The long awaited SimplyMEPIS 7.0 was finally released just before Christmas, and it was worth the wait. In this mature and sometimes underrated operating system, everything looks good and works well.

I like clever things, and the EeePC is one of the few computer products of recent times that has struck me as being particularly clever. It is well thought out, well designed, and offers outstanding value for money.

Joel Sweatte, director of IT at East Carolina University's College of Technology and Computer Science, recently asked the vendor of an engineering analysis application about its support for VMware's virtualization software. The company told him that it didn't have a virtualization support policy and that he should call back if the application didn't work.

There's a few flame effect tutorials out there, but all the ones I've found are either badly outdated or too fiddly. This is how I set any object - including text - ablaze with the Gimp, in just six quick steps.

Open-source electronic health record (EHR) systems, have proliferated in recent years. This executive summary presents the findings from an evaluation designed to determine whether these systems, commonly referred to as free and open-source software (FOSS), are suitable as ambulatory EHRs.

The #1 item on my Top 10 List of Linux FUD Patterns concerns its learning curve. This pattern is probably the most prevalent and primarily appeals to fear by attempting to convince you that Linux is too hard for the average person to use or that it is simply not user friendly. There are many variations of this pattern, from the straight-forward “Linux is for geeks” assault to more mature, logical arguments, such as “if Linux can do everything the fill-in-the-blank OS can do, why bother with the hassle of switching?”.

In a vortex. That's the only way to describe the past thirty days, during which we closed out our second quarter, and put together the transaction to acquire MySQL. How'd it all start?