The usual practice of configuring your email client to retrieve email from your ISP's servers works well, but not for all situations. Here's a way you can set up a single machine on your own network to fetch and store your email and serve it to any number of email clients.

VirtualBox has received a major update in version 2.0. The user interface has been converted from Qt3 to the nicer-looking Qt4, 64-bit guests are supported (with a 64-bit host), and there have been major performance improvements. See the changelog for all the details.

The new generation of inexpensive netbooks may be wonderful, but for my main desktop I want a real machine -- something I can open up, clean, and add to. So I was extremely tickled recently to trade for a new LinPC, an economical personal computer that features PCLinuxOS MiniMe 2008 preinstalled and ready to go.

Microsoft's copycatting and pursuit for software patents in India.

Our good friend Joe Brockmeier, community manager for openSUSE, has just started blogging for ZDnet. In one of his inaugural posts, he ruminates over where a community manager belongs in corporate structure: engineering or marketing? His post was in response to Stormy Peters, who thinks the support team is a good place.

If your plan is to strong-arm customers into offering your products exclusively, you had better give them something people want to buy. With Microsoft and Windows Vista, such is not the case, and Hewlett-Packard isn't taking it lying down.

If you're a gamer or a recent linux switcher you probably think you can't play Windows games on your linux box - or that they will run very slow and crash because they are emulating the Windows DirectX API.