Bruce Byfield

“Put not your trust in princes.” ~ Psalms 146:3 So Microsoft and Novell are extending their two year old partnership. Is anyone really surprised? Similar, if smaller, deals are announced by other partners on an almost daily basis. The truth is, the deal is not nearly as insightful as the reactions to it in the […]

For several years, Ubuntu has been synonymous with user-friendliness. A Web search quickly unearths dozens of articles that suggest that Ubuntu is the distribution you should give non-technical people to introduce them to GNU/Linux. It even won a “Most User-Friendly Linux Distribution” award, which you might think confirms its status. However, like all conventional wisdom, […]

The story of how Ian Murdock developed Debian while a student at Purdue and named the distribution for his girlfriend and himself has been told countless times. Many people, too, know that Debian is not only one of the largest distributions, but also the basis for countless other GNU/Linux distributions — including five of the […]

If you want to add space to a drive, store personal data on a separate partition from your operating system, or run multiple operating systems from the same hard drive, then you need a partition editor. Traditionally, this is a field where alternative operating systems have always lead in the available tools. PartitionMagic, the first […]

With its 4.1 release, KDE is taking few chances. While the 4.0 release’s announcement emphasized excitement and significance, the tone of the announcement for 4.1 is more subdued. This time, the announcement talks about maturing technologies and underlying improvements, and the only claim is that the 4.1 desktop “can replace the KDE 3 shell for […]

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see the point of proprietary network services (or cloud computing, or Software as a Service, if you prefer). Not when you have Free software as an alternative (“Free,” in this case, being analogous to open source or GNU/Linux). In fact, proprietary network services strike me chiefly as a […]

No icons on the KDE 4.1 desktop? For over a month, rumors of this change have been sweeping through the free software community, adding to the controversy that has surrounded the popular desktop since version 4.0 was released in January. However, like many of the concerns about the latest releases of KDE, these rumors have […]

KDE 4.1 is supposed to make everything right with the recently troubled desktop. Everyone agrees now that KDE 4.0 was a mistake. However, what the mistake was — and whose — is a matter of opinion. KDE developers blame distributions for rushing to include a release that was never intended for everyday use, while users […]

How do you get Windows users to try GNU/Linux? The question has no easy answer. Many users aren’t clear what an operating system is, let alone how to install one. However, eager to recruit friends and family (if only to avoid tech-support on Windows), over the years the free and open source software (FOSS) community […]

Post a Comment, and see existing comments: Bruce Byfield’s OpenSUSE 11 review The different incarnations of SuSE have always kept the feel of old time distributions — by which I mean releases made before GNU/Linux became popular, and new users became the main priority in planning. Nor is version 11.0 of openSUSE an exception. Even […]