Linux.com's Stefan Vrabie has a look at the state of Transgaming's Cedega, which some claim to be the best current offering for running Windows games under Linux. While it may be better than nothing, the author still puts this solidly under the "plug and pray" column with the biggest drawback being the amount of fiddling required to make it work. From the article: "Cedega may not be the answer to games under Linux, but it's better than not being able to play at all, until gaming companies notice Linux users as a market and release games for Linux." Linux.com and Slashdot.org are both owned by OSTG.

briandon writes "It's not a step-by-step guide (and doesn't claim to be one), but Building Scalable Web Sites is the closest thing available to a nuts-and-bolts look at managing the technical aspects of doing a Web-based startup. There's lots of code inside, but the book isn't built around a single, extremely contrived, case study like an online wine store. Instead, most of the chapters follow a general pattern: a topic (like bottlenecks in your application and platform, scaling, or monitoring) is addressed and some rules of thumb that describe the way that the author feels things should be done are set forth and explained, with lots of very specific hints and factoids mixed in along the way. Tools for other languages (in most cases, Perl) are mentioned in passing, nearly all of the code snippets are in PHP. MySQL 4.1 is the basis for most of the database-centered material." Read the rest of Brian's review.

lord_rob the only on writes "The Linux NTFS project has released a beta version of its fully open source userspace (using FUSE) 3G-Linux NTFS support driver. According to the developer, this driver beats hands down other NTFS support solutions performance-wise (including commercial Paragon NTFS driver and also Captive NTFS, which is using windows ntfs.sys driver under WINE)." That's right, writing to NTFS even works. Soon it'll mean one less recovery disk to keep around, I hope.

An anonymous reader writes "NeoSmart Technologies has an incredibly detailed (6 long pages!) and mostly positive review of ReactOS, The Open Source Windows. The review covers the goals of ReactOS and how well it meets them, system stability, application compatibility, kernel design and development, and the networking stack. It discusses the use of WINE in ReactOS' kernel and the effect on both its compatibility and development times." For the visual learners, here are some screenshots."

Ravi writes "I recently got hold of a very nice book on Ubuntu called Ubuntu Hacks co-authored by three authors - Kyle Rankin, Jonathan Oxer and Bill Childers. This is the latest of the hack series of books published by O'Reilly. They have made available a rough cut version of the book online ahead of schedule which was how I got hold of the book but as of now you can also buy the book in print. Put in a nutshell, this book is a collection of around 100 tips and tricks which the authors choose to call hacks, which explain how to accomplish various tasks in Ubuntu Linux. The so called hacks range from down right ordinary to the other end of the spectrum of doing specialised things." Read on for the rest of Ravi's review.

chrisd writes "Hi, everyone. Today I'm pleased to announce that we're making Picasa, our photo management application, available for Linux. This is a pre-beta labs release and since we're still learning on how to best make software for Linux, we're asking that you submit your bugs as you find them. Picasa for Linux uses Wine internally; this shows a bit in the interface, but it works even better than we had hoped. Download it and check it out! A list of supported distributions can be found in the FAQ. We hope our patches to Wine will help make it easier for everyone to run Windows apps on Linux and other Unix-like systems. Thanks to our pals at CodeWeavers who did much of the heavy lifting, and to Marcus Meissner, whose libgphoto support patch was a welcome surprise."

A not-so-anonymous reader asks: "I am about to buy a new cell phone and my primary focus is on good reception quality, as I have bad network coverage at home. I made some tests using some phones I have access to and got a subjective rating of T610 < K500i < 6520 < V600i, where T610 means 'nearly no service' and V600i gives 'service even in the wine cellar'. Googling around did not give any useful hints. Has anyone compared the reception quality of current GSM phones via simple locations testing, or better yet with commercial GSM testing equipment?"

mcho writes "Unlike other speculators, who get no spam, Robert X. Cringely offers an intriguing reason behind Apple's recent strategy of Boot Camp. From the article: 'I believe that Apple will offer Windows Vista as an option for those big customers who demand it, but I also believe that Apple will offer in OS X 10.5 the ability to run native Windows XP applications with no copy of XP installed on the machine at all. This will be accomplished not by using compatibility middleware like Wine, but rather by Apple implementing the Windows API directly in OS X 10.5.'

An anonymous reader writes "Chances are that you think Linspire lets you run Windows applications, that you have to run it as root, and that it's really not quite a proper Linux. Wrong, wrong, and wrong. At LinuxWorld in Boston this week, CEO Kevin Carmony explained what Linspire Linux is, and isn't all about. Carmony said that people are still getting these things wrong. Yes, in the beginning, Linspire had the goal of letting Linux users run Windows applications with WINE, but it dropped that theme years ago. As for requiring you to run as root, that was, Carmony said, only the case with an early alpha release that was never put in the public's hands. As for not being a real Linux, that's nonsense, too."

Ravi writes "Anybody who have heard about Linux would be aware of Ubuntu which is a very popular flavor of Linux created by the South African firm Canonical founded by the space tourist Mark Shuttleworth. In fact, they set the precedent of supplying free CDs of this very popular OS to any one interested in installing and trying out Linux on their machine. Recently, I got hold of this wonderful book named "Beginning Ubuntu Linux - From Novice to Professional" authored by Kier Thomas. Being a Ubuntu user myself, I was pleased to see a Linux book specifically concentrating on Ubuntu, finding its way to the book stores. This book is aimed at people who are new to Linux and who wish to start their Linux journey by installing Ubuntu on their machines. Read the rest of Ravi's review.

At the beginning of this month we sent your questions to Isam Bayazidi of Amman, Jordan. He's a Slashdot reader, founder of the Jordan Planet blogging community, and (I know this from personal experience) knows the best places to buy discount-priced computer components in his home town. Enjoy!

An anonymous reader writes "Player gets banned for playing World of Warcraft under WINE and using a Logitech Gaming keyboard. "I am an experienced network engineer for an ISP and I am often running World of Warcraft on Linux through the use of WINE..."" Although the e-mails exchanged are unclear my guess is that the programmable keyboard was more the problem then WINE. Not that you'd ever know that given that Blizzard communicates with their users seemingly almost exclusively with form letters.

Fiachra06 writes "I am involved in helping to maintain the computer systems in the local school (200 ~ 250 pupils) in my home village. The children range in age from 4 to 12. The 14 PC's are running either Windows 95, Windows 98, and XP Home Edition and I find this rather abhorrent. The licensing fees to upgrade all the capable machines to XP pro is unreasonable for such a small school. What would the esteemed Slashdot readers think of shifting all these machines to a Linux distro (probably Ubuntu). I have no doubt the children will have no problem adapting to the new OS (although the teachers might), the main concerns are the availability of educational software for them to use, and practicality of maintenance for people who are new to the OS given that I am not there regularly enough to be a full time sys admin. Preferably I wouldn't like to running too much through Wine but it is still an option."

skaet writes "DesktopLinux.com reports that Google is working together with CodeWeavers to bring their photo editing and sharing program Picasa, formerly only available on Windows, over to Linux. From the article: 'The program is now in a limited beta test. If this program is successful, other Google applications will be following it to the Linux desktop, sources say. The Linux Picasa implementation includes the full feature set of the Windows Picasa 2.x software. It is not, strictly speaking, a port of Picasa to Linux. Instead, Linux Picasa combines Windows Picasa code and Wine technology to run Windows Picasa on Linux. This, however, will be transparent to Linux users, when they download, install, and run the free program on their systems.'"

reub2000 writes to tell us that in response to talk of "tainted" code within ReactOS Steven Edwards, ReactOS and Wine developer, has called for a complete audit of the entire source tree in addition to procedure and policy changes. From the article: "One final note, this audit of the code is going to take a long time. It could take years, but it will happen, this project will come out better than it was before. I don't believe anything anyone has done while working on this project was really wrong. Every decision has three possibilities, being moral, ethical and or legal. Sometimes the law in itself is unethical and immoral. If people made mistakes and there was a violation of the law, I question the justice of the law and or anyone that would try to prosecute any of the developers who just want the freedom to learn and create a more free system."

PeterBrett writes "Tom Wickline recently posted to the Wine development list announcing that he'd done some benchmarks comparing Windows XP to Wine. They should be taken with the requisite dose of salt, but Wine has certainly come a long way."

wombatmobile writes "Hiroshi Tanaka, president of Innovative Design and Technology, claims to have perfected a machine that can transform a bottle of just-fermented Beaujolais Nouveau into a fine, mellow wine in seconds. From the article: 'The road, however, won't be an easy one: the company has brought the machine around to Japanese wine producers, restaurants and even sake rice wine and "shochu" sweet potato spirit distillers, but so far only a small shochu maker in southern Japan has agreed to get involved.'

cyberjessy writes "Surprise! The Fedora Core 5 Release will include Mono in the distribution, in spite of Red Hat's opposition. In addition to the Mono runtime, it will also include Mono applications like Beagle and F-Spot. Is the Linux community finally ready to accept Mono? Mono is becoming increasing important due to Windows Vista, which has WinFX (the next .Net Framework) as its core API. This will mean that in future, all native Windows applications will easily run on Linux, with Mono. Will Mono achieve what WINE could not?"

blast3r wrote to mention a ZDNet Blog posting by George Ou, stating that WINE is still vulnerable to the WMF flaw. From the article: "All applications launched inside Wine, Cedega, or Cross-Over Office are technically still exploitable. Wine runs on most x86 platforms, including Linux and the various BSDs. The surprising part about finding this flaw in Wine is that they implemented the entire Meta File API without realizing that this could be a security issue. Exploiting a Windows application running inside Wine depends on that application calling the vulnerable function with malicious data."

smooth wombat writes "What makes a good wine? Why do some wines have a smooth, almond-like bouquet while others have a sharper, more acidic bite to them? These questions and more have usually been answered by oenologists who can list the subtle nuances of a particular wine and tell you if it's good or not. However, vinters don't have the luxury of waiting until a wine is ready to be drunk to know if they have produced a good, drinkable product. Lorenz "Larry" Biegler, who teaches chemical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, in conjunction with industry scientists in Chile, is working on mathematical formulas to automate the fermentation process, adjusting ingredients and conditions to ensure robust flavors and higher yields from grape harvests. The researchers have been collaborating for more than two years and are studying only white wines, since reds are more complex and contain solids that make them difficult to analyze."