Open-source software vendor OpenLogic Inc. this week is unveiling a free software tool aimed at helping businesses look under the hood of their IT systems to find and inventory the open-source applications they're running.

The final talk on Saturday at Akademy 2007 was from Patrick Harvie, a Member of the Scottish Parliament for the Green Party. While not a technical wizard like most of the other talks of the day, Patrick was able to describe to us the attitudes to free software from the Government he is elected to keep an eye on, and how the work of KDE developers applies to more than just software.

Slackware Linux is the oldest surviving Linux distribution, and still one of the most popular. Last week's release of version 12.0 is a milestone for the Slackware team, as it marks Slackware's first use of a default 2.6.x kernel.

I pulled the 30 GB hard drive from the $15 Laptop today, swapped in the original 3 GB drive (which wasn't bootable with its original Windows 98 install) and decided to throw distros at it.

Have you ever wondered what really happens to those Windows error reports you can send to Microsoft whenever a Windows app crashes? How many reports it must receive before taking action? Or whether it's worth your time and effort to send duplicate reports if the error occurs repeatedly?

CentOS, the popular community Linux distribution based upon Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has been at version 5.0 since April of this year, but joining the CentOS 5.0 fleet today is the LiveCD. The CentOS 5.0 LiveCD is based upon CentOS 5.0 i386 and can work out to be a modest Linux workstation or recovery distribution.

The single biggest argument against a smooth migration to one of the popular desktop Linux distributions is the belief that key applications are not available on the Linux platform. However there are a multitude of fantastic open source alternatives that are easy to install and free to use.