Practical Technology

Computers and Internet access are universally available, but your corporate network resources are probably only available on your office PC and on your laptop. If you wanted to securely use your office resources from another computer — say, your husband’s laptop or your local library’s PC — you were out of luck. Until now. By [...]

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When you think Ubuntu, you almost certainly think of it as a desktop distribution. And, make no mistake about it, Ubuntu 9.10 is a great desktop distribution, but that’s not what Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, is focusing on with this release and the next, long-term support version, which will follow this one. No, Canonical has [...]

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‘m really not sure why everyone is so surprised that Microsoft submitted the driver source code for four Microsoft Hyper-V drivers for inclusion in the Linux kernel under the GPLv2 license. You see, Microsoft and Novell have been working on this for over two years now. These drivers, jointly called the Linux Device Driver for [...]

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Whether you prefer Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X, you can probably get almost everything you need done with your chosen OS. However, sometimes a task demands an OS that you are not currently using. That’s where virtualization programs like Sun Microsystem’s VirtualBox 3.0 come in. What is it? VirtualBox is an open-source virtualization program [...]

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Microsoft made XP Mode so that you can run XP applications from inside Windows 7. Ah… OK, doesn’t Win 7 run XP applications anyway? Let me check. I’m currently running Office 2003, OpenOffice 3.1, Quicken 2008, iTunes 8.1.1, ooVoo, (a video-conferencing program), and a host of other XP programs on Windows 7 on my Gateway [...]

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