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Last week I wrote the first part of this series which discussed the installation of Mepis, Kubuntu, OpenSuse, and Freespire on my laptops. Now that I have had time to play with each of the operating systems I would like to discuss my impressions of the different distributions. I have not spent any time on OpenSuse yet so I will leave it out of the discussion.

Colin Walters of Red Hat chaired a FOSSCamp session about Hotwire, a unique and innovative graphical shell environment designed to improve the command-line user experience. I've been testing Hotwire releases for some time now, so the opportunity to see Walters present his invention in person seemed too good to pass up.

iRiver is readying a Linux-based media recorder/player comprised of a detachable mobile unit and tethered docking station. The Unit2's base station offers a DVD/CD player, TV tuner, and PC-style I/O, while the detachable display features a 7-inch WVGA (800x480) touchscreen, WiFi, and USB. Apparently, the idea is to use the docking station to record DVDs, music CDs, or TV content onto the portable unit, which can then be carried with the user.

The release of Fedora 8 (codenamed Werewolf) is due out for release in less than two weeks and comes with a host of new features. Fedora 8 will offer a Codec Buddy for installing audio/video codecs, an open-source Java stack now based upon IcedTea, improved laptop support, the Pulse Audio sound server, remote virtualization support, and much more. As a sneak peak at the final release of Fedora 8, taken from the Fedora 2007-10-24 Rawhide spin we have screenshots of the improvements to the Fedora Firstboot, the Fedora 8 GNOME desktop, and also the KDE version of Fedora 8. Enjoy!

Have you ever taken a picture which would be just great only if you could remove that strange unwanted object that showed up in the middle of nowhere and now kills the whole effect? Or perhaps you just want to get rid of your ex-girlfriend and keep the photo with a fantastic landscape alone? Whatever your secret plans are, GIMP Liquid rescale plugin is there for you. Just use it!

Ars was at FOSSCamp this weekend. Think of FOSSCamp as an "un-conference" without a set agenda where the minds behind open source projects get together and plot world domination (and, err, ways to improve their code). One fascinating session (and one that shows how FOSSCamp works and why it's so productive) was given by Mirco Müller, who discussed using OpenGL in GTK applications. Müller—the developer behind Cairo-Clock and the LowFat image viewer—talked about the state of OpenGL support in desktop applications and described various techniques that developers can use to make OpenGL content integrate better with conventional GTK user interfaces.

Back in 1995, I read an article about the scarcity of webmasters and switched my specialty. I often look for hot spots and retool to meet the needs. Before 1995, Oracle Financials was hot. I just didn’t care much for the rigidity of technology. But, I was an accountant and an IT guy so I had tooled up for database programming.read more

The funny thing about those telling developers it's a new way of thinking and to "give everything away" or to "build it and they shall come" are often those making their cash using tried and tested ways of working.

This weekend, ten KOffice hackers congregated once again in the hospitable Berlin KDAB headquarters. KOffice has come a long way in six months: all the groundwork has been laid for the new version, KOffice 2.0. From Krita to KPresenter, KWord to KSpread, KChart to Karbon, KPlato to Kexi, and from KFormula to Kivio, the big underlying frameworks are ready. This meeting was called to decide on common look & feel issues and a release plan and schedule.

Earlier this month we looked at the ASUS P5E3 Deluxe WiFi motherboard, which featured a new technology called Express Gate that was an instant-on Linux-based desktop environment that supported a web browser and the Skype VoIP client. This motherboard also featured integrated 802.11n wireless, Intel's X38 Chipset, and a variety of ASUS AI features. However, ASUS innovations are not limited to their motherboards but certainly extend to their wide graphics card selection as well. The EN8600GT OC GEAR/HTDP/256M graphics card is based upon NVIDIA's GeForce 8600GT GPU with ASUS OC Gear. OC Gear? This is the world's first hardware-based real-time overclocking device. The PCI Express graphics card ships with a controller device that can be installed into a 5.25" drive bay and via USB, it's able to overclock the graphics card with a turn of a dial. In this review today we'll tell you how well the ASUS EN8600GT OC Gear graphics card works under Linux.

So the latest IDC quarterly server report is saying that shipments of servers with Linux on them are on a downturn, compared to shipments of servers with Windows Server on them. Game over, Linux, you are defeated.

Internet-gentile mobile operator 3 finally released full details of its new Skype handset at an event in London today. Early adopters can expect free calls, but no guarantees of reliability.

Morgantown, WV, US and Thessaloniki, Greece, Oct 29, 2007 -- MEPIS has announced the "Lysistrata" release of antiX, a lightweight derivative of SimplyMEPIS 7.0. AntiX is built and maintained by MEPIS community member anticapitalista, as a free version of MEPIS for very old 32 bit PC hardware. The antiX web site is at antix.mepis.org and an antiX forum is hosted at http://www.mepislovers.org

Comment Canonical's release of a fresh version of Ubuntu has been met with plenty of grumbles. And now we find some other open source players trying to cash in on Ubuntu's issues.

The "please" is not a request...it is a hard, gloved hand pointing in the direction of those we have chosen to do our bidding. Call them politicians, panderers or power-brokers...they all have a responsibility to you and I and it's time we reminded them of those responsibilities. It's we that dictate to them our wishes and desires. Somehow we have gotten our roles switched around.

A group of open source enthusiasts and professionals from various organizations in the academia and industry are presenting a workshop at the AMIA Symposium this November (Nov 10, 2007). The topic is"Open source tools and applications in medical informatics". We invite all those interested in using, contributing or collaborating to open source to attend.

The subject of testing seems to be in the air at the moment - Matt Stephens recently discussed it in his "Agile" column entitled "Don't unit test GUIs". This month in the Java column we are also going to look at testing, but this time from the viewpoint of design.

Privileges define the access level of the user, or what operations the user is allowed to do and the sections of the Command Center which the user is allowed to see. Every person entry in Command Center has some sort of privileges set.

. . . Intel Intel let the reviews go today on the new Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core QX9650 processor. This processor is based on Intel's new 45nm manufacturing process and is the new big kid on the block.

Konqueror is an advanced file manager for the K Desktop Environment, providing file management functions ranging from simple cut/copy and paste operations to advanced local and remote network file browsing. Konqueror's default setup is a good balance between usability and user-friendliness. However, the usability factor can be enhanced by the use of service menus.