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The Asus Eee PC ultraportable comes bundled with a version of Xandros as its operating system. If you would like to try a different Linux distro on your Eee, there are plenty of options to choose from, including eeeXubuntu, EeeDora, ZenEee, EeePCLinuxOS, and Puppeee. The latter is based on Puppy Linux, a tiny Linux distribution that sports a few unique features that make it a perfect candidate for use on machines like the Eee PC.

Komparator is an application, that can compare and synchronize the content of two (local or remote) folders. Contrary to popular belief this activity is popular among users of all platforms, but in Linux you had to use unfriendly console apps (such as diff) to do the job. Not anymore!

Storage performance has failed to keep up with that of other major components of computer systems. Hard disks have gotten larger, but their speed has not kept pace with the relative speed improvements in RAM and CPU technology. The potential for your hard drive to be your system's performance bottleneck makes knowing how fast your disks and filesystems are and getting quantitative measurements on any improvements you can make to the disk subsystem important. One way to make disk access faster is to use more disks in combination, as in a RAID-5 configuration.

The NSW Department of Education has put Microsoft on notice after it agreed to extend its software licensing agreement with the company for just one year instead of renegotiating a new three-year contract. At the same time, technology chief Stephen Wilson announced the department will install a free alternative to Microsoft's Office suite, referred to in industry circles as OpenOffice, on 41,000 computers due to be distributed to schools across the state by the end of 2008. The NSW Department of Education is also resisting Microsoft's attempts to upgrade users to the latest version of its Vista operating system. Instead, Wilson's team is downgrading every new computer it buys from Vista to Windows XP.

Guest commentator Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Ziff Davis Enterprise tells what, in his opinion, is important about the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit going on right now in Austin, Texas.

Open Health Tools (OHT), based in the United States, announced its Health Interoperability Framework on Tuesday, which will see the organization work with international standards bodies, governments and companies from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and the United States to develop common healthcare IT products and services.

Late last week I had the chance to participate in a call with Bob Bickel and Rich Friedman of Ringside Networks who talked us through their plans for the new open source social networking technology vendor. In short, Ringside’s Social Application Server is designed to add social networking capabilities to existing applications and content. It does this providing hooks into enterprise data sources while delivering compatibility and interoperability with Facebook applications via the Facebook API, while support for Google and MySpace’s OpenSocial is also on its way.

A lot of people have been reporting issues with Ralink (rt61, especially) chipsets and the Gutsy upgrade. Some users are struggling so much that they have gone ahead and reverted to using NDISWrapper and the Windows driver for their Ralink chipsets.

There are numerous menus in the front end of every application. They are often displayed as standalone boxes. The menu items are generally arranged one below the other. Menus can also be integrated into the design horizontally so that at first sight they aren't even recognizable as cohesive menus. CSS menus, which can even be transparent, are very cool.

After last week's unveiling of Mobile Internet Device (MID) prototypes based on Intel's Atom Centrino chipset, the pundits are weighing in. At ZDNet, Dana Blankenhorn blasts the whole lot as "ugly" while at TechNewsWorld, Rob Enderle calls the new Linux-based Lenovo MID an "iPhone killer."

People everywhere love Flash. It has become the Web’s de facto standard for all manner of interfaces. From simple menus to full-blown games, you can bet that Flash is there. It has been called one of the best prototyping tools available, and game designers love it because they don’t need to be computer science graduates to use it. Most people browsing the web today have a Flash plugin installed, making it a fairly ubiquitous platform. With all of these things going for it, why won’t I use it? Because if I can’t even watch YouTube videos without it crashing Firefox on my Ubuntu system, then it can’t be that ubiquitous.

Recently there has been significant discussion of Linux's TCP SACK implementation, and its weakness within the Linux TCP stack. SACK is an optional feature of TCP necessary for effective use of all available bandwidth of some networks. However, processing this type of acknowledgment can be CPU intensive for the TCP sender, and thus a weakness which can be exploited by a malicious peer.

The same thing has happened to me more than once. I install a FreeBSD-derived operating system on the $0 Laptop (the Gateway Solo 1450) and I marvel at the way it manages the noisy CPU fan right out of the box. Then, the next day, it's all over. The fan blows. And blows. Even a complete reinstall won't get back my fan-managed bliss.

Which brings us to my favorite groupware and messaging server, Citadel BBS. Citadel is 100% GPL, and doesn't play games with making either binary or source downloads easily available. If I had to describe Citadel in a word, it would be "simplicity". It is a complex application with a lot of power and flexibility, but it's easy to install and administer. It has an excellent installation script that builds the whole works from source code, and the same script is also an upgrader. Unnecessary complexity may wow the PHB set, but we real people know that simplifying the management of a complex application takes some real engineering skills.

Live CDs are still something that are relatively new to the Fedora Project, but because of their integration to the build system and the user facing tools such as livecd-tools allowing for easy re-spinning, they’re a fairly central part of what Fedora can offer people. Could you give us a bit of background on this and explain the current state of live spins in Fedora 8?

Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. This is Microsoft's latest effort to satisfy anti-trust concerns of the European Union, which is possibly a tougher adversary for the company than Google.

Web Console 0.2.5 beta has been released – that is a second public release of the Web Console. Web Console is open source application that provides access to a web server command prompt from an Internet browser. Furthermore, it includes file manager, files upload/download feature and text files editor, which allows to edit files directly on a web server through browser.

Today at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, VIA Technologies, Inc., a leading innovator of power efficient x86 processor platforms, announced a new initiative to improve support for the Open Source development community. As the first step in this initiative, VIA will open its official VIA Linux website at http://linux.via.com.tw this month.

Over at Seeking Alpha, uber-schmoozer Joe Panettieri (left), now running Nine Lives Media, has one of those pieces that makes me go “waah?” Short version: open source is Microsoft’s secret weapon. Billgatus of Borg close-upThis is not another paeon to Firefox or OpenOffice. Panettieri is talking about Microsoft’s Windows Server business, its true crown jewel, and the effort to make sure open source projects work on it. Specifically he’s talking about working with Spikesource, whom I wrote about earlier today, in certifying programs to work with Windows Server. Open source, he says, is how Windows will kill Linux.

How do I like WordPress 2.5? In a word, "wow." Its developers promised that WordPress 2.5, released last month, was more than just "a fresh coat of paint." Instead, they said, 2.5 was a "from the ground up" redesign. The goal was to create a new WordPress that would be powerful but easy to administer. After upgrading my WordPress installation and using the new format, I found that the WordPress development team has done a fabulous job of making WordPress even better than it was. It's not perfect, but it's darn close.