No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer.

I play with open-source OCR (Optical Character Recognition) packages periodically. My last foray was a few years ago when I bought a tablet PC and wanted to scan in some of my course books so I could carry just one thing to school. I tried every package I could find, and none of them worked well enough even to consider using.

Next time you go into Best Buy or Circuit City or $RETAILER, why don’t you bring your Kubuntu Live CD (okay, you can bring an Ubuntu Live CD if you really want) with you? I did that today, and it actually went really well. Here’s the story.

This series has been moving along rather slowly, but it's summer and there are many important things to do. Like go to the lake and take naps a lot. Nevertheless, the show must go on, so here we are at Part 3. (Here are Part 1 and Part 2.)

Zonbu's overall goal is to vastly simplify the process of buying and using a computer. The idea is to make it not only more affordable but also much less of a hassle and much more energy efficient. However, there's a catch -- several catches, in fact.

A project aimed at building a Linux distribution for media center PCs has achieved a major new release. LinuxMCE 0704 is based on Kubuntu, and offers lots of flashy features, such as whole-house high-definition video distribution, optional alpha-blended graphics, gyroscopic remote control, and much more.

I’m still kind of “watching” the market. And though I would like to have a PC with Intel’s open-sourced integrated graphics (a GMA950 or the newer X3000/X3100 chipsets are more than good enough for what I have to do with a PC), Intel processors are still only a second choice. Why?

Version 0.7.1 of FreeCol, a free/open-source Colonization clone, has been released.