Every major operating system has more than one media center solution for users who can't spend a day without watching a movie or listening to music. In Linux we're all familiar with MythTV and Freevo, two media center applications that are so appreciated they even have got their own distributions. Freevo is highly configurable, and Freevo 2 SNV builds look promising.

The Sun faithful who attended the CommunityOne Conference this morning may not have noticed, but Sun and its MySQL executives were very clear about Sun's open-source strategy going forward, despite news reports that seem to have missed the nuances: The core will always be 100 percent open source. The periphery...will not. Or might not. It depends.

Every user wants to work on the machine that has zero responsive time and glides through numerous applications in one go but with time normally the speed degrades and this really gets things slowed down People get sick of those crawling machines and start looking for better alternatives. So where lies the solution?

I always ask people who market (as opposed to develop) GNU/Linux and open source products or services what Linux distribution they use on their own computers. More often than not, the answer is along the lines of, "I'm a marketing person so I use Windows. The techies use Linux.

With the Fonty Python font manager, you can organize your fonts into groups (called “pogs”), and install and uninstall these groups when you need them. When a pog is not installed, you won’t have the fonts it contains filling up your menus.

In an open-source business, a vendor's biggest competition often derives from a freely available, "community" version of its product. By extension, an open-source vendor's biggest competition comes from the systems integrators that provide implementation services around that vendor's community software.

Nathan’s basic question, however, can be paraphrased: why do so many MCSEs have such a hard time learning to use Linux? why do they think there’s no effective help available to them?