With Red Hat launching a new Linux-based desktop operating system, called Global Desktop for Linux, one analyst is saying the software could be "huge" for Linux, particularly in developing countries that haven't gone the Microsoft Windows route. Red Hat's Global Desktop for Linux is a commercial spinoff of the One Laptop Per Child project.

A free Flash viewer is one of the last major gaps in GNU/Linux desktop functionality, so last week's news that Gnash, the free Flash player, had reached the stage where it could play YouTube and Lulu.tv videos seemed too good to be true. Unfortunately, it was.

Mail merges are a great way to save time, since they pull information from the same fields, over and over again with each new record in your database. There’s only one problem—all records aren’t created equal; they don’t all have, or all need, the same fields. This article solves that perpetual problem with labels.

At least Microsoft is back to normal. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Bill Hilf takes a familiar (if a bit worn and tired) swipe at Linux in the enterprise: "In the enterprise, it's not enough just to be a cheap operating system. You need to have applications for it, and it needs to be highly supported."

I called the Home office department. I asked the representative if I could buy one of the ubuntu computers for my company. She said (and I quote), "these Dell computers are designed for personal use only, as long as you use it for personal use, you can purchase one."

Red Hat, the largest Linux vendor, and Ubuntu-maker Canonical have both rejected calls from Microsoft to forge a deal similar to the one the Redmond giant signed with Linux distributors Novell, Xandros, and Linspire.

PC-BSD is not a Linux distribution, but rather it could be considered among the first major FreeBSD-based distributions to live outside of the official FreeBSD. Like most distributions, it has implemented certain features in a way that attempts to distinguish it from the competition, and I will focus mostly on these differences.

"A member of Skype staff posting in the Linux support forum there seems to have taken a course in customer relations from if his responses to criticism of the lack of real world development of the Linux version of Skype, compared to Windows development, are anything to go by."