JoeJoomla: "The simplest way to develop a Joomla! site on your local Mac OS X computer is by using MAMP. MAMP is short for Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP. MAMP works just like an application. It is released under the GNU General Public License. You can download MAMP from Living-e AG. The download page can be found HERE.

Current MAMP versions require Mac OS X 10.4.x. If you're running Mac OS X 10.3.x you can download an earlier version of MAMP 1.4.1 (universal binary), for Intel and PowerPC."

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OpenSourceCommunity: As I look at the Psystar Web site, built using Joomla! and VirtueMart, both free, as in liberty solutions, I can't help but wonder if we might be seeing these little extra pushes right now.

Psystar offers a product called "Open Mac." Well, today Psystar wisely renamed the product Open Computer.

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My apologies for writing so much about hardware and not content management this week. I suppose though, if Dean Barker at Gadgetopia can talk about content management, I can occasionally discuss gadgets here at CMS Report. Sometimes it helps to take a look at the devices we use to view our content just as much as it helps looking at the software we use to run our Web content management systems. Well, at least this is my excuse for not being fixated so much on content management.

In Thursday morning's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossberg did a review of the Asus Eee PC. The article, Asus Offers Travelers Small, Mobile Eee PC, but It’s Too Cramped, can be found in his column archive (a Wordpress site). I had been waiting for someone of his stature do a review on this product, but I was a little disappointed to see yet another review of a non-Apple device (this one is Linux based) be so negative.

A few weeks ago, I seriously thought about buying either Apple's latest MacBook or a Windows laptop where I could dual boot between the laptops native operating systems and Linux. In the end, I chose to install Linux on a three year old laptop. This old laptop isn't just any laptop but one of the first sub-$1000 laptops that hit the United States market. The laptop is the Averatec 3220 and over time I've found it just too sluggish for running Windows XP.

This old Averatec 3220 had a lot of negatives going its way for installing Linux. The laptop is from a company that almost no one knows so support was limited. Even Google had a tough time helping me find "best practices" for installing Linux on this particular laptop model. This particular laptop includes an AMD Athlon XP-M 2000+ processor, 512 MB RAM (upgraded from the original 256 MB), a 12.1 inch screen, and both Ethernet and wireless networking capabilities. The laptop could barely be considered "up to date" with regards to hardware, although its exterior is designed well and doesn't look dated like other laptops of the same age.

Before I discuss my troubles with installing Linux on this laptop, let me first talk about the positives. During the past two weeks, using Linux on this laptop has been pure joy.

On December 19, 2007, during a seminar with Apple in Paris, eZ Systems demonstrated eZ Publish running on Mac OS X Server v10.5 Leopard. In addition, eZ showed eZ Flow, a new extension for eZ Publish designed for media companies who need to build complex page layouts and pre-plan publication schedules to ensure a constant flow of rich content. Among other features, eZ Flow supports delivery of content to Apple iPhones.

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The latest review I've read on the KDE desktop is from Ars Technica, A first look at KDE 4.0 release candidate 2. While the author notes that a lot of improvements still need to be made to KDE 4.0, overall it should be an impressive desktop. I'm contemplating that my next laptop will be fully Linux and hoping KDE 4.0 will bring enough Wow to impress others on why I didn't choose to go the Windows or Mac route.

Last summer, I reluctantly chose Windows Vista for my home desktop computer. I mainly bought the system knowing I needed an edge for when we finally introduced the new Microsoft operating system at work (so far we continue to downgrade our boxes at work from Vista to XP). Needless to say, I'm not too impressed with Vista.

There are some that argue that Vista was released too soon, but I'll argue that after five years of development, it was released to late. I can't help but wonder if post versions of Windows XP had been released in a 1 to 2 year cycle how much better developers would have a handle on the bugs and users would have understood the new features.

As we mentioned more than a month ago, Firefox 3 is expected to sport a new look. Some of the more popular online magazines are starting to take notice and helping to fan some excitement on the new look. On a blog at Wired a Firefox 3 related post can be found, Catch a Glimpse of Firefox 3's Sleek, Sexy New Digs.

Some of the changes planned for the final release of Firefox 3 include a complete visual makeover with platform-specific skins designed to integrate the look of Firefox into your OS of choice.

Alex Faaborg, one the interface designers for Firefox, has been posting mock-ups and soliciting feedback from the community for some time (see our previous coverage) and he’s back with a series of wireframe sketches that show some of the progress in the interface redesign.

The blog post focuses on the visuals for the Windows and Mac OS X operating systems, but also directs users to an Ars Technica article for those interested in Linux. The article of interest is A first look at the Firefox 3 visual refresh for Linux.

"Why do a lot of really good open source developers like using Mac OS X? On the Apple website in the Developers Connection there is an article that starts with 'If you like open source development, you'll love Mac OS X. This fully-conformant UNIX operating system—built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5—bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products.' I am very Mac oriented and if it wasn't for being able to run open source products on the Mac I might still not be into them."

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"When it comes to Apple's new operating system, Leopard, users are likely to notice the flashy graphics and animations, the tight integration of applications and the speed with which it churns through data. What they don't see are a large number of the under-the-hood changes that Apple built in so that its own developers -- and those who come up with third-party apps -- use all of that underlying software goodness."

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"Mac OS X is a great development platform for working with PHP. Leopard comes with Apache, PHP and many other development tools, such as subversion already installed. Leopard brings a much needed upgrade from Tiger's tired PHP 4 to a very modern version of PHP 5.2.4. This is a guide for setting up a PHP development environment under 10.5 using the version of PHP that ships with leopard."

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