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Welcome! Better Desktop is a project dedicated to sharing usability data with Linux developers. Over the past year, we have conducted many usability tests on different parts of the KDE and GNOME desktops. We created this site to serve as a place where developers can watch videos of these tests. Here you will find over 200 videos of people using Mozilla Firefox, Evolution, Open Office, Banshee, F-Spot and other applications. All of these can be found in the data section of this site. The video repository on this site is growing. We will continue to add video as we produce...

That's right, I'm thinking iMac. With the Mac OS, Apple sticks to a tightly controlled upgrade path that emphasizes backward compatibility. But more importantly, Apple has the advantage of owning the hardware. A Mac always knows how to work its graphics card and its speakers, because Macintosh computers ship with a very limited selection of hardware components. No matter how many people still clamor for Mac clones, it's a strategy that has always paid off for Apple in terms of customer satisfaction. Could it work for desktop Linux? Suppose a single vendor took the big gamble and offered the whole...

In a stroke of irony, Microsoft's Halo movie will be produced in Wellington by servers running the open-source Linux operating system. Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox announced last week that Peter Jackson and his partner Fran Walsh will act as executive producers for the film, based on the best-selling game for Microsoft's Xbox gaming console. Bungie, the Microsoft-owned development firm which created the game, confirmed that Peter Jackson's post-production firm Weta Digital would be involved in the movie. Weta Digital uses more than 1000 dual-processor IBM blade servers running the Fedora version of the Red Hat distribution of the...

Several pieces of SCO v. IBM news. First, IBM has dropped it's patent counterclaims. According to IBM: While IBM continues to believe that SCO infringed IBM's valid patents, IBM agreed to withdraw its patent counterclaims to simplify and focus the issues in this case and to expedite their resolution. The little discovery that SCO has produced regarding IBM's patent claims makes clear that there is insufficient economic reason to pursue these claims. Since SCO's sales have been, and are, limited, a finding of infringement would yield only the most modest royalty or award of damages and would not justify the...

As you know, SCO has filed a motion with the court, asking for permission to take 25 more depositions. IBM has now filed its Memorandum in Opposition to SCO's Motion for Leave to Take Additional Depositions [PDF], and it's a breathtakingly bold chess move. SCO argued in particular that IBM's complex patent counterclaims made it essential that it have more depositions. I thought they kind of had a point. IBM maybe does too, and apparently it smells more attempted delay on SCO's part, and that has got to be a nauseating prospect. Anyway, if SCO's game is delay, delay, delay,...

The U.S. Patent Office has rejected two Microsoft patents over the FAT file format, but the software maker said Wednesday that it's not ready to give up its battle to protect its widely used method for storing data. The patent office delivered its ruling late last month but made it public this week. With one of the patents, the decision is what's considered a final rejection, while with another it's considered nonfinal. In both cases, Microsoft has the ability to pursue its claims further. The rejections come after a re-examination of the patents was sought by the Public Patent Foundation,...

Japan aims to switch some government computers to the free Linux operating system and reduce its dependence on Microsoft Windows. Japan is drawing up guidelines for its ministries recommending open source software such as Linux as an "important option" in government procurement, said an official at the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications.

Microsoft Corp. is not going to release a version of its Office suite software for open-source rival Linux, although the company is actively studying how Linux works and how it can integrate with the platform, a Microsoft representative said Wednesday. “The simplest way I can answer the question is that Microsoft is 100 percent focused on Windows,” said Nick McGrath, director of platform strategy for Microsoft in the U.K. “We have no plans at this present moment in time to deploy or build a version of Microsoft Office on Linux.” McGrath participated in a roundtable debate on whether free software...

Windows was broken and Microsoft has admitted it. In an unprecedented attempt to explain its Longhorn problems and how it abandoned its traditional way of working, the normally secretive software giant has given unparalleled access to The Wall Street Journal, even revealing how Vice President Jim Allchin, personally broke the bad news to Bill Gates.

Three Novell OpenSUSE community web site were defaced on Sunday by politically motivated hackers. Defacement archive Zone-H reports that a group called IHS Iran Hackers Sabotage broke into OpenSUSE.org, wiki.novell.com and forge.novell.com to post a message stating that it was Iran's right to develop nuclear power. All three sites were defaced in the same way.

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 Released Thursday September 29th, 2005 Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0.7 is now available for download. Amongst other changes, this minor release includes fixes for a return receipt regression introduced in version 1.0.2 (bug 289091) and the Linux command line URL parsing security flaw.Thunderbird 1.0.7 can be downloaded from the Thunderbird product page or the Thunderbird 1.0.7 directory on ftp.mozilla.org. Refer to the Thunderbird 1.0.7 Release Notes for more information. We expect details of the security fixes in this release to be added to the Mozilla Foundation's list of known security vulnerabilities soon.

No matter what strides the new generation of open-source companies make, they all owe a big debt to Linus Torvalds. In 1991 the Finnish programmer started Linux as a project at the University of Helsinki. Fourteen years later the reverberations are still being felt. Thanks to support from giant companies such as Dell Computer (DELL ) and IBM (IBM ), Linux is now commonplace on big corporate servers -- posting 11 consecutive quarters of growth, according to market researcher IDC.

The NSW Office of State Revenue (OSR) is taking a tough stance against Microsoft's decision to make an enterprise edition of Windows Vista only available to companies that have signed on to its Software Assurance program. The tax collection agency has declared it would rather switch desktop operating systems than lock itself into Microsoft's licensing regime. Delivering a presentation at the South East Asian Regional Computer Confederation (SEARCC 05) in Sydney yesterday, OSR chief information officer Mike Kennedy and the agency's manager of client services Pravash Babhoota confirmed they would start scoping for a move to a Linux desktop within...

The MIT Media Laboratory expects to launch a prototype of its US$100 laptop in November, according to Nicholas Negroponte, the lab's chairman and co-founder. The facility has been working with industry partners to develop a notebook computer for use by children in primary and secondary education around the world, particularly in developing countries. The laptops should start appearing in volume in late 2006.

SEPTEMBER 28, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - A company server that some workers at Novell Inc. apparently used for gaming purposes was hacked into and then used to scan for vulnerable ports on potentially millions of computers worldwide, according to an Internet security consultant. The scans, which have been going on since Sept. 21, are targeted at TCP Port 22 -- the default port for Secure Shell (SSH) services. SSH programs are used to log into other computers over a network or to execute remote commands and move files between machines in a secure fashion. Scans against the port are often an...

David Berlind over at ZDNet wrote a remarkable article called Did Microsoft send the wrong guy to Massachusetts' ODF hearing?. If you missed this article, you'll have missed the equivalent of what Intel's Andy Grove called an inflection point. This one has the potential to have more impact than the release of the first Pentium processor. ... Microsoft has essentially alienated the rest of the IT industry. I can't remember a single company that had so many people working in harmony against it, including IBM at the height of its arrogance. The Java Community Process provides just one example of...

In an extensive memo called "The Web is the Next Platform" that was introduced as evidence in Microsoft's antitrust trial five years ago, Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka described a "nightmare" scenario for the software giant. "The Web...exists today as a collection of technologies that deliver some interesting solutions today, and will grow rapidly in the coming years into a full-fledged platform (underlined for emphasis in the original memo) that will rival--and even surpass--Microsoft's Windows," Slivka wrote.

The activist group, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), released a statement yesterday strongly criticizing the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for its recent decision to switch all government computer systems to open-source format. The new policy would require all state agencies to acquire open standard software, like Open Document Format (ODF), by January 2007. "It is bad procurement policy for any state to unilaterally lock itself into one set of technologies," CAGW President Tom Schatz said.

IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) and Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT - news) have announced a joint initiative aimed at accelerating the development and adoption of Linux-based products in emerging markets like China, India, Russia and Korea. The two companies will provide software developers with implementation services, expertise and technical resources to help them certify new applications for IBM and Red Hat software. According to IBM, the program will give developers greater ability to build standards-based products that will not lock customers into proprietary operating environments. Penguin March In unveiling the initiative, IBM noted that a shift is occurring in emerging...

Users running Firefox on Linux may be vulnerable to a security vulnerability that can be exploited to compromise the user's system. Security firm Secunia warned on Tuesday that a flaw rated as "extremely critical" has been found in Firefox 1.0.6. The flaw can only be exploited on Unix or Linux based environments and can be fixed by upgrading to Firefox 1.0.7.