When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu.

It looks as if Wine might be supporting Adobe's Flash CS3 as well as Photoshop CS3 on Linux in the near future. With the recent help from Google to get Photoshop CS and CS2 working properly in Wine a huge chunk of the underlying architecture work was put in place for CS3 application support. There are still a number of bugs that need to be triangled and fixed before CS3 is properly supported but this is great news none the less.

Frozenbyte has announced an agreement with Linux specialist company IGIOS Ltd to port "Shadowgrounds Survivor" to Linux.

For my money, the best desktop operating system is Linux -- MEPIS and OpenSUSE at the top with Ubuntu closing in fast, to be exact. But everyone has their own opinion, and over at PC Magazine some old friends and coworkers of mine decided to compare all the most popular desktop operating systems: Windows XP and Vista, Mac OS X 10.5.1 (Leopard), and Ubuntu 7.10.

The GNOME Foundation announced the release of version 2.22 on Wednesday, an update that offers enhanced multimedia support, new file system, and enhanced e-mail, internationalization and accessibility features. GNOME is used in many popular Linux distributions from Ubuntu, Novell, Red Hat, Mandriva and Debian.

I listened to a webcast from JBoss World today with a group of people. After hearing several speakers announce new middleware products and initiatives (as JBoss is the leading force in open source middleware), one of them turned to me and asked, “Just what is middleware?” When I started to describe transaction servers and database connection pool sharing, she held up a hand and said, “No. I want to know what it is in real world terms, and why it’s a big deal.”

A type of application software that functions as a personal organizer is called personal information manager (PIM).