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As I wrote in the final Thin Puppy Torture Test entry, I wanted to try some other distributions with the Maxspeed Maxterm thin client, so I finally shut it down. After that, I opened up the box, unplugged the CF-to-IDE adapter and plugged in a 14.4 GB IDE hard drive by IBM and a 32X TDK CD-RW drive. I had trouble before even booting many Debian-derived Linux distributions, and I'm not exactly well-versed in the jumper settings for a hard drive and CD drive chained to a single IDE interface (there's only one IDE plug on this VIA-equipped Mini-ITX motherboard).

What operating system do the heads of Fortune 500 companies run on their personal laptops? In the case of Michael S. Dell, president and CEO of Dell, it's Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn. Yes, the head of Dell Inc., with a market-capitalization of just south of $56-billion, isn't just saying that Dell will be selling Linux-equipped PCs in the near future -- he's already running Linux at home.

You say you prefer to work in Linux? It doesn't mean you have to be left out of the freedom wireless computing brings you. In this tutorial learn how to configure a wireless network card under Linux. At the end of the tutorial you'll know how to set up a Linux laptop for wireless transmission using Gentoo distribution as an example.

SGI InfiniteStorage SAN and SGI Altix Server Accelerate Intense Data Workflow

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and ZENworks Asset Management Win CODiE Awards

"Patent tax" of $21.50 each

Each copy of Windows cost users an additional $21.50 "patent tax" to cover Microsoft litigation bills, the Software Freedom Law Center claims.

AcetoneISO is the disk image emulator that mounts images of DVD and CD media. Both Mac OS X and Linux / other UNIX like oses can mount and use ISO images using loopback device. It is a DAEMON Tools (Microsoft Windows disk image) clone / emulator program with a lot more features. Using this cool open source software means a user does not have to swap discs to run different programs on local or network computer. You can access software distributed (over Internet) as a disk image such as ISO, DAA, BIN or many other formats (no need to burn a CD/DVD to use disk image).

Since I'm a Red Hat fan (which includes Fedora Core and CentOS), I'm aware of the complaints people have about "having to download multiple CDs" before they can start installing. In fact, the recently released CentOS 5 is 6 CDs (i386, or 7 CDs for x86_64). To counter those complaints, I thought I'd try a single CD install of the recently released CentOS 5 "Debian style" and then add everything in post-install. Join me if you will...

But the system software, which shuns your hard drive, will also appeal to enterprise IT types, says U.K. Internet pioneer Peter Dawe.

Despite tepid sales (remember Origami?), a new generation of ultramobile PCs will arrive this year, and next year they might run on Linux.

This week on Open News ... Bruce Perens stands up for the GPLv3, Watch Out For Linux Wifi, and Linux Goes To The Races.

What kind of computer does Michael Dell have? See for yourself. These are the systems and peripherals Michael is using right now.

Most new Linux distributions nowadays come with a late-model kernel, virtualization support, and a 3D desktop. Mandriva's new Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, however, includes all those must-have features, plus VOIP phone support, Google Picasa and Google Earth, and -- would you believe it? -- support for the Nintendo Wii remote.

On Microsoft's Port 25 site, Hank Janssen has announced that Microsoft has released a plug-in Windows Media Player for Firefox. Well, that's the theory; in practice, DesktopLinux.com has been unable to download the actual file after trying to do so from both Linux and Windows systems.

While not marked in the official release notes, there have been some "under the hood" changes with the fglrx 8.36 driver. In this driver are two new files: esut.a and glesx.so. These are new X.Org modules for the fglrx driver and specifically involve TexturedVideo and OpenGL ES. The changes that stem from this should be very interesting and when the time comes for its implementation we will be sure to share all of the details.

Most people understand that an event watched by this many people for a month's time WILL generate interest and curiosity. The location of the event is secondary...no it's not even that it's...third-ary..? Well, you get what I mean. Now...if we could just put our politics aside for long enough to get this done, I am sure we can proceed beating the crap out of each other once we have secured ourselves a firm place in the market.

eLiberatica, the first national Romanian conference on free and open source software (FOSS), is scheduled for May 18-19 in the city of Braşov. The conference is the result of 18 months of planning by Lucian Savlac, a Romanian immigrant to Canada, assisted by FOSS licensing consultant Zak Greant. The goal is nothing less than unifying FOSS promotion throughout Romania and encouraging its adoption by business through grassroots organization. The goal, says Greant, "is to help build a broad, sustainable, effective free and open source movement in Romania that includes programmers, university students, and business people."

Ingo Molnar released a new patchset titled the "Modular Scheduler Core and Completely Fair Scheduler". He explained, "this project is a complete rewrite of the Linux task scheduler. My goal is to address various feature requests and to fix deficiencies in the vanilla scheduler that were suggested/found in the past few years, both for desktop scheduling and for server scheduling workloads." The patchset introduces Scheduling Classes, "an extensible hierarchy of scheduler modules. These modules encapsulate scheduling policy details and are handled by the scheduler core without the core code assuming about them too much."

While there are many contenders for the title of simplest wiki or easiest to use, Pawfaliki beats them all for two reasons: the entire wiki consists of just one PHP file, and it can be configured by anyone with little or no experience with PHP. This makes Pawfaliki a perfect tool for users who want to set up a personal wiki with minimum fuss, or small workgroups looking for a quick and easy way to share knowledge and collaborate.

Nokia’s latest device, the N800 Internet Tablet, is unique, to say the least. It’s not a smartphone, yet it can send and receive e-mail messages; it’s not a phone, yet it can make phone calls; it’s not a portable multimedia player; yet it can playback audio/video files; and it’s not a notebook, yet it can browser the web.