One of the arguments in Massachusetts against OpenDocument centered on the needs of the visually impaired. In this guest column, a visually impaired PC user explains that not only is using an exclusively Windows solution a crash-prone option, it is also far more expensive than equivalent technologies in OS X and, eventually, Linux. Scott Seder makes the case for more open source development in the Assistive Technology arena.

The developers at XGI released a new version of their drivers for Linux. Version 1.04.13 supports kernel 2.4 and 2.6 aswell as hardware accelerated OpenGL 1.3

This is a Linux operating system with a tried, tested and trusted history - so what does the 2006 offering bring to the party?

Local politician who runs a telemarketing business on the side calls the company where this pilot fish works. "She calls us because she knows my boss gives her free help," says fish. "She quickly asks, 'Do you know Unix? The computer that runs my call center is telling me it's got a bad block!' "

The issue of whether California should be using electronic voting machine systems that rely on "open source software," instead of the traditional proprietary software being used today, will be addressed in a pair of public hearings while Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle signed into law a bill that requires all voting machines used in elections in the state of Wisconsin to be coded with open-source software.

So these observations which follow are of my first encounter with Linux (which occurred about a month ago - early Dec). They are offered for general interest and likely amusement of the ‘Nix aware among you. These comments are longish - but contain just some of the many items I observed.

Instead check into any one of a number of Linux-based boot CDs designed especially for this purpose. My personal favorite thus far is Austrumi.

Like everybody else who has been watching Microsoft try to figure out how to compete with Apple's ipod I've been waiting for the MS folks to launch a competing service. Well now it looks like they're about too. And if the placeholder site's favicon and the netcraft site report is any indication that site'gonna be running linux.

In the filing, SCO proposes amending its claims against Novell. The new claims, if the court permits them to be added, directly target Novell for distributing Linux.

In a body-blow to spammers, US-based Internet service provider - CIS Internet Services, has been awarded a whopping $11.2 billion in damages, in a judgement against a Florida spammer who allegedly sent millions of unsolicited e-mails to CIS' users.

The uptake of Linux clusters based on the high-speed networking standard is about to climb, according to a kernel developer

With Solid the coming Version 4 of the Linux desktop KDE is to be made more flexible when it comes to allowing network connections to be switched or hardware to be changed.

A quiz that helps decide which version of Linux to install on a desktop has attracted thousands of daily hits even though it's still in beta testing, according to quiz-creator Zegenie Studios.

It's been 20 years or more since I wrote my first few hundred lines of code in C, so it's about time I learned a more modern language, maybe something object oriented. But what?

Well, not a heck of a lot to report on the Linux front for day one of the Consumer Electronics Show (really day zero, because the show floor doesn't open up until tomorrow morning.) The evening highlight, as it were, was the annual "Look How Great Microsoft Is" keynote by Bill Gates.

Sometimes it is useful to know the temperature of your hardware, to prevent it from frying. This information can easily be found, if your hardware provides the sensors needed, and we have the necessary software.

Most IT managers put Linux on a server and watch the server run for years and years without crashing. A few are not so lucky. For the latter group, and those who'd rather be safe than sorry, Steve Best lists his favorite Linux troubleshooting and fix-it tools in this interview.

A new technology on the horizon could confound the RIAA and drag Firefox into the top browser position along with it. It just has to be open source to cause this much trouble.

For some time now I have noticed a large number of entries in my Apache error log. I looked at them briefly, but didn't have enough spare time to see why I was getting so many, so I just ignored this for many months.

Well, I finally found the time to look into this and was both surprised and puzzled by what I found. Frankly, I'm still puzzled by some of it.

SuperMaze is a simple to learn and play humorous nonviolent 3D hunt-and-shoot game using Smileys as the main actors in a maze style environment. You may download the shareware version of SuperMaze from the Decane website for free!