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Every so often, you read on Slashdot, Digg, or some other techie news site that Linux is finally ready for the desktop. It's finally to the point that any end user could sit down at a computer and happily compute away. The applications are sufficiently sanitized and Windows-like that even Grandma can use them. I think it's fair to say that most of our previous conceptions of "ready for the desktop" are moot points.

Parastal CSIR, South Africa’s national science and technology research organisation, is readying to switch most of its more than 2300 staff to using Ubuntu Linux as their default desktop.

Taking a page from the doctors at Moses Taylor Hospital, IT staff at the Scranton, Pa., facility last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that's turned out to be a life saver. The patient in this case was an aging Microsoft Exchange 5.5 environment that couldn't support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.

In previous installments of the crash course, you've learned how to build a simple basket tool, a task manager, and even a word game. This time, let's take a look at how you can use the skills you picked up from those exercises to create a simple application launcher, which will allow you to start virtually any application without leaving the convenience of OpenOffice.org. While working on this project, you'll learn how to create and use functions, handle errors, and how to populate list boxes using records from a database table.

Elonex is taking orders for a sub-$200 Linux-based laptop aimed at the British educational market. Based on a 300MHz processor, likely ARM-based, the Elonex One includes WiFi, Ethernet, Flash storage, USB, and a 7-inch, 800 x 480 detachable touch display.

Years ago I already played a bit with Linux (It was Redhat 5.0 on my 386). At that time I thought the operating system wasn't yet ready for the desktop and after a while I reinstalled Windows. Things changed when Ubuntu 5.04 was released. This was the first time I really enjoyed Linux; the most important things worked, it was easy and it was just great! Because I liked Ubuntu so much, I decided to install it on my laptop too and also this worked very good. However, these days Ubuntu is way to heavy to run on my laptop. Because I wanted to have a fast system I tried to install Gentoo Linux; the installation took 3 days but I ended up with a very fast and responsible system. However, every time I had to install a program it took ages to compile the software. So then I started searching to a nice and user-friendly lightweight distribution.

From the release of Mesa 7.1 Release Candidate 1 to Multi-Pointer X being merged to master to the R500 3D milestone, it's been an exciting past 24 hours for the X.Org community. With the open-source 3D support for the Radeon X1000 "R500" GPUs now reaching a parity with the Mesa support for earlier ATI Radeon product families, more Linux users can now consider turning to an open-source driver (xf86-video-ati or xf86-video-radeonhd) for their video driver needs. In this article we are looking at what Linux games work thanks to this latest Mesa R500 support.

While we're all waiting for PCLOS 2008 to be released, we were treated to a kissing cousin yesterday with the release of TinyMe 2008.0. It's a small lightweight distro featuring the LXDE desktop with lots of handy apps. I thought I'd take it for a little test run this evening to see what it might be like.

Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of individual performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next? Is it realistic to expect new features and faster performance? This OpenOffice.org benchmark measures the speed of versions 1.1.5 through 3.0.

Earlier this month KDE Italia attended Open Mind 2008. A Free Software event organised by Roberto Dentice in San Giorgio near Naples. There were KDE talks and KDE demonstrations. Read on for the report. At the three day event, a lot of school children with their teachers were involved to participate in the educational labs, for the talks and the workshops. We tried to show them why it is a good reason to replace Microsoft Windows on their computers to host GNU/Linux Free Software on their disks, they can learn more and be really free using KDE.

Microsoft has begun privately beta testing a new tool, known as “Windows Advisor,” which is aimed at helping consumers better pinpoint why their Windows machines might not be up to snuff.

The storage capacity and data retrieval speeds of Hard Disks have increased multiple folds in last few years. However for large business organizations, which not only need to store terabytes of invaluable data but access them frequently as well. These organizations cannot afford to let their systems go offline even for a short duration of time. Moreover they cannot even think of losing even small amount of data due to disk failure or for that matter any other reason.

As some people here probably already know, I am no fan of Mono - not for technical reasons (mostly [3]), but simply for political ones. Specifically, I’m talking about so-called Software Patents, and even more importantly, precisely who owns those patents

Six degrees of freedom (6DOF) devices allow for movement in three axes, tilt in two axes, and rotation in the third. Some of these devices look like small joysticks -- for example, the SpaceNavigator. These devices are typically used for computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and other 3-D applications. With a new programming library, you can now also use them with Linux applications. You might wonder why you would ever want to use such a device with a desktop application. Well, imagine using the rotation of the device to control your video playback speed, or moving the x-axis of the device to see the next image in a slideshow.

The IBM Systems Application Advantage for Linux, also known as the Chiphopper offering, provides tools to help developers whose applications run on x86 Linux systems scrub their C/C++ code for portability prior to porting to System p, System i, or System z. Source hardware platforms for 32- and 64-bit applications are x86, EM64T, and AMD systems running Linux Standard Base (LSB) 3.x certified Linux distributions.

Translating equivalent arithmetic operations between bash, Perl and awk. Part of an ongoing series on porting code.

Traditionally, web hosts have had a difficult time offering efficient, highly secure web space for a multitude of customers. Generally, a host will provide cheap accounts on a shared server and offer virtual machines as a more expensive option for the more security-conscious site owners. In this article, Joshua Kramer will explain how to provide highly secure hosting for Python-based web applications in an efficient manner. With the popularity of applications such as Trac, Django, and TurboGears, Python-based web applications will become more prevalent in the future, and the concepts presented in this article will become more valuable.

Late last week I downloaded and installed Slackware 12.1 on my aging (OK, old) Toshiba laptop side by side with Vector Linux Light. I'll post a full review to my O'Reilly Linux Dev Center blog once I've had more opportunity to use the latest version of Slack.

My first impression: Slackware is still Slackware.

Cisco has announced an alternative to the Web-services protocol Soap--and made it open source. Cisco said its Etch messaging protocol will be more efficient than the Soap standard and the company will release the source code. A beta version of Etch will be launched this summer, as part of version 2.5 of the Cisco Unified Application Environment (CUAE). Within that environment, it will replace the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standard, Soap, said Cisco, providing a more lightweight and faster interface, suitable for real-time interaction.

I will never cease to be amazed at how fast things change and how quickly people forget. Today’s example is a Slashdot posting with the title, “Why Buy a PC Preloaded with Linux?” Specifically, the dotter—slasher really doesn’t give the right tone—wants to know “‘Why should I buy a PC preloaded with Linux?’ They are more expensive, and it’s not hard just to reformat the PC with Linux. I hate paying the Microsoft Tax as much as anybody else, but if paying that ‘tax’ allows companies to reduce my price by bundling with my PC products that I will never use, why wouldn’t I just buy a Windows-loaded PC and reformat?”