Joe Barr

(LinuxWorld) — I missed Ximian Desktop. I gave it up last fall when I installed Red Hat 8.0. It's not that I didn't like Bluecurve, the new desktop treatment for GNOME and KDE that Red Hat included with 8.0, but it just wasn't Ximian. The months went by and I began to wonder if X... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — Hidden away in a seemingly routine industry news story by John Spooner at CNet last week was the most important PC desktop news of the year. Maybe of the past ten years. Unfortunately, the story was wrong. Michael Kanellos, Editor of Enterprise Computing and Person... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — I received a review copy of Mandrake Linux PowerPack 9.1 last week. I was happy to see it, but as I noted in the story about my frugal Red Hat 9 upgrade a couple of weeks ago, I'm a little hardware-challenged at the moment. Did I let that stop me? Of course not! Wh... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — SCO's latest bombshell came today when the troubled firm announced they are suspending further sales of its own version of Linux. In a letter to SCO partners, CEO and President Darl McBride said the company is "alerting commercial users to the fact that legal liabil... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — Microsoft funded and released a new set of benchmarks to follow the debut of its often-renamed Windows 2003 Server. The boys in Redmond are proud as punch of their new baby, whatever its name. They would have the world believe that Windows 2003 Server is twice as f... (more)

(LinuxWorld) ¡ª It's a bad itch. I've had it for years. For a short period, back in 1988 and 1989, I had a fix for it. But that didn't last. Now, thanks to an unlikely pair (Nick Petreley and Whil Hentzen), it's back. Let me explain. In the late 1980s, I used to hang out on Port... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — These are tight economic times. One of the things I can't afford to do any longer is to run out and buy the latest distribution of Linux to hit the shelves, whether it be from Mandrake, SuSE, Xandros or Red Hat. Little good it would do me if I could; Susan is usin... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — With all the chatter accompanying two WINE-related announcements over the past week or so, I thought it might be a good time to take a long look at the WINE project to see what all the fuss has been about. TransGaming's announcement of the availability of WineX 3.0... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — My desktop machine has been cramped for space for at least a year. I've had to shuffle games, data, applications and digital images on and off the system as I needed them. There just wasn't enough available space on the two existing drives, and it was past time to ... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — I was surprised at the amount of "friendly fire" I took as a result of my last Linux-gaming article, which was about BioWare's betas of Neverwinter Nights for Linux. Some of the core group at Icculus.org — maybe most of them — were furious at me for one reason or a... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — As soon as I saw the news that BioWare released a beta of a Linux client for its popular and successful Neverwinter Nights title, I downloaded the beta (registration required) and went shopping for the prerequisite retail Windows version of the game. Before I proce... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — In the war between proprietary and free/open-source software in state and local government over the past two years, Texas has established itself as ground zero. Texas Senate Bill 1579, for example, which seeks to ensure that free/open-source software is given a lev... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — Joe Aramendia, my son-in-law, has made his first two starts in NASCAR Busch Series events this year: first at Rockingham, then in Las Vegas. As a result, I've been practicing saying "tar" instead of tire, pondering the meaning of phrases like "driving off the... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — The shockwaves emanating from the lawsuit SCO Group filed against IBM last week continue to ripple back and forth across the entire IT community. That includes the free-software and open-source segments. How the suit will affect the future development and usa... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — Linux is everywhere you look, from mainframes to handhelds to servers to desktops. One place where its growth has been something less-than-spectacular is in SOHO (small office/home office) use. Now that full-featured office suites are available for Linux, mor... (more)

I recently downloaded the first beta of Opera 7.0 for Linux and gave it a whirl. I'm going to briefly recount my installation and usage experience with the beta, but this is in no way a review of the Opera browser, beta or otherwise. I'm simply using the beta as an icebreaker, an... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — The forum postings on last week's column about the installation of MySQL and ODBC to gain access to the secret power of OpenOffice.org 1.0 were a mixed bag: some good, some bad, some "so what." I was variously described as an stupid, foolish, an incompetent s... (more)

My friend Milt recently told me that he was having problems getting MySQL and OpenOffice.org 1.0 to play together nicely. Actually, "having problems" is something of an understatement. Milt is not a newbie. He's been using personal computers since before IBM's entry in the market... (more)

(LinuxWorld) — My dear friend Susan is happily running Red Hat 8.0 on my Sony Vaio laptop in her new home while she waits for me to build her a real desktop machine. I set up an account for myself on the laptop so that when I visit her I can get online and check my e-mail. ... (more)

Not long after the second part of the most recent Perens interview went online, we got email from Larry McVoy. He said there were some factual errors in the Perens piece and asked what our policy was on corrections. We assured him that we always tried to make corrections when the... (more)