Help Us Help You: Making it Easy for Your IT Dept

The Wall Street Journal published a great piece on making it easier and faster for your IT department to help you.

I love #'s 2, 4 and 6 on the list. These are all things that we try to explicitly encourage in our customers. The ones that "get it" do get better service, because it's easier to help them!

Red Hat Whiteboxes are Coming!

Red Hat announced a partnership with Intel, which is very long overdue on both parts. As an Intel-authorized reseller and a Red Hat Ready (RH authorized) company, we're positively chomping at the bit for something similar to Microsoft's pre-install kit.

Hopefully, this partnership will ease the RH licensing process and automate much (if not all) of the RH desktop load process, including driver configs and selection/loading of add-on software.

Also, I'm looking for Red Hat to improve its compatibility. Say what you will about both distros, but Ubuntu just seems to fire up, recognize devices and work better out of the box than Red Hat. I've been saying for a good year now that Red Hat has the coordination and the channel-friendliness, but Ubuntu has the ease-of-use. Hopefully this is RH's attempt to fulfill the best of both worlds . . .

Cool Freeware of the Week: Launchy

If you've never tried Launchy, it's time you thought about it. Launchy is started using a hotkey combination (alt-space) and allows you to quickly launch other applications, do calculations, use Google search, browse Windows and even (with some customization) run Windows terminal commands.

If you're looking for Foxtrot-endorsed (useful, unique) free downloads, please visit our free downloads page. And if you have other free software recommendations, please post in the form of a comment. Thanks!