WorkshopLive.com is a virtual music school that features dozens of professional instructors teaching lessons online for all levels of expertise, in guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. When WorkshopLive was in the early stages of development, the company had limited funds to devote to hardware, software, and human resources, so CTO Marilyn Hoefner decided to give open source software a try. "We've been extremely happy," Hoefner says.
As hordes of European Java programmers descend on the JavaPolis conference in Belgium in mid-december, the developers of XWiki hope to turn heads with their "second-generation" wiki software that includes experimental integration with the Google Docs spreadsheet module.
XWiki faces formidable competition, though. JavaPolis's own site runs on the competing Confluence platform, said by its developer to be in use by more than 4,000 organizations; XWiki's clients number in the hundreds. Confluence has its own spreadsheet plugin that interfaces with EditGrid rather than the ubiquitous Google Docs. XWiki hopes Google integration will be the killer plugin that raises its profile as an enterprise wiki.
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Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get. Though of no use against actual insects, Mantis is great for the other variety, since it lets end users report bugs or suggestions, and gives developers a full workflow solution so bugs can be assigned and progress on them checked until eventually the problems are fixed.
You can think of Kile as an IDE for the LaTeX document layout system. Instead of requiring you to learn a considerable amount of markup language, as LaTeX itself does, or providing you with a graphical interface that hides you from the complexity, as Lyx does, Kile automates the process of working with LaTeX while keeping the markup visible. This arrangement makes Kile an ideal way for beginners to learn LaTeX, as well as a convenient and efficient way for more advanced users to work with LaTeX.
Logitech's Harmony series of programmable universal remote controls ship with Windows and Mac OS X configuration programs. That wasn't enough for Phil Dibowitz, though -- he set out to build his own Linux support.
Have you ever tried to unmount your USB thumb drive only to get the message "device is busy"? Like me, you probably thought, "I know I closed that file manager window. What's keeping it busy now?" fuser is a command that can answer that question for you, along with similar questions about what processes are using what files or sockets.
While it's unclear what Maka stands for, the "giga" part of Makagiga most likely refers to the number of tools this application has on offer. It comes with a to-do manager, RSS reader, a basic photo viewer/editor, a text editor, miscellaneous widgets, and much more. Makagiga is written in Java, so it runs on any platform with Java Runtime Environment. Better yet, you can download a portable version of Makagiga that runs equally well on Linux and Windows, so it makes an ideal companion for use on the move.
John Diamond is the creator and lead developer of the popular free software game Alien Arena. He turned his hobbies and a talent for coding into a small business.
These three short videos -- all less than 8 minutes long -- give you an idea of Fedora 8's "look and feel" during the installation and setup process, and show you what software is installed by default. The third video shows you how to install and -- just as important -- uninstall software in Fedora 8.
Damn Small Linux is tiny Linux distribution that John Andrews originally created in 2002 to see just how many applications could fit into a 50MB system. The project has grown over the years to include many other contributors working on hundreds of packages and applications. Last month's release of DSL 4.0 brought many updates and changes, yet it remains a special-purpose distribution for older hardware because it lacks support for many modern features.
Apple's .Mac service -- commonly known as dotMac -- is a suite of online utilities integrated with OS X. It is wildly popular with Mac owners, but it costs $99 per year. That annual hit to the wallet prompted J. Kent Pepper to commence a bounty-driven contest to create a free, open source replacement: the notMac Challenge. And he has found a winner.
Beginning today, anyone interested in getting an XO computer through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has a chance to grab one. The Give One, Get One (G1G1) program is open to US and Canadian residents who want to purchase one XO laptop for themselves for $399.
So you've written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your Web site, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension.
Firefox includes an option for bookmarking all open tabs, but heavy users of tabs will find that this option is hardly enough. When you are researching a subject, the particular combination of tabs matters as much as the individual ones -- and, besides, selecting the tabs to open individually can be tedious if you are dealing with several dozen. And what happens if your session crashes before you have a chance to bookmark? You can address such concerns by installing Session Manager, a highly customizable add-on for preserving the state of the window after you close the browser.
I've been hearing the phrase "This is the year of the Linux desktop" for 10 years. For me, it's been a true statement for each of those years, because GNU/Linux has been my primary desktop operating system since 1997. But for most people around the world, this is the year of the the Windows desktop, same as it was last year and the year before. But if we each spent one day telling others about GNU/Linux, could we make a difference in the lives of at least a few people? I think so. That's why I'm promising -- right here and right now -- to spend at least one day in the next three months handing out free GNU/Linux install CDs, and why I invite you to join me in this effort.
What does a marketing guru with a passion for the South Seas and a penchant for entrepreneurship do? He launches an e-commerce site that sells noni juice, custom surfboards, and island-inspired home accessories, of course. And because the site is highly branded and feature-rich, he hires an open source developer to code it for him.
Handwriting recognition, like its cousins speech recognition and optical character recognition, is a domain still dominated by proprietary products. Where there are Linux solutions, such as the one in Nokia's Maemo Internet tablets, they are often closed source plugins protected by patent claims. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to find CellWriter, a small, straightforward handwriting recognition tool that integrates easily with modern Linux desktops.
Linux Mint is a derivative distribution of Ubuntu. Its purpose, according to its Web site, "is to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." Unfortunately, it falls short in at least one of those areas, and suffers from several other disappointing shortcomings.
The US Navy's research and development and acquisition policy site at acquisition.navy.mil uses eZ Systems' open source content management system to help civilian and military users access the Navy's myriad policy documents. Before the switch to eZ Publish in November 2003, the site was an unorganized collection of hard-to-navigate static HTML pages. Today, IT project manager Tina Minor, who manages the system for DOD contractor Automation Technologies, says she really likes the customizability and low price of open source software.
Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer, which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations. Although LaTeX Beamer is capable of considerable complexity, you need to know surprisingly little in order to produce a slide show.
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