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Debian and Ubuntu are distributions that lend themselves naturally to comparison. Not only is Ubuntu a continuing fork of Debian, but many of its developers also work on Debian. Even more important, you sometimes hear the suggestion that Ubuntu is a beginner's distribution, and that users might consider migrating to Debian when they gain experience. So what are the differences between these Siamese twins? Looking at installation, the desktop, package management, and community in the two distributions what emerges is not so much major differences as differences of emphasis, and ultimately, of philosophy.

Everyone uses Microsoft at some point or other. Even if you're not a fan of Microsoft it's hard to ignore the unique position of Office as the world's most popular office suite. The latest version of Office 2010 is out now and there are a few good reasons to give it a try.

Mozilla Messaging released Thunderbird 3.1 a small update for the open source email client that features bug fixes, improvements, and a few new functions for end users. The most immediately recognizable update is an added Filter Bar that allows to quickly index the messages in your inbox, or any other tab you have open. In addition, there is a Setup Wizard and a Migration assistant that allows you to keep you existing buttons and layout or switch to the default view for 3.1.

As I mentioned in an earlier Linux Journal article, I decided to cut the apron strings with my television provider over a year ago. Bye bye, DISH Satelite TV! Man, you should have heard them whimper. "But sir, is there anything we can do to keep your business?".

The Wine development release 1.2-rc5 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations.

In which a coup is planned in North Korea, a mystery is unraveled in Nevada, and Frank (unknowingly) finds himself out of the frying pan - and into the fire.

Companies based around open source are still comparatively young. So it remains an open question what happens to them in the long term. As open source becomes more widely accepted, an obvious growth path for them is to be bought by a bigger, traditional software company. The concern then becomes: how does the underlying open source code fare in those circumstances?

"Awhile ago, two family members of mine were programing something for a simple task, they chose to do it in Visual Basic as the program was going to be running in a Windows environment anyway." ... "There were small problems getting it to work properly (as this can happen programing anything.) Seeing the code, everything looked like it would work"

When a consumer installs a Linux system, this has various consequences for him, which are sometimes hard to estimate at first. I've written a little summary touching the differences to Windows and Mac OS X in drivers, open source and support.

KidZui turns Firefox into fun, kid-safe browser and online playground for kids in the age group 3-12, with over a million kids games, YouTube videos, and websites. Or in other words, KidZui Firefox extension turns Firefox into a place where your kids would love to be.

Great tool to get access to main configuration tools, system tool packages also listed in good way to easily access your configurations, Ubuntu Control Center inspired by Mandriva Control Center... readmore

Your editor had the pleasure of giving a keynote talk at the 2010 LinuxTag, immediately prior to Mark Shuttleworth's keynote - a position described by more than one person as being Mark's warmup act. That role must have been successfully carried out; Mark's talk was, indeed, well received from the start. Topics ranged from the familiar (cadence) to issues like quality, with a look at upcoming Ubuntu design features as well.

Commandlinefu.com collects your useful command-line one liners and shares them with the rest of the world. I check it out every so often (if you're really dedicated, there are Twitter and RSS feeds),

Decibel Audio Player is a GTK+ open-source (GPL) audio player for GNU/Linux. It is very straightforward to use thanks to a clean and user-friendly interface. It is especially targeted at Gnome and follows the Gnome HIG.Decibel Audio Player is built around a highly modular structure that lets the user disable completely the features he does not need. A disabled feature uses absolutely no memory and no processor time.

This tutorial describes how you can monitor your server with the tool Bijk. Bijk creates online 30 graphs about load, CPU, memory, traffic, Apache, NginX, PostreSQL and others with alerts. Bijk can be used on Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat and Gentoo. In this article I will explain how to install Bijk on Debian.

Here's the US Supreme Court's opinion [PDF] in Bilski v. Kappos, at last. The lower court's decision is affirmed, and so no patent for Bilski. However, business methods are not found totally ineligible for patents, just this one. But the door is not swung wide open. From the Syllabus: "Finally, while §273 appears to leave open the possibility of some business method patents, it does not suggest broad patentability of such claimed inventions."

Adrian Bridgwater talks cross-platform application and user interface framework development with Qt program manager Volker Hilsheimer…

This is the third in a series of posts about the pre-releases of KDE SC 4.5. This one is about the first release candidate. In the previous posts about beta 1 and beta 2 I went over the new features in 4.5 – few as they are. I also pointed out that one of the focuses of this release is stability.

Android and iPhone OS (iOS) have been at loggerheads for quite some time now and recently there has been a lot of talk about which is more secure or which has more malware. This is a take on which has a better security model to protect its users. It will give a point by point detailed account of which platform does what "kind" of security better.

In recent weeks we have published a number of benchmarks showcasing the ATI Gallium3D driver that supports the R300-R500 graphics processors as this open-source driver has been maturing at such an exciting rate with impressive changes and measurable performance gains over a short period of time. This ATI Gallium3D driver in most instances is outperforming the classic Radeon Mesa driver that supports up through the ATI Radeon X1000 series graphics cards. However, how is the Nouveau driver maturing that supports NVIDIA's wide-range of GeForce graphics cards? In February we published some Nouveau Gallium3D benchmarks, but now we have a fresh set of numbers from three different NVIDIA graphics cards and we also compare the Nouveau Gallium3D driver to NVIDIA's proprietary Linux driver.