Bruce Byfield

No user of free and open source software (FOSS) can escape having an opinion about Microsoft. Microsoft products and technologies represent what FOSS users have left behind. Some consider it increasingly irrelevant, and others a shadowy figure comparable to Satan in the Middle Ages or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Yet, no matter […]

You would think that a GNU/Linux distribution dedicated to shipping only free software would be uncontroversial. After all, isn’t free software what GNU/Linux is all about? Yet, when the latest version of GNewSense was announced recently, Slashdot readers were divided in their reactions. Some thought the distribution would have too limited appeal, and argued that […]

2008 is shaping up to be the year that GNU/Linux hit the Windows desktop. Already the year has seen the first working version of the KDE Windows project, Wubi, which installs Ubuntu to an existing Windows filesystem, and LiveUSB Creator, a wizard for installing the Fedora distribution to a flashdrive from within Windows. Last week, […]

These days, business and free software co-exist with little friction. Although you still find some members of the free software community who automatically view business with suspicion, for the most part the community considers the multibillion dollar open source industry as a validation of its beliefs. Business and free software are so closely intertwined that […]

Configuring GNU/Linux does not end when the installation CD ejects, nor even after the post-install wizard runs. While installation leaves you with a basic system, it does not leave you with an optimized system in which all your preferences and requirements have been taken into account. Given an operating system’s size and complexity, you should […]

James Maguire, Datamation’s managing editor, claims he has no interest in software whose source code is available for editing. “I’m not a software engineer,” he says. “If I can’t grab it off the shelf, I can’t use it.” He’s half-joking, of course. But he echoes the opinion of many people outside the free and open […]

Stephen King once observed that the first review of his books was important because later ones often borrowed its opinions. Who did the first review of Ubuntu 8.04 – better known as Hardy Heron – is debatable, but something of the same consensus seems to have hit tech journalists, with the majority proclaiming that the […]

One of the signs of Ubuntu’s soaring popularity is that the computer press enthusiastically credits the distribution with anything that happens to be new in its release. A case in point is Wubi, an application for installing Ubuntu in Windows as a loopmounted device. The truth is, while Wubi installs a copy of Ubuntu whose […]

Last year’s DesktopLinux.com‘s survey showed Xfcewas the third most popular desktop environment. Granted, it was a distant third to KDE’s second place and GNOME’s first place, but Xfce does seem to be gaining in popularity in the last few years. Part of the reason may be the availability of Xubuntu, a version of Ubuntu that […]

After three weeks of using KDE 4 on my laptop, I continue to find new features and changes. I am aware of the dictionary of special names that make up the back end of the new KDE — Oxygen, Plasma, Phonon, and the rest — but just as often as the major features, it’s the […]