IBM is making its AFS enterprise file system product available to the open source community under the IBM Public License. AFS is a very scalable, highly available, and secure file system with a very robust data management model for ease of administration.

When I got SuSE 7.0 on my doorstop, I found out that Linux distros could be chock-full of apps and utilities and still be hugely user-friendly. This week, I discovered that Linux-Mandrake 7.2 can just about join this elite category--provided you install it correctly.

There are two words which don't get much play in Linux development projects: Requirements and Design. Not surprisingly, it is the lack of these two things which causes most of the problems in open-source software. Too many developers in the Linux space start programming before they have a good idea of what their project functions and capabilities are. In other words, they start in the middle, not at the beginning.

More and more, software is being released as open source. When are you going to take advantage of the riches?

LDPS does nothing to encourage distributions to take the simple steps necessary to fix a problem. LSB is simply kow-towing to existing distributions with this specification when it should be pushing distributions to become more compatible. LSB needs more guts than that.

Corel Photo-Paint needs no introduction. Photo-Paint has been competing

with Adobe Photoshop for some time now. While Photo-Paint has always been

a very capable program, but, it hasn't quite been able to match the

popularity of Photoshop. Its image creation and manipulation features are

very strong. So it was good news when Corel decided to the latest release,

Photo-Paint 9, to the Linux community as a free download.

Corel Photo-Paint for Linux can be downloaded here. Both RPM and DEB

With its polished, accessible interface, Version 2 of the KDE Project's KDesktop Environment makes important strides toward providing desktop Linux users with the sort of computing experience they've come to expect from Windows and Mac OS.

Microsoft's Silicon Valley competitors, while acknowledging no company is immune to hacker attacks, say Windows has greater security challenges than older, more mature systems built on Unix and a Unix spinoff, Linux.

With the general availability of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server for S/390, SuSE supports more IBM server platforms than any other commercially available Linux distribution.

VMWare is truly impressive as it is the first product to take the next step, emulating an entire computer, on which you can install the operating system of your choice. As a result, "guest" operating systems are able to access all the hardware features of your (real) computer, including Intel's MMX and AMD's 3DNow! technologies.