Software

Gentoo Linux can be either an experienced Linux user's ideal desktop choice or a new user's worst computing nightmare. I am not talking about being new to the Linux OS. I mean just plain and simple new to Gentoo Linux. The Linux OS has many dozens of specialized distributions. Many of them are easy ...

Open source developers apparently don't adhere to best practices such as using static analysis and conducting regular security audits, found Coverity's Spotlight report, released Wednesday. The Coverity Scan service, which is available at no charge to open source projects, helped devs find and fix a...

Cylon Linux Delivers GNOME Design with Glamour Galore Jack M. Germain Cylon is a classic Linux distro preconfigured with lots of tweaks -- kind of a Unity-less Ubuntu with bling. Cylon runs the classic GNOME 3 desktop on almost any hardware configuration made since 2007, but it is more suited to sea...

We're hearing more from vendors about how new features, functionality, rewrites and releases are being driven by customers -- by their direct experience using the software and competing in their various industries. We're also hearing from customers and users, including the enterprise market, that in...

Elementary OS is a new style Linux distro that wraps its own sophisticated desktop design around a solid Ubuntu core. This distro first appeared in 2011. Its developers released the second major version, Elementary OS Luna, last year. The latest weeks-old beta release of what will be the third major...

Darkcoin this week announced that it has exited beta and is now ready for mainstream use. Also, the software's code is now open source. Darkcoin -- a Bitcoin competitor -- is the first fully open source cryptocurrency with financial privacy built directly into the software, its developers claimed. O...

Scribbleton is a very infant -- as in alpha -- release of an innovative note-taking app for Linux that provides cross-platform access with Windows and Apple computers. It creates a personal wiki for storing everything from quick notes to detailed checklists to outlines. It creates links between page...

Linux -- the free open source operating system for enterprise, small business and home computing use -- is not used everywhere yet. However, its user base crosses nearly every industry. Linux is in many places today. It's in consumer products like TVs and computer networking gear. Linux drives servi...

The Pale Moon Web browser project solves a problem that many Mozilla Firefox users would like to solve. It is a fork of Mozilla's official browser developed by Moonchild Productions that provides users with access to all of their favorite Firefox extensions but eliminates the Australis interface, wh...

One of the essential draws to open-source software should be superior product documentation. Well-written user guidelines are a key strategy that software developers should use to increase an open-source project's growth and user adoption.

An unplanned convergence of Android apps and the Chrome OS may be setting the stage for a wide-open cross-platform architecture that combines Android and Chrome. Freelance programmer Vlad Filippov, aka "Vladikoff," discovered a way around Google's limitations on its ARC, or App Runtime for Chrome, w...