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While Sun Microsystems puts their weight behind the GNOME desktop environment for Solaris and OpenSolaris, there are developers that do work on providing a quality experience for KDE on OpenSolaris. However, getting KDE to run on a clean OpenSolaris installation can require building KDE from source and taking various other steps. Fortunately, for KDE fans, there is now the Korona distribution, which brings KDE 4.3 as the default desktop environment to an OpenSolaris stack.

Remember Mindcraft back in 1999? Not many people do. It was when Microsoft "proved" Windows NT was faster than GNU/Linux. That backfired, and so has Microsoft's latest paid benchmarking: this time of Internet Explorer 8 vs. Firefox, by NSS Labs. It just goes to show that Microsoft is now officially worried about Firefox in the browser sector.

Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and Microsoft’s Windows 7 are expected to debut within days of one another in October 2009. Some open source pundits will surely hype a showdown between the two operating systems. But Canonical will need to carefully communicate the broader Ubuntu 9.10 story to media, customers and partners. Here are seven potential steps to success for Canonical and the Ubuntu 9.10 launch.

Open-source Java clustering startup Terracotta is today expected to announce an acquisition that'll potentially boost the speed of clustered Java applications. The company said it's buying the IP behind the Apache-licensed Ehcache along with Ehcache founder Greg Luck, who'll be joining the Terracotta team. The goal is to integrate Ehcache with Teracotta.

So Microsoft is going to decide how big a netbook can be to be a netbook then? Anything larger than 10.2" doesn't get Windows 7 Starter Edition, must pay more for another version that will run even slower on a netbook. Could be good news for Linux, as OEM XP licenses expire and Windows 7 becomes the only alternative.

The Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.8.2 for Linux today. Bordeaux 1.8.2 adds support for Apple's QuickTime 6.5.2 Player, IrfanView 4.25 the extreamly popular image viewer and editor. This release aslo bundles in Cabextract, Wget and Unzip to remove external dependencies. Our winetricks script has been synced to the latest official release, Steam should now install and run once again, There has also been many small bug fixes and tweaks.

LAMP is short for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP. This tutorial shows how you can install an Apache2 webserver on a CentOS 5.3 server with PHP5 support (mod_php) and MySQL support.

It takes money to make money, and commercial Linux distributor Red Hat knows this. Red Hat has made no secret of the fact that it wants to get more of its sales through indirect channels. This is not just a matter of shifting the burden of sales to resellers, as is the case with most server makers, but is also a means of keeping Red Hat's overall revenues growing so it attains its long-term goal of becoming a $1bn, profitable software company.

While betas of Microsoft's Silverlight 3 platform have been available for a number of months after being announced in the last half of 2008, their free software implementation of Silverlight, which is known as Moonlight and developed largely by Novell with the Mono developers, has lagged behind.

Microsoft has attempted to block the court-ordered end to sales of Microsoft Word over a patent dispute. But court papers show that company officers were aware of the patent when they took the infringing action.

Open source Silverlight clone gets new milestone release as it races towards feature parity with Microsoft. A key element of the Silverlight framework is its ability to handle high-quality video and audio codecs. Thanks to a deal worked out between Microsoft and Novell, Moonlight includes the Microsoft Media Pack, which is a set of proprietary codecs that Microsoft is making available to Moonlight users, free of charge. As a result, the codecs installed through Moonlight are actually licensed by Microsoft, which in turn has licensed the video and codecs technology from its respective patent holders. "Novell is not actually paying Microsoft for the codecs, and in a manner of speaking, Microsoft is footing the bill for the codecs," De Icaza said.

Head First Networking, eh? I'm familiar with the Head First series, having reviewed a number of such books before. Head First books are generally successful at teaching a technical topic to a moderately to severely distractable person. I was curious how teaching networking would fit the bill, particularly since "networking" as a technology, is so vast. Head First books tend to be beginners books, so I wasn't expecting a huge amount of detail or advanced knowledge. The typical audience for this series is late high school/early college, so I thought at best, the content would more or less map to CompTIA's Network+ certification.

Anyone who reads the Linux technical press, Linux blogs, or the comments section of DistroWatch Weekly knows that there has been a lot of discussion, dissatisfaction, and even anger over the state of Intel video drivers for Linux. In a nutshell and without going into the nuts and bolts, Intel made significant changes to the drivers for their chipsets, introducing new technologies that were designed to radically improve performance.

There are a lot of bogus VPN (virtual private network) products sold for big bucks that are not real VPNs at all, but SSL portals. OpenVPN is a genuine secure VPN that supports both site-to-site tunnels, to create a nice secure WAN on the cheap, and remote individual clients. Eric Geier shows us how to use the Untangle gateway to set up a good stout OpenVPN server the easy way.

LMMS is music creation software similar to programs such as GarageBand for OSX and FL Studio for Windows. Those programs are designed to streamline the process of making music with a computer in order to get new users into music composition as quickly and painlessly as possible. Their feature sets include preset audio loops, MIDI tracks, and other ready-made musical materials available for immediate use in a piece. Their GUIs invite involvement in the process of making music and it's clear that the designers want the user to have fun with the program and the process. In this mini-review we'll see if LMMS lives up to the precedents set by those programs.

Two weeks before the VMworld and Red Hat Summit conferences, Red Hat is bolstering its virtualization strategy. The latest move involves a new partner program that emphasizes virtualization training. Here's the scoop.

Free online encyclopaedia Wikipedia is celebrating a new milestone – an article on Norwegian actress Beate Eriksen added on Monday took the English-language version of Wikipedia over the three million article mark. The encyclopaedia, which first went online in January 2001, now contains a total of more than 13 million articles in more than 200 languages. The English-language Wikipedia, as the oldest version, remains the leading version. The German version is second with more than 940,000 articles, and the French version is third with 840,000 articles.

It was about 16 years ago that Ian Murdock came upon the idea to design a new Linux distro. He named it Debian after Debra and Ian.

Last week, Linux was tagged with a local NULL pointer flaw that could have led to a privilege escalation issue. Linux founder Linus Torvalds pushed a patch upstream quickly and now that patch is in the Linux 2.6.31 -rc6 milestone. Torvalds notes in the 2.6.31 rc6 releases notes that the issue wasn't as bad as it could have been, and that he would have likely delayed the fix were it not for the fact that a private list, apparently wasn't private after all.

Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.