Carla Schroder

Tech editor Carla Schroder dissects a recent article about problems with IT management. There’s plenty of finger pointing at workers, but who’s really to blame? Security fail: When trusted IT people go bad has a great title. Then it’s all downhill. I suppose it’s appropriate for an audience of managers who want cheerleading for bad […]

Some things seem so obvious I feel silly even saying them. And this is one of them: any IT staffer who only knows one operating system is not worth hiring. We see the silly Microsoft vs. Linux vs. Apple stories every day, with Ten Reasons Why This One is Better, and 7 Reasons Why That […]

The Teo feels sturdy. She’s a beefy little girl, not as thin as other netbooks, but still very portable. The screen is beautiful; it is bright and sharp, and quite readable even for me and Terry, with our don’t-like-small-print eyes. Colors are excellent, with true bright whites, and good saturated reds, blues, and greens. The […]

Cathy and Earl Malmrose founded ZaReason several years ago. ZaReason is a Linux OEM that has long intrigued me for a number of reasons: they encourage customers to open their boxes and tinker, they specialize in OEM Linux boxes, and they demonstrate that there is still room for independent shops in the rough-and-tumble world of […]

I’ve been spending the past few days migrating some of my home computers to PCLinuxOS. Not my studio computer which is going to run Fedora with the Planet CCRMA packages. I keep a current Ubuntu on my laptop just to stay up-to-date, and Debian powers the home server. Nobody is pushing Debian out of that […]

Silly FUDwagons Roll There is such a wealth of great Free and Open Source software applications it’s almost an embarrassment of riches, and we’re going to look at 8 of them in this two-part series. Yes, we keep hearing the repetitive klaxon of the tireless FUDwagon: “Linux is no good because everyone needs Adobe Flash […]

In Linux For Absolute Beginners: 3 Easy Ways to Test-Drive Linux I reviewed some simple ways to safely test-drive Linux. All of them involved selecting a Linux distribution to try, then downloading and burning it to a CD. Anyone can learn how to install Linux in different ways, such as dual-booting, standalone on a single […]

My monitor gave up the ghost in the middle of the workday, naturally when I had deadlines and a half-dozens things to do right now. It turned out to be a fried video card, and I took the long way to figure it out, but I was able to keep working until I had time […]

Everyone is writing “Foo Best” lists all full of good Linux apps, so here are my own 7 Best Excellent Linux Apps You May Not Have Been Introduced To Yet. They are presented in no particular order or categorization, they’re just good applications I’ve been using and enjoying. They are all 100% genuine Free/Open Source […]

Hardware vendors have been missing the netbook boat ever since I can remember– there has been demand for a small, portable, inexpensive, fast-booting computer ever since the World Wide Web became popular. You oldtimers might recall when that happened, way back in the last millennium around 1995 or so, when AOL disks rained down upon […]