Some of us rely heavily on our personal information managers for keeping our appointment calendars, contacts, reminders, and notes. Gnome offers Evolution, and KDE has Kontact. Which one is better? Bruce Byfield takes a detailed look at both.

In this tip, Juliet Kemp shows how to use xclip for copy-and-paste on the Linux command line– without using the mouse.

You know a controversy is a big one when none other than RMS weighs in with his opinion, and sure enough, that’s what happened in the Mono debate late last week. “Debian’s decision to include Mono in the default installation, for the sake of Tomboy which is an application written in C#, leads the community in a risky direction,” RMS wrote on the Free Software Foundation’s site. Of course, rather than settling the debate, Stallman’s proclamation only fanned the flames higher, resulting in a raging inferno.

Moving on from where we left off last time, this article isn’t so much the next in the series as much as it’s just tidying up some random loose ends. And so, to business.

Here’s one of the many questions facing device makers targeting the mini notebook and netbook markets: When business users or consumers want to access the Web on the go, will they be willing to set aside a smartphone or cellphone and instead log on using a next-generation PDA? Dell may be wagering the answer is yes. The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday the company is developing an Android-based, non-phone device that will run on the ARM architecture instead of an Intel Atom mobile chip.

It’s easier than ever for Linux users to avoid closed, proprietary applications and drivers. But life is complex, and there are still times when a Linux user’s choices are not as simple as FOSS/non-FOSS; for example, multimedia is a minefield of patented codecs, binary blobs, and DRM. So what’s a freedom-loving Penguinista to do?