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We've taken you through a tour of Window Managers in Linux, and now it's time to show you the Window Manager's bigger brother: the desktop environment, or DE for short. With a sea of choices out there, we can see where Linux newbies might feel a bit overwhelmed. Catch us after the break and we'll show you some of our favorites, along with a few honorable mentions. First things first: a desktop environment is an implementation of a graphical user interface commonly mimicking a physical desktop. Think about your grade school desktop on your computer screen, with folders, binders...

The Acorn Archimedes range of computers was moderately popular, especially in schools, around the time of the Atari ST and Amiga home computer reign. However these ARM powered computers were quite a lot more expensive than those 16-bit favourites, also no killer app(s) to entice people to move over to the platform left Acorn Archimedes owners to remain a minority. Most 16-bit friends I remember moved to the PC because of Doom, flight simulators and Word. More arty types gravitated to the Apple Mac with its Quark Xpress and Pagemaker and sometimes played Myst. Determined not to follow the pack,...

AMD is launching its first tablet-optimized APU today, in a bid to challenge Intel's de facto dominance of the Windows 8 tablet market. Dubbed Hondo, the new Z-60 draws less power than any Brazos-based part AMD has launched before. Some of you may remember that AMD launched a tablet processor last year, but the Z-01 -- codenamed Desna -- was an ordinary Brazos core that binned well enough to run within a lower power envelope. It was more a proof-of-concept chip, meant to demonstrate that AMD could, and would, compete in the tablet market. Hondo, in contrast, is a new...

Ubuntu 12.04 vs. Windows 8: Five points of comparison Summary: The leading Linux desktop and the number one desktop of all, Windows, are both undergoing radical transformations, but which will be the better for it? By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Linux and Open Source | May 7, 2012 -- 09:28 GMT (02:28 PDT) Follow @sjvn Windows 8 Metro vs. Ubuntu 12.04 Unity2012 has already seen a major update of what's arguably the most important Linux desktop: Ubuntu 12.04 and we're also seeing the most radical update of Windows with Windows 8 Metro coming since Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1. So,...

Microsoft launches Windows 8 later this month after a year of gradually making the new operating system more and more available, hoping for a big hit that will drive sales this holiday season and beyond, and giving the company new hope of grabbing a bigger share of tablet sales. But what if Windows 8 flops? For businesses, the problem won't be that dire, says Paul DeGroot, principal consultant at Pica Communications. Businesses that are Microsoft shops already have an operating system, likely Windows 7, but if not, Windows XP with a plan to adopt Windows 7 soon before support for...

My Toshiba Satellite L305 has crapped out. It did not come with the reinstallation disk. I can get a new hard drive but I need an O/S. It is too old to run Windows 7, which I can't really afford. Does anyone know where I can buy a Windows Vista Home Premium (or sumtin') disk or product key for a good price?

Introduction Last night my son was trying to install something called Tekkit which has something to do with Minecraft. I am not really savvy when it comes to Minecraft and I had no idea what Tekkit was. My son asked whether he could download and run the Tekkit Launcher and if so could I help him install it. The first thing I noticed when visiting the site is that there is a download button on the right hand side for both a launcher and a server. What is lacking however is any real information about what Tekkit is, how...

There seems to be a recurring phenomenon in the technology press, where any trojan that affects Linux or Macs becomes front page news. On the other hand, trojans that affect Windows are mostly ignored, perhaps because this is considered to be the normal state of affairs.   There are two common statements made in the discussions of these rare events: No operating system will ever be secure from Trojans. Linux/Mac only have fewer viruses because no one uses them.  The first statement is almost correct, whereas the second one is a flat out myth in my opinion. Let me explain, and I’ll listen...

Hot Chips 2012: From GPU to soap opera to productAfter years of anticipation, Intel is finally giving us more information about the Larrabee/Knights Corner/Phi architecture. Pieces of this multi-multi-core architecture is going to form much of Intel’s future, so let’s take a look at the details.

One of the biggest lies told about open source is that it's insecure. In letting just anyone use your code, that has to include the bad guys. They're bound to find a way to compromise it, the thinking goes. But that's not the way it works in real life. Having every potential victim working on your neighborhood code watch turns out to deliver more security, not less. Having everyone who might be the victim of an online break-in organized, finding bugs, writing and testing fixes, constantly improving security tools, works. Don't believe me? Well, maybe you'll believe the National Security...

Digia has bought out Qt from Nokia. Uh oh? Nokia has announced today that Digia is acquiring the Qt software technologies and Qt business from Nokia. Digia is completely taking over Qt. Digia is the open-core company that previously took over Qt Commercial and releases their special version of Qt to customers. Digia claims they will take care of the commercial and open-source versions of the new Qt and they also want to bring the popular tool-kit to Android, Apple iOS, and Windows 8. With the Qt acquisition, a maximum of 125 people from Nokia will be joining Digia. Most...

For years, there has been one constant for users making the switch to Linux: gaming was going to be a thing of the past.Not that people havenÂ’t tried, of course. Software like WINE (with its gaming spin-offs like Cedega and PlayOnLinux) have made it possible to run Windows games on Linux with mixed results. There have also been the occasional forays into official Linux support in a handful of titles, but outside of the Humble Indie Bundle, Linux games sales have never been able to touch even Mac OS, let alone Windows.Linux users who wanted to do any serious...

I have been a Linux (Linux in this article refers to Linux based Operating System) user for a quite a number of years, actually, since I owned my first PC about four years ago. All through I have been using Fedora Linux , and it has not been an easy ride all along. Linux users have to learn how to use text editors, and how to work their way around configuration files. Initially, the issue was that Fedora Linux ships without a number of drivers, so called proprietary drivers and software. Proprietary drivers are drivers that do not conform to...

There are countless users of Microsoft's Windows operating system who become Linux users each year--an important part of the engine that drives the popularity of Linux. In some cases, these migrating users want to escape the malware storm that afflicts the Windows ecosystem; in some cases they want to run Linux alongside Windows (a dual-OS strategy that has its advantages); and in some cases they want to use specific applications that are available for Linux. For those who want to make the switch from Windows to Linux, there are a lot of good free resources that can help. There is...

I guess you could say I started cheating on Windows back in October of 2010. That’s when Apple debuted the revamped MacBook Air. For the first time, I could resume working almost as soon as I flipped the lid on a laptop, thanks to the way the notebook leveraged its flash memory. (Intel and Ultrabook makers wouldn’t offer a similar instant-on experience until a year later.) The Air was a work of art, but it didn’t feel complete until OS X Lion arrived last year. With key time-saving features like Auto Save and Mission Control for faster multitasking, I started...

Unknown to tens of millions of users, a hidden security vulnerability has been lurking on many Intel-based Windows PCs for the past six years. The vulnerability was found by researcher Rafal Wojtczuk from security firm Bromium. Wojtczuk announced his findings at the Black Hat security conference here in Las Vegas. According to Wojtczuk, the vulnerability he re-discovered was actually first exposed and patched six years ago, albeit only on Linux systems.The vulnerability involves the unsafe use of an Intel CPU instruction called 'sysret'. The risk is that if left unpatched, an attacker could have executed a user-to-kernel privilege escalation attack....

The prospect of Windows 8's planned Secure Boot restrictions has caused no end of controversy in the Linux world, where distributors and users of the free and open source operating system have been struggling to figure out just what it's all going to mean for those who don't embrace Windows. The prospect of Windows 8's planned Secure Boot restrictions has caused no end of controversy in the Linux world, where distributors and users of the free and open source operating system have been struggling to figure out just what it's all going to mean for those who don't embrace Windows....

A tidbit buried within an hour long video: http://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA At about 19 minutes, he starts talking about IBM, and how there was a drive to sell Linux. And he goes on to point out how easy to use interfaces just weren't a high priority until the commercial interests came in and did a lot of the boring stuff. They did Q and A. And other things he eludes to but doesn't specifically list. I point this out because I myself have run into a lot of the total anti-commercial venom from various people over the years, and that doesn't have...

Paolo Bonzini noticed something a little awkward in the Linux kernel support code for Microsoft's HyperV virtualisation environment - specifically, that the magic constant passed through to the hypervisor was "0xB16B00B5", or, in English, "BIG BOOBS". It turns out that this isn't an exception - when the code was originally submitted it also contained "0x0B00B135". That one got removed when the Xen support code was ripped out.

This set of patches implements the core Linux support for the AArch64 (64-bit ARM) architecture. ARM introduced AArch64 as part of the ARMv8 architecture and consists of a substantially revised exception model (with 4 exception levels: EL0 - user, EL1 - kernel, EL2 - hypervisor, EL3 - secure monitor), new A64 instruction set based on larger register file, new FP/SIMD instructions. The new ABI is LP64 and takes advantage of the larger register file and mandates FP. AArch64 documentation currently available (publicly, though click-through agreement required): - Instruction Set Overview:http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.genc010197a/index.html - ABI (PCS, ELF, DWARF, C++):http://infocenter.arm.com/help/topic/com.arm.doc.ihi0059a/index.html The AArch64 Linux port...