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According to Microsoft, Windows XP died on June 30th when it stopped sending it to the likes of Dell and HP, as well as ceasing shrink-wrapped distribution. According to Dell, new buyers can take a 'Windows Vista Bonus' machine: a PC with a copy of Windows XP pre-installed instead...

One of Firefox's key promotional advantages is that it runs on Windows. Ubuntu, too, can make itself run "on" Windows, at least for trying it out.

SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source MPlayer. The version I decided to test in this review is 0.6.1 from SVN. SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. You can also play mounted images of DVDs by pointing to the directory which contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. It can also play videos from a given URL location. One of the great features SMPlayer has is the ability to resume a movie after you closed it and restarted the application.

Here is a step-by-step guide that should save you a few hours.

The following article is about using a HP-530 laptop with Slackware-12.1 and Lantech wireless router with WEP encryption. It can be used as a general tutorial for configuring your WiFi manually in Linux.

There is no dearth of software that can help you run that indispensable Windows app over Linux. Win4Lin has managed to survive through the years as an inexpensive tool for people who like to pay for support. The recently released Win4Lin 5, available for $30 a pop, has shrugged off the shortcomings of its predecessor and delivers on its "near native-performance" promise. When I reviewed Win4Lin 4 last year, the software wasn't easy to work with, thanks to its half-baked graphical user interface and over-reliance on the command line. It was on the edge of usability, with poor hardware support. Win4Lin 5 promises improvements on all these fronts, along with special pricing for desktop users, especially those running Ubuntu.

Last.fm is an open-source application licensed under the GPL, allowing you to listen to Last.fm radio stations and submit the songs in the same time. For those of you unfamiliar with Last.fm, it's a great social music community, allowing you to submit songs you currently listen to, statistics, forums for bands or music styles (or even more: Amarok has a group, most major distributions also, and you can start your own group about anything, match people and discuss), together with information for each artist, open for anyone to edit, just like the Wikipedia style.

There is an extensive amount of free audio software available on the Linux platform which is both mature and sophisticated. In fact, Linux has all the tools needed to be a serious contender in music production without a user having to venture into the commercial software world.

A few days ago I reviewed BasKet, the wonderful KDE application for taking notes, so today I decided upon Tomboy, which is an application for GNOME. Tomboy does not provide as many features as BasKet, but it might be the right choice for those using GNOME. It provides global hotkeys, spell-checking while typing, and several options for formatting the text, like highlighting. It can be embedded in the system tray and it uses a low amount of resources.

A free and simple piece of open source software is helping manage the spread of disease in developing countries. The Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) is providing countries, such as South Africa, with an online patient medical record system.

Super Micro, are you familiar with them? Chances are that unless your focus is on the workstation and server markets, you probably haven't heard of them. However, this company has been around since 1993 and they have been producing a variety of different motherboards, servers, computer enclosures, and other products to fit the needs of their customers. Super Micro manufacturers a variety of different Intel server motherboards -- and they are one of the few that offers quad-socket Xeon motherboards -- but they also have a growing selection of Core 2 desktop motherboards. The C2SBX+ is one of their newest motherboards and with our first Super Micro review at Phoronix we are looking at this product. This Intel X48 motherboard is designed for digital entertainment, gaming enthusiasts, and other high-end applications.

The new, record breaking, Firefox 3 web browser is the fastest version of Firefox yet. But are you really getting the biggest bang for your buck (metaphorically speaking, because, of course, Firefox is free?) You can eke out a better disk and memory footprint and higher speeds by building it yourself from the original source code. I'll show you how, with genuine metrics to prove it.

Images are an important part of an attractive, eye-catching blog. Well-chosen images can highlight and capture the essence of your communication, helping your audience to better appreciate your message. Here are three WordPress extensions that help you gain more control over the photos and graphics you want to display on your blog. Image Manager lets you set default image sizes and borders and control other aspects of your photo and graphics collection. ImageManager works especially well if you like to include images with each blog post and need to keep them to less than a specific width in order to avoid breaking a template design.

In addition to Desktop environments there are window managers that are separate programs that manage the windows and interface that you use. The reason you would explore the option of a different window manager is that it will use much less resources than the GNOME or KDE Desktop. However, less resources in terms of RAM and CPU means more basic features. In initial testing in similar settings for each these are the results. It is very clear that GNOME uses considerably more resources than any of the alternative window managers.

1. SMPlayer SMPlayer is a fully featured video player built using the Qt 4 libraries. It basically plays anything, including DVDs and ISO images, but it skipped the menus when reading DVD ISOs. It's complete and it offers plenty configuration options, including for subtitles and the interface itself, allowing to choose the icon set and the style used. You can also configure the language SMPlayer uses for its interface, including English, Romanian, Polish, German and many other. I was impressed to see translations are pretty much complete.

This tutorial shows how to configure Zimbra Collaboration Server (ZCS) and Samba to act as a primary domain controller (PDC) that uses LDAP as a centralized database for authenticating users on Linux and Windows desktops.

A business version of Micro-Star International's (MSI) Wind mini-desktop PC should be available in Asia and Europe in July, as products are already in mass production, a company representative said Monday.

One of the perennial jibes about open source is that it never innovates. This conveniently forgets that the World Wide Web was released as free software (Tim Berners-Lee contemplated using the GNU GPL before he decided to release it into the public domain). Despite the ludicrousness of the accusation, it is nonetheless always good to have further counterexamples.

You've seen it too - a recent Linux convert, used to clicking on executable files to install software, is often shocked to discover that Linux distributions use dedicated package managers to install and remove applications. But with a large number of distributions and philosophies, which is the best tool on the market? And how do they differ in terms of usability and convenience? If you are a new Linux user then our article explaining the various package management options is a must-read. In the news section, openSUSE developers defend their inclusion of KDE 4 into the recently released openSUSE 11.0, Mandriva cancels the first alpha release of version 2009 due to problems with X.Org, Debian completes the security infrastructure for the upcoming release of Debian "Lenny", and Ubuntu unveils the first developers' build of the new MID edition for mobile Internet devices. Also in this issue: a link to an interview with Zenwalk's Jean-Philippe Guillemin, a review of the upcoming Acer Aspire One and a round-up of rescue live CDs based on Linux. All this and more in this week's DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!

Many people don't realize the wealth of applications that are available for Linux. I am asked all the time about X and/or Y application on Windows and whether there's an equivalent on Linux. Most of the time the answer is yes. The arena of finance is no exception. Plenty of outstanding financial applications are available for the Linux operating system. From personal finance to business finance, there is an application for nearly every need. Let's take a look at the top Linux financial applications.