I am(was) a great Microsoft Windows fan. One of the best things of Microsoft Windows is the sheer ease with which it can be installed. Over the years I have had to do it many times, especially since I keep getting this blue screen and I have to press the power button to get things going again. That and installing software that came on any magazine CD would have me formatting the disk every few months.

Corel Word Perfect 2000

The book is nicely categorized into seven parts, each further simplified into different chapters and further sub topics. Though it is advisable to read the book from 'Part I to Part VII' in tandem don't let the rules bully you. Every chapter is interlinked with the previous topic. It can however be read in any manner, provided you know what it is about and have a rough idea of the past. All the 18 chapters are comprehensively explained keeping the 'lame' user in mind.

Opera is a lesser-known web-browser, available for various platforms

(beta4 for LinuxPPC was unavailable at the time of this writing).

I took the statically linked RPM for simplicity, but it's 2.27 megs. The

dynamically linked version is of course, smaller -- around 1.2 megs. The

difference? Dynamic linking requires you to already have the Qt 2.2

library.

It's simple enough to install the RPM -- there's nothing to do but ``rpm

-i opera*''. Run it from the command line with `opera'. The license

agreement, which pops up right after the rpm installation, gives a 30 day

Star Office 5.2 is an office suite similar to Microsoft Office for

Windows. It consists of Presentation software, Spreadsheets, Word

Processor, HTML editor, Database and can also be used as your e-mail

client! Lets look at the things you can do with StarOffice 5.2 beginning

with the installation procedure. You do need to install the software on

your PC to be able to use it!

Place the StarOffice 5.2 CDROM in the drive, then type

mount /dev/cdrom.

Change to /mnt/cdrom and press enter.

cd /mnt/cdrom/linux/office52

Emacs, Perl, Linux, FreeBSD, Apache, Sendmail, Fetchmail, BIND, X

Windows, and indeed much of the foundation of the global Internet

owe their origins to a remarkable model of economic development

for software and platforms called Open Source.

"Just as the early microcomputer pioneers set the stage for

today's industry, Open Source software has set the stage for the

drama that is just unfolding, and that will lead to a radical

re-shaping of the computer industry landscape over the next five

to ten years," predicts publisher Tim O'Reilly.

Version 7 (Guinness) certainly has been one of the most anticipated and

hyped releases of Red Hat. It's been out for a while now and it's time

to see whether all that hype was justified. We'll be reviewing the Red

Hat 7 ftp release here.

The first thing new about the distribution is that there are now two

installation CD's. Red Hat has added a lot of new stuff here namely

OpenSSH and Tripwire for security, Kernel 2.4, Abiword, Xfree86 4.0

and USB support. Is the added software worth it? System administrators

QNX, or Qee-nix, is one of the latest entrants in the free operating systems

market. If you mistakenly thought that QNX is a new kid on the block, you

couldn't be more wrong! The QNX Real Time Operating System ala RTOS (What the

heck does that mean? A: We'll get to that later) has existed for nearly 20

years. QNX Software Systems claim that they were the first to bring

transparent distributed processing to the PC, built-in fault tolerance and

embedded microkernel windowing system, to name just some of the pioneering

Corel Photo-Paint needs no introduction. Photo-Paint has been competing

with Adobe Photoshop for some time now. While Photo-Paint has always been

a very capable program, but, it hasn't quite been able to match the

popularity of Photoshop. Its image creation and manipulation features are

very strong. So it was good news when Corel decided to the latest release,

Photo-Paint 9, to the Linux community as a free download.

Corel Photo-Paint for Linux can be downloaded here. Both RPM and DEB