Jason Brooks

Debians Lenny Remains an Apt Community Linux Option by Jason Brooks Upgrading from Etch Support for in-place upgrades of production machines is one of the capabilities that the Debian project has long touted. I began the update by directing my Etch installation to train its attention on the new Lenny repositories. Familiar Software Tools Back […]

Debian GNU/Linux, the open-source operating system that’s proven more influential than any Linux flavor this side of Red Hat, recently hit the Internet’s FTP mirrors in the form of an updated 5.0 release. Version 5, which is also known by the Toy Story-inspired name “Lenny,” sports the same excellent software management tools and broad processor […]

In a blog posting earlier this year, Ian Murdock, Sun Microsystems’ vice president of cloud computing strategy and Debian GNU/Linux founder, wondered what might emerge as the cloud equivalent of the Linux distribution. Murdock pointed out that the cloud computing world today resembles the early days of Linux, during which dabblers with a surplus of […]

The world of Linux and open-source operating systems is populated with what seems like an absurd number of competing options, with new ones popping up all the time. And yet, owing to the depth of their corporate and community support, a few particular Linux distributions command the bulk of our attention. One such distribution, Novell’s […]

OpenSUSE 11.1 Takes On Ubuntu, Fedora by Jason Brooks ThinkPad Tab I was impressed by the “ThinkPad” tab in the system’s task manager application because I haven’t seen such a tab in the other distributions that also ship with this application. However, the tab was wrong about my system being undocked. Docking Applet On the […]

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 20 tech-related things, facts, habits or ideas about yourself. At the end, you will tag no one, since you should have forsworn chain letters years ago. However, if you want to share your tech idiosyncrasies, you can reach me at jbrooks@eweek.com or […]

I just wrapped up a review of OpenSolaris 2008.11, which, among other things, represents the most recent fruit of Sun Microsystems’ intermittent and arguably quixotic efforts to field a viable desktop alternative to Microsoft’s Windows. Over the past several years, I’ve reviewed quite a few of these desktop challengers–perhaps too many, considering the slender combined […]

OpenSolaris 2008.11, the second major release of Sun Microsystems’ freely-licensed, Solaris-based operating system, hit the Web late last year packed with feature enhancements that illustrate that Sun isn’t about to cede the platform stage to Linux, as brothers-in-Unix such as IBM’s AIX and Hewlett-Packard’s HP-UX have done. Taking a cue from popular Linux distributions, Sun’s […]

For the past few months, I’ve been using Twitter, the microblogging service that you may well be sick of hearing about. Right off the bat, I was attracted to Twitter because the 140 characters per entry that Twitter allows add up to about as much blog as I’m capable of mustering at most times.For me, […]

For the past few weeks, I’ve been running OpenSolaris 2008.11 on my main work notebook, in part because I’m working on a review of the OS, and in part because Linux’s rough edges have grown a bit smooth to support the desktop tweaking and fiddling with which I like to sidetrack myself. One of the […]

More than a few times now, I’ve heard it said that our new president, Barack Obama, will be an open-source president. Owing to the many meanings of “open,” this catchy tagline has been used in a lot of different contexts, most of which relate to transparency in government. There are, however, indications that the Obama […]

Dabble DB is a Web-based application from Smallthought Systems that can help solve one of the modern knowledge worker’s most enduring dilemmas by bridging the gap between the spreadsheet and the database. Spreadsheet applications are excellent tools for ad hoc data crunching. You fire up a new spreadsheet, key or paste in your data and […]