Before he became Mother Teresa, Bill Gates was Darth Vader. As captain of the Evil Empire, he and his minions dominated PC operating systems, vanquishing all rivals. In May of 1998, the US Department of Justice struck back.

One of the hottest gadgets of 2007 – with no sign the trend is abating – was the super-portable ASUS Eee, putting Linux in the hands of the masses at minimal cost. It's user interface is great for new users but power users might want more punch. Here's how to take full control.

The company plans to ship Ubuntu and Red Hat versions of its "Open Collaboration Client," a combination of Lotus Notes 8 and Symphony. IBM has increased support for Linux with the introduction of versions of its Lotus Notes collaboration suite and Symphony productivity tools built to run on the open source OS -- and it's hoping the effort will help unseat Microsoft as the king of desktop software.

A rootkit is a program designed to take fundamental control of a computer system, without authorization by the system’s owners and legitimate managers. Most rootkits use the power of the kernel to hide themselves, they are only visible from within the kernel. How do I detect rootkits under CentOS or Debian Linux server?

Over the years, I've had people ask me many times, "Why do you use this program or that program? Why not use Microsoft instead like everyone else?" I simply reply, "Because I prefer to have the power to choose what program I want to use, when, where, why, and without big brother corporation X breathing down my neck telling me what I can and can't do."

Novell has extended a set of development tools so they can be used to write applications and other software for rival Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS.

I recently spent some time talking with Christine Martino, Hewlett-Packard's vice president of Linux and open source, about HP's plans to provide services around open-source software. That HP is doing this is now old news (the news broke this week). But the truly interesting thing in this is HP itself.