Paul Ferrill

Granted, syncing the iPad with a Linux PC isn’t for purists: at some point you must update the iPad’s firmware from either a Mac or Windows OS. Paul Ferrill reports. The Apple iPad is without question a wildly successful product in a market space that’s seen many false starts. It seems like the iPad was […]

This month we take a look at a number of small form factor PCs that either come with Linux or would make a perfect fit for your favorite Linux distro. Each of the computers mentioned takes up very little space, but all deliver plenty of computing performance to handle everything from basic web browsing to […]

High-end graphics editing in the commercial world has been defined by Adobe’s Photoshop. It is so dominant and so prevalent that the name is frequently used as a verb, as in the line from the movie Cheaper by the Dozen “We’ll photoshop her in later.” In the free and open source world the standard of […]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/73617363@N00/ / CC BY-SA 2.0 With all the recent heat generated about Mono and the C# language, it only seems appropriate to take a look at the issue from a programmer’s perspective. There are a number of open source projects written in the C# language. Banshee, F-Spot and Tomboy are three of the most popular. […]

Options for building and deploying Web-based applications to the “cloud” are abundant. Amazon’s EC2 offering has been out for a while and offers a variety of operating systems, databases and storage solutions. Linux choices include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, OpenSolaris, Fedora, openSUSE, Gentoo, Oracle Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu and Debian. When you look at the way […]

Ask any Linux aficionado why the desktop hasn’t seen more converts, and you’ll probably get a blank stare. The answer depends on your perspective. For enterprises, it often comes down to support and interoperability. In its first release Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) made great strides at addressing both issues. Cost as an issue […]

Picking the right Linux distribution for a new task often comes down to comfort level. We all tend to lean toward things we’re familiar with. So we go with the latest Ubuntu release and make it fit even though it might not be the best choice for the job. You can bet it will have […]

Netbooks are all the rage right now with Linux as one of the primary operating system (OS) options. The Eee PC from ASUS got things started and originally only shipped with a Linux OS. This year’s Consumer Electronics Show was overrun with the little laptops from a wide variety of vendors. It was only a […]

Waiting for a laptop or desktop to boot has to be one of the biggest time wasters for the majority of computer users no matter what the operating system. You would think with faster CPUs that the problem would just go away, but it hasn’t. In fact, if anything, it has gotten worse. Larger amounts […]

The latest release of the Linux Mint distribution offers up a clean, user-friendly desktop environment with a good assortment of applications to meet the needs of most any typical user. Linux Mint 6 is based on Ubuntu 8.10 with a number of additional utilities added for extra polish. Setup and configuration is painless and takes […]