Being the best doesn't always mean being the most popular. We all know of many inferior products that are immensely, sometimes perplexingly, popular. However, this does not mean that one must forsake the pursuit of excellence when pursuing a broad market share. As proponents of open source software, it should not be beneath us to pursue popularity or to look to proprietary developers as examples. And by following the right examples, we can help spread the usage of open source software without sacrificing the goal of software excellence, says NewsForge.

Linare Pro is a commercial GNU/Linux distribution based on Fedora Core. It is themed to look and feel like WinXP and aims to be a full-featured well-integrated desktop OS. Read its review at NewsForge. OSNews also learned that the very affordable Linare laptops are selling extremely well via Wal-Mart.

Today, Apple Computer announced the release date of MacOS X 10.4 "Tiger." Tiger will hit shelves on Friday, April 29.

With some free time and some spare equipment lying around, I decided to give Novell's Open Enterprise Server an install. I work in a Netware environment, but given recent trends, I decided to try and drop OES on a fresh SuSE Enterprise install. This isn't a comprehensive review; rather it's just some comments while I was just playing around. It might give people a better idea what OES actually is.

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 5.4 is now available for testing.

I'll try to explain my experience on updating Ubuntu 4.10 Warty to 5.04 Hoary. I've been a Debian user for some years, and updated the system at least twice (Woody -> Sarge -> Sid) with apt-get dist-upgrade. I followed exactly the Hoary release notes with Synaptic, but life isn't always a path of roses, and there are some glitches that need to be solved. Discover which ones

Gnome has been plugging away with its 2.X series from quite some time now, updating every 6 months on a predictable schedule making incremental improvements with each release. During this period they have kept their API stable and have refrained from making fundamental changes to the project. The developers have acknowledged that at some point in the somewhat near future, they will break from this series and begin work on a new series that removes some of the old cruft and changes some fundamental approaches in how people use Gnome. Here are a few of my suggestions for what would help Gnome 3 a revolutionary leap forward.

In the Linux in Government Columm, Linspire gets a review - not as technological as some others - but for its contribution to the Linux adoption curve.

After a faltering start, Microsoft is stepping up its commitment to Intel's Itanium processor.

Fedora Core 4 Test 2 is now available on the FTP first mirror and over BitTorrent, more here.

Ian Murdoch, Debian's founding father, does not believe Ubuntu's popularity bodes well for Debian-based distros. "If anything, Ubuntu's popularity is a net negative for Debian," Murdoch told internetnews.com. "It's diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don't work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare."

Here is a tutorial about apt on rpm-based distributions. This tutorial is split into two parts: in the first it demonstrates how to install and use apt based on an example (apt on SUSE 9.2), and in the second part it will give you an overview of the packages to install and the package repositories for each distribution mentioned above.

When Firefox’s Mozilla came onto the scene four months ago it looked like an end to the constant struggle against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer security vulnerabilities was finally in sight. The promise was almost too good to be true: a viable alternative that had been designed with a security conscious approach, no pop-ups and none of IE’s vulnerabilities. read more

Most times when an object shows up for work, it's capable of performing as required, because its capabilities are advertised explicitly in its interface. However, life is not always that straightforward. This chapter will help you learn what to do when capabilities aren't readily apparent.