I had bitter feelings about RealNetworks products and practices years ago, but over the last couple of years I find that RealPlayer8 is one of the first apps I open on my linux machines. I confess I am a BBC Radio addict living in the USA and streaming audio is my only way to listen.

Xandros Desktop 2.5 represents the fourth release of the desktop GNU/Linux distribution formerly known as Corel Linux. Xandros prides itself on superior Windows compatibility, and to maintain that reputation it includes some hard-hitting tools for making Windows programs work well on GNU/Linux. It's a little on the expensive side as far as desktop distributions go, and it feels somewhat like a slightly watered-down version of Linspire, but Xandros 2.5 Business Edition definitely has its advantages.

The new version of KDE has a completely new email client, in one of many improvements designed to close the features gap with Windows. The final release of KDE 3.3, an open-source Linux desktop environment, is due in a few days and will give users greatly improved email facilities.

AOL has released Netscape 7.2, unfortunately, linked to GTK+ 1.2.x instead of 2.x under Linux.

Swing provides a complete set of standard GUI components, ranging from simple buttons and text fields to feature-rich tables, trees, and text editors. This article presents a drawing component used by an image-annotation application named JImaging.

I read something in one of the comments for an OSNews posting a couple weeks ago that sent me thinking. It wasn't an original or profound thought. In fact, it's a rather commonly-held opinion that happens to be quite misguided. It's an opinion summed up by the "open source = communist" meme that gets thrown around in thousands of flamewars all over the internet. In this essay, I will explore why this idea is wrong and demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of economics.

HP World HP will be a pitching a story of Unix harmony and advancement at its HP World user conference here this week. First up, HP has now released HP-UX 11i V2 for both its Itanium and PA-RISC based servers. This means PA-RISC customers no longer have to wait until HP-UX 11i V3 arrives to use the same operating system as their Itanium counterparts. The bad news, however, is that both sets of customers will have to wait until the second half of next year to get their hands on V3 - a product once due at the end of this year.

Jorge Castro has a couple of interesting observations about packaging on Linux.

Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) introduces a number of new features that help increase the performance and the security of your system. These changes also affect the operations and functionality of some programs.

Solaris 9 9/04 Operating System, SPARC Platform Edition, is now available.

This article describes the system startup and installation processes for the Solaris Operating System and explains how to modify them to change the location from which the Solaris product is installed.

Get up to date on some of the new interface changes and features in Windows Server 2003, including a skinnable interface, folder compression to save space, built-in methods for CD burning, and remote desktop assistance.

Learn how to use C++ code to create basic animated graphics in this chapter from "Beginning Game Programming" by Michael Morrison.

The Gnoppix Project released Gnoppix 0.8. Gnoppix 0.8-Series comes with Gnome 2.6 and Kernel 2.6.7, gcc 3.4, egroupware, Openoffice, etc. The Mono/MonoDevelop environment is also included. There is also a GUI Installation tool, that lets you install Gnoppix with 7 clicks to disk.