica in Rome. And passion, of course, has long been Linux's trump card.

See original article on InformationWeek.com