Ubuntu clearly rivals Windows 7 in terms of stability, speed, and functionality. Yet school IT staff who try to take advantage of this free software often meet with serious resistance.

Which path should you follow? Should you take advantage of Ubuntu's package manager and use it to upgrade your system to the latest 8.04 Hardy Heron release, or should you download a CD or DVD ISO image and do a clean install?

If you are mounting shares from disks on your network and you are using wifi, the shares don't unmount when you try to shut down. This is a major pain. (The pain is amplified because folks keep marking the bug "fixed" when it's not.)

Over the weekend I carved up the hard drive on my IBM ThinkPad T60 so I could dual-boot XP Pro with Ubuntu. The purpose of the exercise is to see if I can satisfactorily recreate my Standard Operating Environment in Ubuntu and gradually ween myself off Windows.

Innotek's GPL-licensed Virtualbox software lets you create a virtual operating environment inside your PC's real operating system. I've been using Virtualbox for several months now on a 32-bit laptop running Ubuntu 7.04, and I've been impressed with the software.

As a (relatively) long time Ubuntu user, occasional bug reporter and support analyst, I often deal with bug reporting and I feel your pain about bug reporting, Matt. This happens in many other free software projects, but I think Ubuntu’s popularity gives its problems more exposure, an opportunity to refine the process and maybe inspire others to learn from its mistakes and success.

I have been borrowing a laptop that runs a version of the free and open-source operating system Linux. The operating system is called Ubuntu

So recently I have written a lot about how user-friendly Linux has become. Naturally the nay-sayers have spoken loudly and insisted that Linux is far, far behind Windows in the user-friendliness category. So, I decided I wanted to figure out a way to test this argument to see which operating system was, in fact, more user friendly.

Software always has bugs, and free software is no exception to this. When we think of free software, we think of software we can distribute, modify, study and of course, run. I don't spend a lot of my time studying or modifying free software, to be honest. There are lot of people who do this, and they're a lot smarter than me... well, most of them. Apparently, none of the people who write free software bug trackers ever actually use them to report a bug, or if they do, they have a very high tolerance for pain and annoyance.