Dear me. Just because I recently talked about Windows XP SP3's virtues and vices, some people seem to think I've turned away from my beloved Linux systems. Nope, I'm still a rock-solid Linux desktop user. In fact, I'm writing this tale on my #2 desktop, which runs openSUSE 10.3. But, just because I use Linux all the time-my current office's desktop offerings include the aforementioned openSUSE, Mint 4.0, Ubuntu 8.04, MEPIS 7.0, Freespire 2.03-doesn't mean that I don't run other desktop operating systems. I do. XP SP3 has the lead with three systems running it-two on virtual machines under Linux and one natively; two Macs running Tiger and Leopard; a copy of the newest OpenSolaris that I'm still tuning, and one system that I tolerate having Vista SP1 on.

We finally finished our review of Shuttle's KPC K-4500, the Foresight Linux-based small form factor desktop that Shuttle announced a few weeks back. This review covers the lowest end complete system. Shuttle also offers a bare-bones K45 model (with no operating system) as well as a few others with higher-end hardware and Vista Basic.

Wine is nearing its 1.0 release, and we need your help to make sure it's a good one! Wine has been under heavy development in recent months, and some applications that used to work well no longer do. But we don't know which ones! Please help us find them, so we can fix them. Here's how:

Join us for an interesting discussion on open source clinical trial software the DIA Annual Meeting June 24th in Boston. This presentation will evaluate how open, standards-based software can alleviate the challenges of flexibility, interoperability, and cost in regulated clinical research environments. Presenters will discuss the unique advantages and challenges in developing and using open source software for tasks such as electronic data capture, and provide an overview of other open source technologies currently being used in clinical trials.

Fedora 9, the latest release from the Fedora Project, goes up for download on Tuesday. The ninth release of Fedora ushers in a number of changes aimed at making the venerable distribution a more newbie-friendly desktop, but longtime users needn't fear a great dumbing down; version 9 packs plenty of power user punch as well. Fedora is a community-driven distribution sponsored by Red Hat and, while Fedora may be best known as a popular server OS, most of the changes in Fedora 9 are aimed at making the system friendlier for desktop users.

"I like to make browsers do things that they weren't supposed to do," Brad Neuberg likes to say. As a developer advocate for Google Gears, Neuberg has a wide scope for pursuing this interest, not only as an active developer, but also as a frequent speaker at conferences. His message is that Gears is not a means of working offline with Internet content -- which, so far has been its main function in applications like Google Reader and Google Calendar -- but also a potential universal update mechanism for browsers that could help to keep the Web free.

What do you want your cell phone to be able to do? Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson put that question to about 20 computer science students this semester when he gave them one assignment: Design a software program for cell phones that use Google Inc.'s upcoming Android mobile operating system. In the process, they revealed the power of an open system like Android to shake up the mobile phone industry, where wireless companies are being pressured to loosen the control they have maintained over what devices do. If the brainstorms of these MIT students are an indication, phones will soon challenge the Internet as a source of innovation.

After I reviewed Alien Arena last year, some readers criticized my choice of that first-person shooter (FPS) as the best free software game I had played. Several suggested Nexuiz would have been a better choice. At the time, I had not played it. Now that I have tried Nexuiz 2.4, it has become my favorite free software FPS. Nexuiz runs on an improved Quake engine called DarkPlaces. The engine has been undergoing on-and-off development by Lord Havoc, the game's creator, for several years. On icculus.org, Lord Havoc says he developed a custom OpenGL-only engine for DarkPlaces, and other modifications that "support Windows WGL and Linux GLX and have greatly improved graphics and image quality."

It was not intentional, but my later work on OpenSourceToday evolved where I copied up files directly from the version control onto the server. Moreover, I started making quick fixes directly on the version control copy (local) and then loading it onto the server. That cycle, my loading, my testing and my correcting code continued until I had acceptable functionality. Despite my having a poor fit between the site and the version control directory structure, I abandoned old habits. I believe that implies a natural existing advantage, hence, I found myself relying increasingly upon the version control copy.

In this article, learn to use Firebug, a free, open source extension for the Firefox browser that provides many useful developer features and tools. Using Firebug, you can monitor, edit, and debug live pages, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript code, and network traffic.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script. This allows an Administrator to write a shell script that performs a given function but make the program easy for less sophisticated users to interact with.

Times change, businesses have to adapt. Any entrepreneur knows this. But nowhere is it truer, perhaps, than in the telecom and Internet industries. Just ask ISPhone Inc., the Traverse City, Mich.-based IP telephony wholesaler we first wrote about in 1999 when founder and president Victor von Schlegell was just getting his company off the ground.

If somebody accidentally drops a critical table in MySQL, the application no longer works. The solution to this problem is to utilize the (open source) Zmanda Recovery Manager. You are a MySQL database administrator. You take regular backups of your MySQL database. Somebody drops a table critical to the MySQL application (for example, the "accounts" table in a SugarCRM application). The MySQL application no longer works. How can you recover from the situation?The answer is MySQL binary logs. Binary logs track all updates to the database with minimal impact on database performance. MySQL binary logs have to be enabled on the server. You can use the mysqlbinlog MySQL command to recover from the binary logs.

Back in March we had reviewed the Quadro FX1700 512MB graphics card, which is NVIDIA's lower-end OpenGL 2.1 workstation graphics card that's based upon the consumer G84 core. In the benchmarks that had followed, we had compared the Quadro FX1700 performance under Windows, Linux, and Solaris. We had found the performance of this Quadro graphics card performed well under all three platforms, but Ubuntu Linux had led the race. We are now preparing a review of the high-end ATI FireGL V8600 1GB graphics card for publishing in the coming days, but we have stumbled upon some results from the FX1700 that never ended up making it out earlier. Specifically we had overclocked the Quadro FX1700 with CoolBits and it had actually worked out quite well. In this article are the overclocking results from this NVIDIA workstation graphics card as well as comparing the performance to an ATI Radeon HD 2900XT 512MB graphics card.

Fedora 9 is scheduled for release tomorrow. Six months after Fedora 8 was released, Fedora 9 will be available in a variety of “spins” (custom boot images for everything from desktop installs to USB devices) with improved networking and eyecandy.

This document describes how to reconfigure the default language and the keyboard layout on various distributions so that they suit your location. I made this howto for our VMware images where the keyboard layout is always set to German and a few users have problems to configure the language and keyboard layout on these images.

Do you fancy Web-based word processors but aren't ready to leave OpenOffice.org? You can work with your Zoho Writer and Google Docs files from the convenience of OpenOffice.org Writer, courtesy of the OoGdocsIntegrator extension. Despite its name, the OoGdocsIntegrator extension can handle both Google Docs and Zoho Writer. In fact, it offers better integration with the latter than the former. Since OoGdocsIntegrator is written in Java, you have to make sure that you have the Java Runtime Environment installed on your machine and enabled in OpenOffice.org. To do this, choose Tools -> Options -> OpenOffice.org -> Java. Make sure that Sun's Java Runtime Environment is selected, press OK, and restart OpenOffice.org.

Audacity is a cross-platform digital audio editor application. It imports and records audio tracks, provides a large palette of digital effects and plug-ins, and can be used for a variety of tasks – from post-processing of podcasts, to converting and mastering cassette tapes or records into digital tracks. This tutorial presents the most important features of Audacity. Part 1 is devoted to issues associated with recording of audio files. Next parts will show how to use effects, mix tracks and remove vocals from music recordings.

Welcome to this year's 19th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! It's a Fedora week here at DistroWatch. A new version of the popular distribution will be released later this week, complete with the usual cutting edge features, such as KDE 4, dramatic speed improvements, support for the ext4 file system and many others. One popular application set missing from the distro, however, is KDE 3.5, now relegated to the dustbins of history by the project. If you are a Fedora KDE user, should you upgrade or should you not? Read our first-impressions review of Fedora 9 KDE to obtain some answers. In the news section, openSUSE presents several user interface improvements for its package manager, Ubuntu prepares to deliver cool new features in Intrepid Ibex, Attila Craciun introduces the Slackware-based Bluewhite64 Linux, and PC-BSD updates its artwork and fixes bugs in preparation for the 7.0 release. Also included are several resources to help you manage your OpenSolaris system better and an interesting update on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Happy reading!

The company has abandoned its appeal against a German ruling that it must supply source code with Linux-based VoIP phones, in compliance with GPLv2.