Remember a time when doing research required us to have to go to the library? Your school had one, and that's probably where you spent most of your library time at. If it wasn't your school, then it was probably your local town or city library.

The old question always used to be if linux will ever be as widely used as Windows. For years there were always comments on how Linux was ready for the desktop and getting more and more popular.

This engaging and insightful eight-part series by Kim Brebach, a consultant with an Australian technology marketing group, explores the suitability of desktop Linux for ordinary computer users. Follow Brebach's often-amusing foils and fumbles as he investigates a veritable alphabet soup of Linux distributions -- from Damn Small Linux to Zenwalk.

I've said it before, with the proper support in place, anyone can use certain Linux distributions successfully. And apparently, this has been shown to be true yet again. But even considering this success story, there remains a shortage of understanding on which dial-up modems will work and why, if that new all-in-one printer grandma just purchased will work with her chosen distribution and so on.

Red Hat is continuing to land big, fat contracts for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux server. This week saw major deals with the French Ministry for Education and the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry.

France’s ministry for education has migrated 2,500 servers across its 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, in line with the ministry's open-source investment strategy to avoid problems associated with vendor lock-in

The Year of the Linux desktop may never come. Instead, there will continue to be significant encroachment into the territory that Microsoft believes to be its own. This will happen for all the reasons you might expect. Linux is cheaper and more versatile and secure than the alternatives, and most of the arguments for not installing Linux don't hold much water.