At this point there are really only three major contenders on the desktop market; Windows, GNU/Linux and Mac OS X. It is a known fact that Windows still holds the vast majority of the market and Mac OS X is tied to computers made only by one manufacturer.

This was actually supposed to be a follow-up to my tests of startup performance of various desktop environments, primarily KDE of course. I decided I should publish at least a shorter variant with all the numbers and some conclusions. You can do your own analyses of the numbers if you will.

In this howto I will show you step-by-step how to successfully set up a long distance calls service in your Cybercafé, using open source software. The main element is *starShop-OSS, an open source application designed to monitor and bill, in real time, calls made via Asterisk PBX. This service is commonly called callshop or taxiphone.

XenSource offers its first product, which is the best Xen virtualization solution eWEEK Labs has tested, although it's not yet ready to take on VMware.

A simple oversight may cause some wondering WTF? I’ve been spending most of my time getting my Debian installation up and running with what I need. After a week or so I am really happy with it. Then the other day, I was trying to install something and I had run out of disk space! 23 gigs used already? for Linux?

So you just bought and assembled a brand-new AMD64 workstation. The only decision that remains is whether to install a 64-bit Linux distribution, or stick with comfortable, tried-and-true IA-32. If you are seeking an easy answer to that question, I can't help you. Running 64-bit Linux has its pros and cons. Unfortunately, a lot of the cons are out of your hands -- but they're not really Linux's fault, either.

The open source stack is moving to the core of data centers -- to a place where it's responsible for handling critical parts of business operations. Support for these applications is paramount for IT departments and absolutely essential to the enterprises that use them, according to a report from The 451 Group, based in New York.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a set of desktop computers in a more wretched state than those I saw this morning. It was going to be something of a miracle if they started up; however they did. Still, the result was not particularly pleasing. I decided to install and see if Linux could bring something as wretched as this back to life.

Earlier this year, I wrote that the General Public License version 3 (GPLv3) would bring the open-source and free-software communities to a critical juncture. While some scoffed, the decision of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) to discount the concerns of commercial open-sourcers with the latest draft of GPLv3 threatens to split the community and slow the growth of free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS).

Red Hat announced the growing adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network solutions by several higher education institutions, including Wake Forest University, the University of Washington and Vanderbilt University.

A recent Slashdot item on Wi-Fi security was a timely reminder of the weaknesses of default Wi-Fi encryption protocols, and the dangers of using unencrypted, public Wi-Fi connections. Fortunately, you can use FOSS utilities to securely tunnel your Wi-Fi connection sessions and protect your Web and email traffic.

European Commission on Tuesday warned US- computer giant Microsoft against bundling security upgrades into its new Windows Vista operating system.

Ok, so Gnome 2.16 came out a while ago. There are lots of new features. Yay for the foot. Now default Gnome is ass-ugly. Thank God the Ubuntu folks made their own theme, otherwise no one would be using Gnome at all. I'll swear by that.

Holoracer 3 has just been announced over at Happy Penguin. It aims to be an incredibly fast "twitch" racer with 3D psychodelic graphics and networked play. They've already got a finished release for you to sample on SourceForge. (HoloRacer@Sourceforge)

You must remember the period where various electronic devices, from phones to radios, were available in transparent cases. You may have found them utterly cool. Yet the simple fact that you can't find these things on the shelves anymore (except for do-it-yourself PC cases) means the crowd doesn't find them nearly that cool. While you may not see the link yet, this is exactly why the Linux desktop will never be popular.

Every wise old system and network administrator knows that security is a multilayer process. You have your firewalls and other border security, perhaps some internal network segmentation, and application and operating system security. However, locking down the operating system is probably the most crucial link in this chain. An excellent utility to help you probe, assess, and harden your Linux system is Bastille Linux.

This weekend a KDE delegation attended the Come2Linux expo in Essen, a city in western Germany. I was one of the KDE booth babes, along with Harald (from Austria), Carsten (Germany), Eckhart (Germany), and Benoit (France).

Those itching to get their hands on Red Hat's next version of Enterprise Linux now have a chance. Red Hat's community of enterprise users is now testing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 Beta 1, code-named Tikanga.

Atang1, one of the nice guys over at tuxmachines asked me once more to do my own review of the newest OpenLab release. A repeated honour which I am happy to oblige.

Michael aka. Darkstar let us know that he recently set up a small Wiki which focuses on reverse-engineering of (old) games. So far, they don't have a lot of information, but lets hope that it will change soon.