Mike McCallister

The name sounds like it might be a disease, but thanks to the German IT-Security Agency, KDE users will soon have a functioning open-source groupware application suite. Building on and integrating existing personal information management tools, the Kroupware project is beta testing a server component to compete with Microsoft Exchange. The suite will be integrated into KDE 3.2. The K Desktop Environment is still the most popular Linux desktop, included in all the major distributions and the primary desktop in SuSE, Mandrake, and other popular distributions. A consortium of German and Swedish firms (Efrakon, Intevation, and Klarälvdalens Datakonsult) got the contract in September 2002 to produce a free software groupware application allowing German government entities using both Linux and Windows to communicate with each other. With a tight timeline, the consortium ... (more)

Making Friends with the GNOME Desktop

In my last article I showed you some of the basics of the KDE desktop environment. The primary challenger to KDE is the GNOME desktop environment. The GNU Network Object Model Environment project began, in part, in a political dispute in the free software community. KDE is based on Trolltech's Qt libraries. These development libraries were originally released under something other than the GNU General Public License (GPL). Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation issued a call to create a new desktop environment based on GPL'ed libraries. While the political dispute was r... (more)

KDE 3 More effective, more fun

The Linux desktop world reached another milestone in April when the third major version of the K Desktop Environment (KDE 3.0) hit download servers. As many as three-quarters of all Linux desktop systems use KDE as their primary desktop. While the GNOME desktop has made great strides over the last few years, KDE is clearly the more stable and mature choice for business users. This is a basic overview of what's new, what works and changes in store for current KDE 2.x users. Those changes center around a new basic architecture for the desktop, which means a big download for those ... (more)

A Profile of the Mad Prophet of Free Software

Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software, by Sam Williams. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly & Associates, 2002. 225 pages. $22.95 Richard Stallman is easily the most controversial figure associated with Linux and the open source movement. And the controversy begins with this very terminology. Stallman, fairly or not, believes the operating system is and should be called GNU/Linux, and the movement that he is a part of is not favoring "open source" but "free software." For those of you just getting acquainted, Stallman is the founder of the Free Software Foundation... (more)

Tools of the Trade

Sure, there's a JVM for Linux and applets will run in any Linux browser, but can you actually code from a Linux box? When the GNU/Linux boom hit in the late '90s, all the hype was directed at the server. How Linux would save enterprises great gobs of cash in storage. How stable it was for next-to-no cost. How Apache stoked the furnace for the underfunded dot-coms slated to rule the universe. In the face of all that hype, some may have thought that Linux was really just an OS for sys admins. What those people forgot is that Linus Torvalds invented the OS just so he could code at h... (more)