With new security holes appearing every day and spy/ad-ware spreading rampantly, the combination of Internet Explorer and Outlook Express are becoming increasingly dangerous choices for safe web browsing and e-mail. Yet what is one to do if they can't or won't switch from Windows to another operating system? It's simple: bring the security and power of Open Source applications to Windows. The Mozilla Project's Firefox web browser and Thunderbird e-mail client do just that, and do it without sacrificing the easy-to-use, clean interface users demand. As associate editor Ed Hurst noted in his OpenCD review earlier this year, many of the Open Source community's best applications are available conveniently packaged for Windows, and the Mozilla Project's applications are no exception.
A few months ago, we looked at the IOGear Miniview Extreme series of keyboard, video and mouse switches (KVM's) that can be used to control multiple computers without the clutter of multiple input and display devices. Unlike many KVM's, however, the IOGear unit provided multimedia support — speaker and microphone sharing — in addition to its abilities to share the normal stuff people expect KVM's to work with. Like the IOGear units, Avocent's creatively named SwitchView USB 4-port (Audio) Switch, is one of these new “KVMP” multimedia switches.
Novell is an interesting company, and has only become more so since it decided to dive head first into GNU/Linux last year. Nat Friedman, formerly of Novell acquired Ximian and now the veep of Novell's Linux Technologies Group took some time to answer our questions about exactly where the company is heading with GNU/Linux.
Perhaps it is a new laptop that will compliment rather than replace your desktop or perhaps you have found the need for both a PC and a Mac. Whatever the case, if you have the need to operate two or more computers, the idea of a KVM switch — which provides a way to control multiple systems with just one keyboard, monitor and mouse — becomes very attractive. Unfortunately not all KVM's are created equally — many do not get along that well with Mac or Linux systems. What are you to do? Join me for our look at the first two of several promising new KVM switches we've been testing — IOGear's MiniView Extreme KVM's.
Apple computer has a long and distinguished list of “firsts” in
personal computing, not to mention the least of which, they invented
personal computing as we know it today. The others include a long line
of stuff, including, but not limited to, in personal computer “firsts,”
first with a GUI, first with a mouse, first with a color monitor, first
with a floppy drive, first with a hard drive, first to have a CD-ROM,
first to make home movie editing possible, first with USB and Firewire,
first with 64-bit processor — the list goes on.
The Fall distribution release period of 2003 was not the most interesting, nor the least interesting in recent memory. For
the most part all of the distributions got better, but not so much
that those running distributions now going on a year in age are
really missing anything terribly substantial. We did find a few
interesting points worth revisiting, however, and those deal with
Mandrake Linux 9.2 and Fedora Core 1.
The wake of the controversial XFree86 license modifications that will premier in XFree86 4.4 is growing larger each day. It now appears that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Mandrake Linux, Debian GNU/Linux, OpenBSD and Gentoo Linux will be sticking with XFree86 4.3 in their next respective releases. With such a large controversy surrounding the license, we decided to ask Free Software Foundation founder and president Richard M. Stallman about the issue.
Trolltech's Qt development toolkit is serious stuff. As the foundation of KDE on the GNU/Linux desktop as well as its usage as a popular environment (when matched with Trolltech's Qtopia) for PDA interfaces, not to mention great support for Mac OS X, it is hard to imagine any tool that offers a comparably serious cross platform solution. With the third major release of the Qt 3 series last Wednesday, Trolltech CEO Haavard Nord graciously took some time to talk with us about Qt and related topics.
Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the Apple Macintosh computer. While the original Mac is certainly meager by today's standards, there are few that would argue against its revolutionary status in the early years of personal computing. In commemoration of that event, today also marks the launch of OfB MacFor.Biz, the new section of Open for Business that will cover the Mac in much the same way OfB covers GNU/Linux and BSD. In this premier piece, we will examine the latest Mac OS X, 10.3 “Panther,” on two separate generations of Macintosh systems.
Update: Improved OpenGL benchmark results included below.
MandrakeSoft, the French GNU/Linux distributor who filed for bankruptcy protection one year ago last week, announced today that its first fiscal quarter of 2004 resulted in a positive operating result of €280,000. This follows news in recent weeks that the company is preparing an exit plan to leave bankruptcy protection by the end of the quarter.