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To buy a flashy new ultra-thin framed 3D TV or not: Like many consumers over the holiday buying hustle, I struggled with that question. I finally gave in and decided to buy one. That decision was not an impulse-only submission, however. I was toying for a while with replacing my aging 42-inch plasma...

The Raspberry Pi project launched an app store Monday to support its eponymous $35 Linux PC, which hit the market in February. The store will carry both free and paid apps. Its launch has stirred mixed reactions among Raspberry Pi enthusiasts, with some criticizing plans to offer paid apps and other...

Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle. He was chosen to lead a discussion on open governance at the Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. The open innovation concept is what got him interested in free software communities while studying organizatio...

The latest release of Canonical's innovative open source operating system, Ubuntu 12.10, maintains its twice-annual upgrade pattern. Even though the last few releases have generated a steady chorus of cries for longer release schedules, Canonical's leadership stands by the schedule and the rationale...

For the installed user base of the former Sun Microsystems' OpenSolaris OS, questions about its continued support and development remain largely unanswered. When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, it raised fees for its technical help and halted further development on OpenSolaris, replacing it with its...

Gnumeric is a lightweight spreadsheet program that is fast and feature complete. Much like its chief open source competitors OpenOffice and LibreOffice, its graphical user interface is nothing fancy. What it lacks in colorful design or exciting visual menu displays, however, it surpasses with its fo...

It's obvious from the latest U.S. election that our voting system could use some improvement in terms of both enabling and supporting voters and efficiently tallying and verifying a trusted result. Open source offers the technology, as well as the culture and community, to address these challenges, ...

The recent release of Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal, is a more palatable version of the open source OS built around the Unity desktop environment. Perhaps I am growing more accustomed to Unity, or maybe Canonical's developers are succeeding in refining the graphical user interface, so it seems l...

OCRFeeder is a document layout analysis and optical character recognition application. It is a type of software that leaves much to be desired on the Linux desktop. OCR software is a companion tool to scanning a document. The scanner software creates a photo-like image of the scanned document. The ...

Darhon Finance is a comprehensive personal finance program packed with features to manage finances and bank accounts, track credit cards and investments and plan for expenses. It goes far beyond serving as a typical electronic check or bank book register. That leap to being full financial package pu...

The tide of software piracy in China may be ebbing. With the clear support of the Chinese government, several software organizations and computer firms based in Europe and the U.S. are conducting events focusing on growing open source in China. The push toward China's active participation in the ope...

NoteCase Pro is a note-taking and outliner application with a hefty list of features if you venture beyond the free version and buy into the shareware license. Even if you settle for the unregistered lite version, NoteCase Pro is an impressive tool for cataloging your notes and collected information...

The Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential -- but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago. Calligra is a fork of KDE's KOffice that grew out of unresolved disputes among ...

Oracle's proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison has pushed the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems -- a...

Ubuntu is one of the most popular and user-friendly Linux operating systems you will find. That said, Ubuntu can be intimidating and frustrating to computer users just stepping out of the World of Windows. Nothing beats learning how to use the Linux operating system like hands-on discovery. Having s...

Zorin Linux 6.0 is a very capable replacement operating system for Microsoft Windows. It is also a bother-free alternative to other Linux distros that suffer from the usability issues of the Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces. The Zorin Linux distro is an offshoot of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux...

One of the stumbling blocks in migrating to the Linux desktop is the mistaken view that you can't take it with you. Your data must remain captive to the Microsoft operating system. Not true at all. A related misconception that stalls many Windows users from adopting the Linux OS is the belief that w...

The developers of the now-notorious Flame malware used command and control servers running the 64-bit version of Debian and the OpenVz virtualization technology in their work. They wrote most of the server code in PHP, researchers at Kaspersky Lab and Symantec have found during continuing investigat...

The VectorLinux distro does an impressive job of blending a traditional Linux environment with the performance of other more mainstream offerings. VectorLinux is not a newcomer to the Linux desktop world. Despite its more than 10 years in development, this distro is not as well known as other Linux ...

The general public knows little about the true technology fundamentals of cloud computing, suggests a recent survey commissioned by IT vendor Citrix. Almost a third of the roughly 1,000 U.S. adults polled thought cloud computing was related to weather. However, the ascendance of Linux and open sourc...