There are some technical publications which are just like some novels in that you either don’t want to put them down or you don’t want to stop reading them. When O’Reilly first published their GNU/Linux series of books Linux in a Nutshell and Running Linux were quickly seen to be essential reading by the international GNU/Linux community.

A low-cost nettop PC designed primarily for accessing the Internet, the Lenovo IdeaCentre Q100 is an ideal computer for knowledge workers and end-user quality assurance testing.

Mandriva, previously known as Mandrake, was always an interesting mainline GNU/Linux distribution to use, providing some superb server or desktop software. As far as quality is concerned, nothing much has changed since the Nineties, but as far as sophistication of the desktop is concerned, things have come a long way from those dark days of loud laughter when the GNU/Linux desktop was mentioned in public or in private. The presentday Mandriva desktop or the desktop of other GNU/Linux distributions is so much more complex than it once was. It is endlessly configurable and can be made to suit just about anyone’s tastes. It has left the Microsoft and Macintosh desktops behind in the 20th century.

Here’s the most compelling feature on the Sony VAIO VGN-FW180-E/H: the 16.4-inch screen is just amazingly crisp, exceptionally bright and unusually spacious, at 1600×900 resolution…

A fully featured projector that could easily be the hub of an office or home cinema system…

The Jolicloud netbook operating system promises so much and it’s highly likely that its developers will deliver. It already has a well thought out desktop and some nice applications…

Ex Linux User & Developer editor, Simon Brew, ponders just what kind of definition of free is preferable where software is concerned…

Opera started as an early version of open source development on GNU/Linux. At that time there wasn’t a business model or an international community working away on a complete operating system – just a few souls who were interested in where all of this could go…

Jon Masters is a Linux kernel hacker who has been working on Linux for almost 14 years, since he first attended university at the age of 13. Jon lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works for a large enterprise Linux vendor…

As the operating system increasingly becomes the main attraction, ex Linux User & Developer editor Simon Brew yearns for the thinking of the good old days…