But there is another software which is even more amazing. www.Maxivista.com let you use any laptop as an extra screen of another PC.

Unfortunately not open source but definitely worth a

Michael

Mandrake Linux cannot, as of right now, write to NTFS partitions. The easiest way to share files between Windows XP and Linux continues to be having a FAT32 partition that can act as a go-between. There is a project — NTFS-Linux — devoted to getting native support for the Windows filesystem into the Linux kernel, but the web site is pretty stale and development seems to be at a crawl. Meanwhile, a programmer named Jan Kratochvil has come up with a way to use Windows’ own filesystem drivers to talk to NTFS partitions from within Linux. The project, called Captive NTFS, is worth a look for people who need this functionality.

YAReG, the ReiserFS tool for Windows mentioned in my earlier comment, cannot write to Reiser volumes like I originally thought. It can only read from them and write to Windows partitions.

I’ve had great difficulty getting my Canon i350 printer working under Linux. It’s not supported by current Linux printing architectures, but the manufacturer does seem to offer some limited Linux support in the form of i-series drivers available for download from the New Zealand and Japanese Canon web sites. I haven’t tried these yet, but have high hopes. Canon’s failure to release these drivers in the US is inexplicable, but probably has to do with the great strides Linux is making in other countries compared to here. Thanks are due to Jose and Tassos from the LinuxPrinting.org Canon forum for this find. The Japanese drivers have moved from the original location given in Jose’s message. You can now find them at the URL given in my follow-up message to the same forum. More info is also available in this message. You can translate the Japanese pages into English with AltaVista’s Babel Fish translator.

I’ll continue to post about my ongoing Linux experiment elsewhere on this blog.

Mandrake’s distro has gained the ability to safely read from and write to NTFS partitions (so I’ve heard… not tested yet), and some enterprising .Net programmer has released a tool that can read/write ReiserFS volumes from Windows. Not only that, but some OSS programmers appear to have ported Linux to Windows as a Win32 executable (this is my limited understanding, since they claim that it doesn’t use VMware-style virtualization). The CoLinux web site has some truly impressive screenshots.

Microsoft does a lot of talking about innovation, but the open source arena is where it’s really happening. By the time Longhorn finally comes out, I think Linux may very well have surpassed it in both features and UI.