Leaving Windows takes more than courage. Apple's OS X may be nicer, but Macs still cost more than Windows PCs. Linux sits at the other end of the price spectrum; it is free - or close to free.

After installing CentOS, your system has only a few repositories, therefore offering a limited range of applications. It is possible and easy to add more repositories that are unofficial but trusted by the community. By doing so, you will access a wide range or applications for your CentOS system.

In this week's entry we'll look at two more "live" CDs of Linux systems optimized for multimedia creation and performance. I've been having a great time with these systems, and I hope that my mini-profiles inspire you to try them all.

Would you believe that two open-source powers are battling over the Firefox Fox logo? Well, believe it.

Howtos are always useful, no matter the subject they are about. Whether you are trying to contribute to an Open Source project or to attract traffic to your blog howtos can make the things done. I wrote this list of things to keep in mind while writing a howto.

According to the results of a survey conducted early this year by Novell, Adobe Photoshop tops users' lists as the most critical application not available on Linux. While Gimp may be a popular free choice, an exciting project from Slovakia called Pixel is a potential Photoshop-killer under development.

This week on Linux.com we reviewed Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, three of the highest-profile open source alternatives to Microsoft Exchange. All of them have their defects, and all three offer commercial versions that make installation and maintenance easier than it is for their open source versions.

This chapter shows you how to get a basic installation of Fedora up and running. You will learn how to start installation, as well as specify certain configuration options during the install.

Since the news about Sun and JRuby broke at the beginning of the month, I've tried to stay close to the JRuby team to see what's going on. Our discussion has turned into another interview.

MPlayer is a movie and animation player that supports a wide range of codecs and file formats, including MPEG 1/2/4,
DivX 3/4/5, Windows Media 7/8/9, RealAudio/Video up to 9, Quicktime 5/6, and Vivo 1/2. It has many MX/SSE(2)/3Dnow(Ex) optimized native audio and video codecs, but allows using XAnim’s and RealPlayer’s binary codec plugins, and Win32 codec DLLs.

A new version of a license for open source Linux has caused a storm among the community of open source developers. The kernel developers contend that the Free Software Foundation’s plan to promote GPLv3 has “the potential to inflict massive collateral damage upon our entire ecosystem and jeopardize the very utility and survival of open source.” Now, in an email interview with Red Herring, Mr. Torvalds says this is not as much a “debate” between the kernel developers and the Free Software Foundation “as it is a declaration of different positions.”

Back in 1991, a brilliant and determined 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki had an idea. He decided to try his hand at creating his own PC-style operating system. I recently shook the dust off my old Compaq 1800-XL notebook computer to see how easy it would be to install a modern-day Linux operating system.

So the other day I was reading the Weekly review on distrowatch.com and was checking out a recent tidbit on Linux XP that seems to have caused quite a stir on their site. Seems that for the past 7 days, Linux XP has surpassed Ubuntu for number one on their list. To quote Ladislav

The Tool Command Language (TCL), pronounced tickle, is a scripting language and cross platform interpreter. It was designed by Professor John Ousterhout at UC, Berkeley, as a high level embedded language, but is often used to quickly create stand alone applications. Why bother with TCL?

Red Hat Inc.'s woes this week raise the issue of whether IT investors are turning sour on open source. A somewhat disappointing forecast for the next quarter has investors fleeing, just as they have from the company's open-source rival, Novell Inc.

This week the People Behind KDE series is featuring Philip Rodrigues. He mostly is active as a documentation contributor, but he also does user support and some coding. Enjoy the interview with tonight's star.

The Documentation Project is holding a competition for templates and
clipart, and there is prize money!

The goal is to increase our trove. Frankly, we don't have enough;
users are feeling deprived. That means over 50 million people.

Talked with Chris DiBona and Leslie Hawthorn at Google today. And of course, the GPLv3 debate came up. Strange that the media makes it seem all about Linux.

The projects are in and the mentors have filed their evaluations. In the final tally, it looks like Google's Summer of Code 2006 was a success.

Microsoft Windows will not suffer irreparable damage on the server side at the hands of the Linux operating system over the next five years, Gartner analyst George Weiss told attendees at the Gartner Open Source Summit here September 28.

Also: OSDL: Patent Infringement Not a Real Open-Source Threat