It's been 12 years since I got my first PC. Back then, it came with a 14" 800x600 CRT monitor. But times change. Now, for just $250 you can get a 22" LCD monitor with a 1680x1050 resolution! Geeks.com were very kind to send us one of their LCD monitors, the Viewsonic VX2235wm, for a review. We tested the monitor under Windows, Linux and the Mac and here is what we found.

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions about how to install the free VMware Server (version 1.0.2) on a Debian Etch system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (virtual machines) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free). Also, VMware acquired the VDI provider Propero.

"The founder of the ambitious "$100 laptop" project, which plans to give inexpensive computers to schoolchildren in developing countries, revealed Thursday that the machine for now costs $175, and it will be able to run Windows in addition to its homegrown, open-source interface." More here.

Novell openSUSE project has had a recent history of trouble with its update programs. Now, to make updating openSUSE more pleasant, the project is dropping its support for ZENworks and opening up YAST to community development. DesktopLinux.com has the story here and some other info here.

"After making a lot of progress with Mandriva Linux 2007, I thought perhaps Mandriva had turned over a new leaf, and was using that release as a starting point for an overall better quality operating environment. I was totally wrong. Both the PowerPack Edition and Discovery/LX have slid so far back with version 2007.1 that I have serious doubts as to the future of Mandriva's viability as a commercial desktop operating system." Read more at SoftwareInReview.

Adobe Systems plans to open-source Flex, its development framework for building Flash and Apollo-based applications. The company on Wednesday is expected to announce the move, which will start when it releases a beta of the next version of Flex, code-named Moxie, in June.

According to kerneltrap: "The future of Reiser4 was raised on the lkml, with the filesystem's creator, Hans Reiser, awaiting his May 7th trial. Concerns that the filesystem wasn't being maintained were laid to rest when Andrew Morton stated, 'the namesys engineers continue to maintain reiser4 and I continue to receive patches for it.'"

NeoSmart has the goods on the release of Windows Longhorn Server Beta 3, and the availability of public ISO images for x86, x64, and Itanium versions of the English, German, and Japanese localizations of the various Windows Server flavors. According to NeoSmart, it's the same as the April CTP, but with some bug fixes and compiler optimizations.

Linux Kernel 2.6.21 has been announced. Linus writes: "So the big change during 2.6.21 is all the timer changes to support a tickless system (and even with ticks, more varied time sources). Thanks (when it no longer broke for lots of people ;) go to Thomas Gleixner and Ingo Molnar and a cadre of testers and coders." More info here and here.

Ubuntu Open Week is a series of IRC meetings of people behind the distribution and the community. Mark Shuttleworth answered various questions on Tuesday and Wednesday. The interview covers many issues, including: GPL v3, proprietary software, Microsoft's $3 project, Launchpad, non-free stuff in Ubuntu, April 19th siege of ubuntu.com, Canonical vs. Ubuntu Foundation, becoming F/OSS contributor. Full logs are available on Ubuntu wiki. Ubuntu News has a digest with the most interesting pieces. Also, another interview with Mark is here and four interesting Ubuntu articles are here, here, here and here.

"One of the many new technologies for KDE 4 is the often mentioned, but seldom explained Solid hardware API. Hardware has always been a bit of an annoying element of using Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, but Solid hopes to fix that for KDE 4. In many ways, Solid is like Phonon, in that it's a Qt/KDE style API around already existing components at the lower level, such as freedesktop.org's HAL. It is already quite functional in the backend, and it's already affecting visible KDE components."

Paul Thurrott reviews the latest CTP of Windows Home Server. "I remain excited about WHS and while one might easily come up with a number of features they'd like to see added to the product - a server-based version of Media Center comes to mind - know this: This is the initial version of WHS, Microsoft plans to keep improving it over time, and they're listening to your suggestions and ideas. As with the first version of Media Center, the technology is in a nascent stage but is already quite compelling. If this first version of WHS is so good, I can only imagine what the future holds."

"More than half of the 1.2 million lines of code for the real-time kernel technology have been moved into the mainline Linux kernel over the past year, Tim Burke, the director of emerging technologies at Red Hat, said at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference on April 23."

A month ago I wrote a review on Ubuntu's 7.04 version and in it I promised a second look once the final version was to released. Feisty Fawn was released last week and as it seems so far, it is one of the most (if not the most) successful Linux distro release ever. This means that we can't help it but compare it with XP and Mac OS X, after having tested it in 3 laptops and 2 desktops in my lab.