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In this fourth episode of a series that pits Microsoft's new Vista OS against SimplyMEPIS Linux, DesktopLinux.com columnist Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols compares the operating systems' bundled games, browsers, and instant communications applications.

Install Songbird Music Player in Ubuntu

With the release of Microsoft's new Windows operating system (Vista), more and more people are looking for alternatives to Windows for various reasons. This tutorial is the first of a series of articles where I will show people who are willing to switch to Linux how they can set up a Linux desktop (Fedora Core 6 in this article) that fully replaces their Windows desktop, i.e. that has all software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

The first release candidate of Damn Small Linux 3.3 is now ready for testing: "Added mouse configuration persistence via .mouse_config; Improved rdesktop - added color depth; ALSA sound autoconfiguration improvement via conflicting audio module; Automated start of rcfirewall upon boot when rcfirewall.unc is in mydsl search path at boot... - DistroWatch. Screenshots of Damn Small Linux 3.3 RC1 are available at LinuxQuestions.org.

OpenMedSpelis a open source medical spelling word list that is released under a GPL license. OpenMedSpel was derived from the word lists complied for MedSpel, a shareware medical spelling tool for Microsoft Word. OpenMedSpel is currently available in USA English. Other languages and localizations may be released in the future. OpenMedSpel has been adapted to work on the Mozilla Tunderbird email client and the OpenOffice.org office suite. OpenMedSpel can be adapted for many other programs as well. OpenMedSpel can be downloaded from http://www.e-medtools.com/openmedspel.html

Freedom is just another word for $7,000

After 3 months development we are proud to announce the release of sidux-2007-01 “Χάος” for amd64 and i686 systems, in ≈ 402 MB lite KDE and ≈ 700 MB full KDE flavors of Debian Sid-based liveCDs.

Red Hat has launched its first annual Red Hat Innovation Awards to be presented at the Red Hat Summit in San Diego May 9-11. The Red Hat Innovation Awards recognize Red Hat users, customers and partners who stand out for improving processes, overcoming technology challenges and enhancing their bottom line through Red Hat and JBoss solutions. The awards provide an opportunity for Red Hat community members to share their individual stories and receive recognition for innovative and exemplary uses of Red Hat technologies.

David Airlie has mentioned to me this week that a new reverse engineering group has begun work on the ATI/AMD R500 series. David is not taking part in this group (due to existing NDAs with ATI), but this project is current led by Jerome Glisse. Jerome was one of the open-source r300 drivers, and he also has another one or two others helping out...

Kingfisher Group has migrated its 240 Castorama and Brico Dépôt stores on the continent to Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Oracle databases.

When a project with the size and scope of KDE gets to be as big as it is, sometimes changing a decision established almost a decade earlier is very difficult. KDE has relied on autotools to build most of the project since its inception, but for the last year, KDE 4 has been building with CMake, a newer build system that is rapidly becoming a heavyweight contender in the world of buildsystems. Read on for more...

Microsoft Corp. on Wednesday released a list of 800 applications it has officially verified so far to run bug-free on Windows Vista. The list is notable for both its brevity and the absence of many applications popular on Windows XP, although Microsoft and analysts said that the majority of XP software can run, albeit with hiccups, on Vista.

[800 huh? I got 8000 - Scott]

It's no secret that XML continues to be one of the most popular technologies that's shown up in the last ten years. But what is XML really good for?

Are you confused by the plethora of testing and comparison options in the Bash shell? This tip helps you demystify the various types of file, arithmetic, and string tests so you will always know when to use test, [ ], [[ ]], (( )), or if-then-else constructs.

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Scot Finnie, Microsoft Windows advocate and known best for his award-winning Scot's Newsletter, smacked Vista around the room a bit. When he was done there, he decided Microsoft itself needed a bit of dusting-up as well.

Linus Torvalds announced the first release candidate for the upcoming 2.6.21 kernel, ending the two-week merge window, "there's a lot of changes, as is usual for an -rc1 thing, but at least so far it would seem that 2.6.20 has been a good base, and I don't think we have anything *really* scary here." Linus noted that the tickless kernel patch was finally merged into the mainline kernel, "the most interesting core change may be the dyntick/nohz one, where timer ticks will only happen when needed. It's been brewing for a _loong_ time, but it's in the standard kernel now as an option." Thomas Gleixner explained a year ago how this could result in cooler CPUs and power savings, "the tickless kernel feature (CONFIG_NO_HZ) enables 'on-demand' timer interrupts: if there is no timer to be expired for say 1.5 seconds when the system goes idle, then the system will stay totally idle for 1.5 seconds."

After five years, I finally managed to put my ideas into a book, which I would like to announce to the developers of the medical software community, because I was greatly influenced by their discussions. More information about the book can be foundhere

At a recent news conference, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sought to impugn the character of the free/open source world by implying that it had no respect for the intellectual property rights of others. It's not just the enormous ignorance embodied by this duplicitous braggadocio that caught my eye, it's the fact that the claim is coming from a man associated with Microsoft, which is far and away the most notorious IP thief of all time.

The KOffice team today released KOffice 1.6.2, the second bug-fix release in their 1.6 series. Although this is a maintenance release, there are some new features in Krita (new filters and a smudge paint operation) and Kexi (a new User Mode to deploy Kexi applications). Many bugs were fixed, thanks to the helpful input of our users. We also have updated languages packs with no less than 4 new languages. You can read more about it in the announcement, and the release notes. A full changelog is also available. Currently, you can download binary packages for Kubuntu and SUSE.

Last month with the 8.33.6 release we had seen the first signs of Radeon X2000 (R600) product support. The AMD Radeon Xpress 1250 IGP (both Intel and AMD processor models) are supported by today's driver. Additional work has gone into the 8.34.8 drivers with this release to prepare for the Radeon X2000 launch shortly. More information will be available shortly.