Practical Technology

Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary [...]

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Every now and again someone writes me and asks me “What’s the best way for me to get started in Linux?” Over the years, I’ve answered in several different ways, but here’s the summarization of my thoughts. First, most of the people who write me aren’t interested in the fine details of Linux. They are [...]

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If your business is like many, you’ve been waiting for Windows 7 SP1 before even thinking about moving from Windows XP to Windows 7. But with Windows 7, you haven’t really needed to do that. Out of the box, Windows 7 was ready to go. Mind you, I say that as someone with little love [...]

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When I went to college, there were days I’d carry over 20-pounds of books to school in a backpack. Of course, we had it tough back then, “We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick the road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold [...]

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So, there I was, trying to get an e-mail client, Evolution, set up on my faithful old ThinkPad R61 laptop and I was going nowhere fast. I’d decided to use Mint 9, the latest version of an Ubuntu Linux-based distribution and that had all gone perfectly well. So, why was a simple e-mail set up [...]

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