Archive

Not all search tools are the same. Just like users have a variety of Linux distros that appeal to a wide range of needs, search apps do different tasks for different users. One of the best search tools I have found is a clever app called "Recoll." I have an extensive collection of research and publi...

Yahoo has offered its Mojito application framework to the open source community under the BSD license. Mojito is an MVC JavaScript Web application framework built on release 3 of Yahoo's open source JavaScript Yahoo User Interface Library. MVC is a software architecture that isolates the domain logi...

I've been looking at ways to optimize the time I spend sitting in traffic. The old days when listening to the radio constituted the sum extent of productivity achieved while staring at someone else's tailgate are long gone, thanks to the smartphone. I've already written about in-car Internet, includ...

I thought I had found image-manipulating Nirvana with GimpShop. But the wide world of open source software and the Linux community failed me this week. My quest for a better GIMP tool to give me a Photoshop-like Windows experience turned into a fool's folly. Actually, my faith in the Linux OS is sti...

Amazon Web Services has teamed up with private cloud infrastructure provider Eucalyptus in a move that could enable the deployment of hybrid clouds. Hybrid clouds are a combination of internal private clouds and external public clouds. Under the agreement, AWS will support the integration of privat...

The government of Iceland recently launched a one-year migration project for all its public institutions in what appears to be an acceleration of its movement toward free and open source software and away from proprietary systems, according to the European Commission blog Joinup. The project will ap...

We've been seeing applications that allow you to remotely access desktop PCs for years. They have tended to function on a PC-to-PC connection basis over the Internet -- like Symantec's pcAnywhere software, which is often used for remote PC troubleshooting. More recently, we've been seeing tools that...

Developers are losing interest in creating apps for Android because of the continued fragmentation of the operating system, according to a survey conducted jointly by Appcelerator and IDC between January and February. Its results show that interest in Android phone app development fell by nearly fiv...

The TEA Text Editor is a very handy writing tool that delivers a much different user interface. For most computer users cranking out words or program code for digital consumption, text editors are often preferable to feature-bloated word processors. TEA pours on features yet keeps from getting too s...

Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, announced version 3.3 of the kernel Sunday. Among the most noteworthy changes found in 3.3 is the merging of kernel code from the Android project. Linux 3.3 also includes support for a new architecture, the Texas Instruments VelociTI Very Long Instruction Word ar...

Windows 8 is on its way. In fact, it's already here, in a manner of speaking. Microsoft recently released what it called a "consumer preview" version of the OS. When the final versions arrive, it will finally give Microsoft a leg up in the tablet market. That might take a bite out of the market sha...

Mirage is a fast and simple GTK+ image viewer for the GNOME desktop. Its lightweight structure includes just enough editing power to make it an ideal choice for everyday use. Image viewers come in all sizes and shapes. They can be packed full of editing features and can come with little or no photo ...

The Linux Foundation has come a long way since initiated in 2007 as the fusion of the Open Source Development Lab and Free Standards Group. At its start, I wondered why there was no membership or representation from Canonical, which was the hottest thing in Linux at the time. Today, Canonical is a m...

The ultra-cheap Linux computer on a circuit board has its roots in the classroom. But the bare-bones computer, dubbed "Raspberry Pi," has potential to teach industrial embedded programmers some new tricks. Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit-card-sized computer sold without keyboard or monitor, runs several ...

It's no wonder that the Linux desktop operating system is not attracting hordes of new users from Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS X platforms. Linux has almost too many desktop choices, and most of them are far from good. One clear exception is the Lightweight X Desktop Environment, or LXDE. I am b...