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Tired of Microsoft rattling the patent sabers against FOSS? Why not join Christian Einfeldt at the Digital Tipping Point and demand that Microsoft sue you first! Or to put it another way, "Hey, Microsoft, put up or shut up!"

Who, besides myself, would like to avoid paying hefty long-distance fees? I see. Well, how does free long distance to anyone anywhere in the world sound? That's what I thought. How? By using your Linux system and a Voice over IP program, of course.

From a business standpoint, Jabber should be your clear IM choice. Because Jabber is an open protocol, it doesn't belong to anyone in particular, so there is no single company driving its destiny. Your business won't get locked down by proprietary formats. Jabber also uses a decentralized approach so the system is more robust. Best of all, any company can run its own private, secure, standards compliant, Jabber instant messaging server for little or no cost for the software.

This is the fourth book by Gagné I've reviewed over the past half-dozen years. Though I've found things to carp at in each of them, each one was a first-rate book. Here's another.

Thomas Nagy's kdissert is an application referred to as a mind mapping tool. Its purpose is to help you create complex documents such as a thesis, or a dissertation, or a presentation.

Now, if you haven't played a decent game of computer chess lately, it's time to check out this month's Linux game over at UnixReview.com. In the article, I'll tell you about eboard, a great chess-playing program that lets you play against your own system, play against another player remotely, or join an online game using the FICS protocol (Free Internet Chess Server). You can read all about it at UnixReview.com

There is something I like about playing games that is, strangely enough, much the same as what I enjoy about reading science fiction or fantasy. The medium lends itself beautifully to creating other times, places, and even worlds. Some of these worlds can be familiar — what we call simulations — while others are a bit more out there. My game recommendation for this month is called Fish Fillets Next Generation, and it definitely fits into the out there category. Perhaps a little description to start with...

After spending any amount of time playing (and yes, when necessary, working) with Linux systems, you can't help but notice that penguins do tend to figure prominently in the mythos of the operating system. Penguins show up everywhere — from the Linux mascot, Tux (designed by Larry Ewing), to the numerous variations on the penguin theme, you can't go near a Linux system, magazine, T-shirt, mouse pad, coffee mug, or book, without running into some kind of penguin. That's okay for most people because, well, penguins are cute.

Novell and SUSE's latest Linux offering is very slick, and it's going to impress the business community. The casual home user may feel a little differently, however. Unless you are feeling particularly adventurous and you've got some time on your hands, I'd pass on taking the Beagle for a walk.

A long time ago (when the Earth was young), I worked as a top-40 disc jockey for a local radio station. The years have passed but my passion for radio hasn't dwindled. A few months ago, I discovered Xiph.org's icecast.org directory of music streams. Not long after that, I ran across SHOUTcast. Between these two Web sites, I had access to literally thousands of Internet radio streams, both professional and amateur, covering every imaginable musical taste. As you can well imagine, browsing through these sites can become a rather time-consuming process — not that I minded, but time is something I seem to have a lot less of these days. That's why I like Jean-Yves Lefort's streamtuner so much.

Since this is the first column in this series, I'm going to start with a little justification. After all, when you are doing something that looks more like fun than work, there always seems to be some "splainin' to do". So, let me explain. Linux as a computing platform has come a long, long way since it appeared way back in 1991, so much so that it is now ready to replace that other rather common desktop OS we see on PCs everywhere. (Shhh . . . don't mention the name!) In the server room, Linux has been king for some time. Now, Linux is ready for the desktop and the business applications that the average office worker depends on — word processors, spreadsheets, Web browsers, electronic organizers, email packages, and so on. If you're still following my logic, then winning the business desktop is already a done deal — it's just going to take a little while. That means it's time for Linux to look to the final frontier, which takes me back to the justification for this series.

Robby Stephenson's Tellico is billed as a collection manager though I like to think of it as a very versatile personal library system. It's a great tool for keeping track of your many cookbooks as well as Linux books, science fiction books, mysteries, and so on. That in itself would make it an extremely useful tool for keeping track of what books various friends and family have.

Linux offers an excellent alternative for businesses looking for something different in an OS. However, Linux with all of its components and options installed can be a massive resource hog. Enter "thin clients," pared-down Linux installations, which offer a streamlined OS for lighter system usage.

Today, I want to make you a star ... of your own movies that is. Actually, I'm going to suppose that you've already made the movies and now you want to transfer them to DVD for your family and friends to enjoy.

...steganography. Using this process, you can take any message, encode it inside another message (or in this case, a graphic image). In fact, you could create a whole web site, full of images with secret messages in all of them and none would be the wiser.

Most ISPs provide dial-up access through the Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP. The KDE program that gets you connected to the Internet with a modem is called kppp. On a standard KDE setup, you'll find it under Kicker's big K by choosing the Internet menu, then clicking Internet Dialer. On Mandrake, look under Networking, then Remote Access; and Red Hat has it under Extras and Internet. You can always just start the application with the command kppp & from an X window terminal session or by using your old friend, the <Alt+F2> combo?once again, just type kppp.

Being a guy with an accent on one of the letters of his name, you can imagine that I probably spend a lot of time entering so-called "special characters" in my documents and e-mails. Short of keeping a document with these letters already written, then copying, and pasting them, entering an é can be amazingly time consuming. Worst of all, while OpenOffice.org lets me click Insert, Special Character to select from a list, not all applications have a handy list of characters to choose from. For everyone out there who routinely has to enter special characters or letters with accents, I'm going to give you a great KDE trick to use that will ease the pain.

One of the guys I work with saw me running Libranet on my workstation the other day and said “I bet you need an Engineering Degree to install software on that sucker”.... Sorry Jacob, you just lost a bet....

Following Jon Biddell's praise for Libranet, two more people immediately came forward to champion their distro of choice, both carrying the Slackware banner and both for somewhat different reasons. Let's start with Lew Pitcher's answer to the call.

So you have your new installation of Fedora up and running and so far you're quite happy with the results. Then you decide that it's time to start installing some new programs. So how do you add in new packages, or remove packages you don't need?