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Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle. He was chosen to lead a discussion on open governance at the Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. The open innovation concept is what got him interested in free software communities while studying organizatio...

The latest release of Canonical's innovative open source operating system, Ubuntu 12.10, maintains its twice-annual upgrade pattern. Even though the last few releases have generated a steady chorus of cries for longer release schedules, Canonical's leadership stands by the schedule and the rationale...

SolusOS is a relatively new Linux distribution that is attracting considerable interest as an alternative to unpopular desktop replacements for traditional Linux user interfaces. It has much to offer Linux users who reject the Gnome 3 desktop and find little appeal from the KDE and Unity desktop env...

Converting media files is often one of the messiest chores that audio and video fans must tolerate, but WinFF is one of the simplest methods I have found to convert audio and video file formats to make them compatible on my growing collection of mobile media platforms. Unlike other excellent single-...

Just when you thought it couldn't top itself -- having contributed Linux kernel code under the GPL, broadly supported Linux alongside Windows with its systems management and other software, and spun off a new subsidiary dedicated to openness, Microsoft showed yet more Linux and open source love rece...

I've got fond memories of physical keyboards embedded in smartphones. My Palm Treos -- I had three -- were superb at composing email and SMS text responses. I even made notes for a book I was writing on one Treo. I speculate that the hardware keyboard is the principal differentiator keeping BlackBer...

Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide by Wale Soyinka is a hands-on manual for IT staffers who must dance with Windows and Linux. It is a practical guide for network admins who deploy and maintain Linux and other free and open source software. In this Sixth Edition opus, Soyinka provides...

The recently released Who Writes Linux kernel contributor list reveals that some of the usual supporters of Linux -- Red Hat, SUSE, IBM, Intel, Oracle -- remain firmly behind the open source OS. There has also been a lot of attention on the other contributors, which now include Microsoft. What I fin...

YouTube is a great source for watching an eclectic collection of videos on music, human stupidity and worldly comedy. But I find it much too easy to go far afield as I click on "also watched" videos when viewing a particular topic line. Minitube solves that problem for me. Not only does Minitube bet...

The Linux community and Linux users are at odds over the transition from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3 as the backbone desktop environment for the OS. Ubuntu's developers muddied the situation with its newcomer Unity desktop alternative. Given the situation, Linux Mint may offer the best solution if you need t...

The task of ripping files from CDs is fast becoming old hat -- that is, unless you have a collection of plastic discs you want to put onto your smartphone or portable music player. In that case, you will find Asunder to be an indispensable tool. Asunder is a graphical audio CD ripper and encoder f...

If you use Linux instead of Microsoft Windows, its free availability may well be a deciding factor. But the fact that virus and malware contamination are less likely to take down your Linux computers is no doubt an essential influencing factor as well. But does using a more popular Linux distro like...

When I first left the Big Blue OS behind for the world of Linux, I wallowed in guesses over how my disk space was filling up. One thing that was hard to replace from my Windows XP days was the colorful pie chart of disk ingredients that resulted from right-clicking the lettered drive names. Linux of...

I've been tracking the Top500 Supercomputer List with a particular eye on Linux for some time now, highlighting how Linux continues to power the majority of the world's fastest supercomputing systems. So it's no surprise to see continued dominance for Linux, but there are some interesting changes ev...

Customers are demanding open source characteristics such as flexibility, customization, cost and time efficiency, and scalabilty, while vendors are doing their best to deliver it -- often based on support for open source components, languages, frameworks, databases -- and hypervisors.

Keeping track of personal and business finances is one of the most essential tasks I do daily on my computer besides researching and writing about the Linux platform. Lately I am assigning much more of that task to HomeBank to keep my banking transactions in order. Do not confuse this personal accou...

Having multiple choices of desktop environments is one of the Linux OS's strong points -- as well as its potential nemesis. This lack of a uniform desktop strategy means confusion for Linux newcomers and frustration for seasoned users. For example, the two most used desktop environments are GNOME an...

Operating a small business or home office is always fraught with tasks based on creating and maintaining office documents. Often, entrepreneurs are stuck using different apps to handle each phase of record-keeping and pricing business proposals for each customer. Why stretch those tasks over multipl...

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0, which was released last November, packs a hidden punch: The latest version of the operating system pre-bundles patches with the kernel. The disguised fixes have shaken up some controversy, but Red Hat contends that the move is aimed at making it more difficult for rival...

For some Linux adopters, exchanging Microsoft Office in Windows for the OpenOffice suite is a radical change in computing behavior. Swapping out OpenOffice for the LibreOffice suite may be a lot less traumatic. LibreOffice is a near clone of the OpenOffice modules. Yet it provides the potential for ...