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OpenOffice.org's namesake suite turned 4 last month, and in a sign of just how far the open-source productivity suite has come, a commercially supported version of the software for Windows is now available.

The joined efforts of SableVM JVM hackers and GNU Classpath hackers finally allowed Eclipse 3 to run on SableVM!. According to what Etienne told me, he was running Eclipse 3 on his Debian PowerPC for a few hours, including editing, compiling and running simple java programs. And all that using SableVM as the only Java Virtual Machine on his laptop.

SUN CEO Jonathan Schwartz's claim that his Java Community Process is the only true open source has greatly miffed the open source movement. Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, has hit out in an open letter that Schwartz's claims that Linux didn't even get a vote when it came to being close to the open source ideals.

The Commonwealth Department of Veterans Affairs is considering installing open-source software on its desktop computers as it continues a wide-ranging technology revamp that has taken in almost all of its information systems.

Paul Andrews of the Seattle Times has used Linux for three years and makes numerous cites from places like Consumer Reports that offers Linux as a Windows alternative.

Flash Linux is a compact distribution designed to run off 256Mb USB keys. It includes hardware detection, auto configuration, a fairly complete Gnome 2.8 desktop, and associated office tools. Ideal if you want to try out Gnome 2.8 without touching your current system with over 50Mb of storage left after installation. Note that this is a first release, it should however be pretty usable and stable.

This review is a light-hearted look at Sef's install of Lycoris Desktop L/X 1.4, and what went right, what went wrong, and how it turned out.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, weighs in on the upcoming challenges facing GPL Version 3 in an e-mail interview with eWEEK Senior Editor Peter Galli.

Earlier this month, veteran Windows-centric columnist John C. Dvorak wrote a half-serious, half-facetious article called The Ten Axioms of Modern Computing in which he complains about common computer issues. What he and far too many other people don't realize is that most of their problems could be solved by removing Windows from their machines and installing a free software operating system like GNU/Linux. Let's take a point by point analysis of how Dvorak's gripes have little to do with the majority of his computing environment.

We've all heard of Windows Media Center, the OS based purely on playing movies, music, and watching TV. While there have been tutorials on how to create something just like that using Linux, GeeXboX makes all of that extremely easy. Well most of it anyway.

Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC have released their jointly developed messaging software as open source.

Review: Red Hat's latest release offers a raft of improvements, but update tools still lag.

Hello Fedora Users! The has been updated for Fedora Core 3! This means that it has some new questions answered for Fedora Core 3 users, and it also has a new yum.conf for Fedora Core 3.

Karl Fischer takes a walk through the latest version of Gnome, version 2.8, to illustrate a few of the best new features of this very popular desktop environment.

The Linux Desktop Team at Sun Microsystems has updated Release 2 with numerous patches.

Schwartz appears to include Linux as part of UNIX's bright future.

A few tips and tricks for finding Wi-Fi access on you next road trip.

You know you're living in a cutthroat world when your BIOS lies to your operating system at boot time. Yet that's exactly what often happens, to one degree or another, depending on the manufacturer and model of the system. Some of the BIOS lies cause problems for Linux and some don't. The dmidecode project provides the means to learn exactly what claims your BIOS is making about your hardware. Strange as it might seem, it's useful information, even when it's not 100% reliable.

The SCO website appears to have been hacked over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. A page at http://www.sco.com/redhat/ displays a "SCO vs World" story which proclaims "Recently we found parts of our code in almost all Microsoft(R) software. We want to bring an action against Microsoft(R) and our legal department is working on that."

If Linux is the platform that you plan to move to, support is probably the number one issue popping into your head, as the technology is notorious for its paucity of high quality support from vendors. Apparel manufacturer Bossini can attest to this, but it is also proud to say that it has found ways to circumvent the problems. In fact, the Hong Kong headquartered company, which runs retail stores in China, Taiwan, and Singapore, switched to Linux three years ago, and has found compelling reasons to stay faithful to the platform. Over time, it has even migrated more applications to it.