One thing I forgot to mention about my thus-far-successful adventure tuning my coworker’s VAIO … Xubuntu ran awfully slow on that machine. The live CD was so sluggish as to be unusable. It was PUD/GNU Linux that saved the day, by letting us boot to an extremely lightweight GUI and salvage files off her hard drive.

The big news in the Linux realm for the past few months has been Dell's introduction of Ubuntu-preinstalled computers. Dell's not the only game in town, though -- there are also some Lenovo machines that are certified to work with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. You don't need assurances and certifications to get a good laptop system that will work with Linux, though.

Recent articles have sparked debate about discussion about how easy it is to use Linux. I add my own $.02 in a debate that will go on for a while.

I have to say I'm disappointed. CentricCRM released a significant chunk of code under an OSI-approved open-source license, yet still doesn't seem to appreciate that open source means something to the community, and to the industry.

When you do your RESEARCH first, installing Ubuntu or SLED or Fedora.. etc is not difficult. To install Ubuntu (any flavor) in my Toshiba M45-S265 Satellite you will die durring install if, as I have done, you forget to add the command pci=noacpi to the boot command.

SugarCRM is a webbased CRM solution written in PHP. SugarCRM is available as an OpenSource edition and a ClosedSource version. For a detailed overview of the different editions, have a look at the SugarCRM website.

Having been to DebConf7, I took advantage to visit a few beautiful places around the venue. Some of them are very hard to photograph with a common camera, specially when you’re trying to capture the full landscape from a hill or the complete sensation from a room in a castle —with all the walls covered with paintings and complicated ornaments—.

Really, this tutorial will be about masking: taking a photograph and separating a foreground subject from the background, for the purposes of doing something interesting with it.