Via Technologies has announced a computer that attaches, piggyback-fashion to the VESA mounting holes on any VESA flat-panel display, turning it into a complete PC. Aimed at signage, kiosk, and other intelligent display applications, the vm7700 runs Linux, among other OSes.

Downloading—no matter what operating system you are using—is ubiquitous. If you’ve been on the internet you will have downloaded something at some point: PDFs, pictures, ISOs, movies, music files, streaming videos to name a few.

While working on the instructions for compiling MonoDevelop from source, I relied heavily on the dpkg and apt-cache commands to tell me what was already installed vs what packages were available in the repository. After completing that article it occurred to me that I should explain how to show what packages are currently installed… so here we are.

Historically I, like most of the Skype users I know, have used the standard pluggable headsets for calls. These have the advantage of working more or less out of the box, even on Linux, and being relatively inexpensive.

What is raptor? Raptor is a an amazing project i have been working in the last few days. It trys to be a fresh new way of finding your desktop applications, and interacting with its users.

openSUSE 10.3 is the latest offering from this excellent and matured Linux Distro, however, the install of SUSE 10.3 fails to impress. It is simply not modern enough. Most distributions offer LiveCD which double up as install CD, SUSE chooses to follow old style of only install CD, add to that SUSE install tries to download software from internet.

Here I was happily fiddling around with my Kubuntu installation and at a critical time when the initrd image was being regenerated our fabled standard of stable electricity supply decided to cut out. Not surprising as it does that every time a mosquito sneezes.

The strengths of IBM Lotus Symphony are also its weaknesses. Based on the OpenOffice.org source code, on the one hand, the beta of this newly released office application offers a much needed revision of the interface. On the other hand, too much of this revision takes the form of leaving out features, and the changes are accompanied by high hardware demands.