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As an operating system, Linux has many things to recommend it over Windows. Gaming, alas, is not one of them. Compared to Windows, Linux just doesn't have anywhere near the same level of good games. Yes, there are a few here and there, but overall, Windows continues to dominate as the PC gaming platform of choice, with the widest array of content and the most up-to-date graphics and audio drivers.

The reaction one gets when attempting to get a manager in a corporate environment to consider an alternate operating system can sometimes be likened to a typical dilbert comic strip. Joseph Mallett contributed the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which suggests that if you present the case properly, your pointy haired boss will make the right decision when choosing a Unix operating system to run the business.

OSDN (the Open Source Development Network) has changed their name to OSTG (the Open Source Technology Group). This is the group that publishes all of VA's websites, including Slashdot, Freshmeat, NewsForge, and Linux.com. This editor believes it was a good move. The old name carried the idea of a development organization, and sounded too similar to OSDL. The new name sets it apart as its own entity, and carried the feeling of a publishing company.

Who is Dan O'Dowd and why is his opinion so important that it makes the news on Slashdot? Is he an expert on free software development and embedded operating systems who suddenly admits free software helps terrorists? No, Dan O'Dowd is the CEO of a proprietary software company, using the media as a FUD machine to bash a competing product -- but if you didn't do your research, you wouldn't know that.

This paper is meant to serve as an introductory guide to the basic security and server hardening functions present in AIX. Many of the features and functions shown throughout this guide are applicable to AIX 4.3 and above, but are more directed toward AIX 5.2. This guide attempts to cover a lot of ground and offers useful and necessary insight for anyone administering AIX machines.

Day two of the OSCON open source conference in Portland treated some 1,900 paying attendees -- up from an original estimate of 1,500 -- to sessions on how programmers can comply with intellectual property law and the GPL, as well as talks on how programmers sometimes break the law with hacking attacks and countermeasures to prevent them.

The business case for adopting Linux over Microsoft's Windows is an economic decision, but not one where the total cost of ownership is a fundamental issue, an executive from a business technology advisory group told a session at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (Oscon) here Tuesday afternoon.

After nine years in proprietary software migrating Windows machines to other Windows machines as CTO for Miramar Systems, Mike Sheffey saw the wave coming. The large corporations Miramar worked with were increasingly asking asking for a new migratory path: Windows to Linux. Instead of running in terror from the oncoming tsunami, Sheffey dove into the wave and founded Versora last December.

Improvements to the desktop will require a greater Internet focus that enhances communication and collaboration; the ability for users to access their data anywhere; and the option of software as a service, Havoc Pennington, the technical lead for desktop engineering at Red Hat Inc., said here Wednesday.

In the new world into which the open-source community is moving, open and free software does not guarantee freedom, especially when applications depend on the network effects and data lock-in more than on software secrecy, said Tim O'Reilly, CEO and founder of O'Reilly Media, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention here Wednesday.

It's A question of cost, again. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) will test running the Open Source office suite on Windows, on some of its workstations.

The Malaysian government master plan, road map and the technical implementation plan are now available on line, through the Open Source Competency Center (OSCC). The Government of Malaysia has decided recently to encourage the use of Open Source Software in the Malaysian Public Sector. The Malaysian Administration Modernization and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) of the Prime Minister Department has been given the responsibility to implement this OSS initiative. The governments Master Plan, road map and the Technical Implementation Plan are now available on line through the Open Source Competency Center (OSCC) which acts as a single point of reference in the implementation of OSS in Malaysia.

Last month, I touched a little bit on HP's screwed up Linux PDA initiative, but perhaps I was a bit too harsh. Sure, they have a research arm that's completely underutilized and they have absolutely no clue as how to turn those efforts into a product, but HP is in no way unique in their absence from the PDA and Linux device cluetrain. For the most part, the entire industry needs a swift kick in the head to see how to build and market a successful Linux handheld and to learn how to properly support open source PDA developers. I learned how the hard way, and here's my painful perspective on the whole shebang.

I know that a lot of people have posted reviews on Mandrake, SuSE, Fedora, etc. but here is mine. I downloaded the first 3 Mandrake CDs from LinuxISO and then burned them to a CD while in Windows to get to work. I had a Windows XP installation on my 100GB hard drive, but I only have it on 30GB because Windows acts up so much.

A little over a year ago, Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI, http://www.sgi.com) announced a new 64-bit supercomputing platform called the Altix 3000. In a break from its tradition of building large machines with MIPS processors running the IRIX operating system, the Altix uses Intel's Itanium 2 processor and runs -- you guessed it -- Linux. Unlike Beowulf-style Linux clusters, SGI's cache-coherent, shared-memory, multi-processor system is based on NUMAflex, SGI's third-generation, non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture, which has proven to be a highly-scalable, global shared memory architecture based on SGI's Origin 3000 systems.

While CVS is the de facto standard for revision control in the world of Open Source, that doesn't mean CVS is popular or perfect. To some developers, CVS is simply a necessary evil. But now there's an alternative to CVS. Read on for a look at the just-released Subversion 1.0.

In the near future, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio will become the first municipality in the country to receive broadband over power lines (BPL). The service, which promises at least one megabit per second download and upload speeds, can be accessed via any electrical socket using an adapter that closely resembles a large cell-phone charger. The technology is proven, the Federal Communications Commission is endorsing it, and unlike DSL or wireless, BPL can go anywhere that power goes. And BPL is cheap: the basic one mbps service is priced at $29.95 per month.