If you always wanted to fly but were held back by the expense and risks of flying real airplanes, you may want to give X-Plane a try. It is one of most advanced flight simulator software packages for personal computers and includes complete scenery of the planets Earth and Mars. X-Plane creates a realistic flight model by computing the forces to act upon each part of the aircraft. A wide range of aircraft are available, and you can build your own.

"Linux has been an option for corporate machines for 7 years now. NOTHING HAS changed. Quit lying Dell. The requests were for pre-installed openSuSE, Ubuntu and Fedora Core on Inspirons and other retail grade machines, not bulk purchased corporate class computers. We are not idiots and we can read through the lies."

Nokia is now scouting about for new application ideas around the N800, its latest Linux-enabled tablet. At the same time, though, the company has no plans to stray from its choice of an essentially Debian Linux-based platform, or from its concept of the N800 as a device geared to on-the-go Internet connectivity, according to Ari Jaaksi, Nokia's director of open source software.

Version 1.0 of NTFS-3g, a free NTFS driver for Linux, has been released. Project manager Szabolcs Szakacsits has declared the driver ready for productive use after the release candidate published two weeks ago was not changed. Szakacsits is also the author of the ntfsresize tool used in a number of partitioning tools and Linux installation routines.

Sister Judith, the director of the Vatican website, discusses the challenges of building a site for one of the world's oldest organizations.

The Mono project announced today that it has developed a Visual Basic compiler that will enable software developers who use Microsoft* Visual Basic to run their applications across multiple platforms without any modifications to the code. The new Mono Visual Basic compiler allows developers to continue to code in their preferred Visual Basic/Visual Studio environment and compile and run that same code base on a variety of operating systems and architectures, including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS.

For the consumer desktop/laptop market, Linux has been a non-starter. Sure, you can find many many different flavours of Linux available online, but you can't go to the local Big Box store and get a PC loaded with Linux on it.

Microsoft and Novell have offered new details about plans to help Windows and Linux work better together in enterprise settings. Although some in the GNU/Linux community have expressed unhappiness over the partnership between Microsoft and Novell, at least one analyst said data center managers will likely have cause to celebrate.