Last week, AMD's recent support for Linux in the video card sector inspired me to give Linux another shot. I decided to give Kubuntu Feisty a try, as I am already somewhat accustomed to KDE. Unfortunately, I ran into all of the same problems that I had run into with previous versions of linux, as well as some new ones.

Should Linux do more for programmers? "Absolutely! Linux should go and make me a coffee! Then it should automagically translate my ideas into perfect code," quipped Barbara Hudson, a blogger on Slashdot. "And how about walking my dogs for me? Or put away the laundry? Linux is certainly not doing enough for *this* programmer!"

Many Free Software projects have not received the attention they merit, not because they aren't good projects, but because the developers involved either do not have the time to devote to it, or do not grasp the impact that a little good promotion can have on their projects.

I am not a programmer. Yet Linux is built on the philosophical principle of freely sharing source code. This is how those who create Linux frequently advocate it. But if I'm not a programmer, and source code therefore means little to me, why do I use Linux?

As I've mentioned in a previous Linux Line post, I am not a programmer. Yet Linux is built on the philosophical principle of freely sharing source code. This is how those who create Linux frequently advocate it.

After having run into several somewhat small but bothersome problems with both my machines running Fedora 10 (various sound problems with the new pulse, a new slew of compiz problems, and bad Xorg memory leaks), I decided that since OpenSuSE offers many things I was looking for right now: RPM 4.6, OpenOffice.org 3, a decent pulseaudio that hasn’t implemented timer based scheduling, etc, that I w

When explaining why Free Software is important, one question that often comes up is: “do I really need the software freedom?”

The visibility of the source code is an essential element of Linux and free software, but reading the source is not always the best way to discover what the coder intended - which is not always the same as what the code actually does.

Yesterday I stumbled onto a delightful tool from Google Labs: Code Search. Turns out Google is now crawling through source code. Granted access to billions of lines of code and the awesome power of Google’s search technology, I did what any rational, thinking programmer would do: I typed in some profanity and hit enter. In tribute to the valiant struggles of coders everywhere, please enjoy...