Software

Since its start in the summer of 2010, the OpenStack open source cloud computing project has been the subject of a lot of hype. Today, the technology, backers and users of OpenStack are giving substance to all of that sizzle, and skepticism is giving way to service provider and enterprise use cases ...

Open source technology is central to Morphlabs' business model. The company, launched in 2007 with Yoram Heller as a cofounder, builds fully modular, scalable public and private cloud products. It takes open source software and designs architecture to run on specific hardware. Building its products ...

Chakra is an unusual Linux distro that rethinks what the Linux desktop should be. It gives users the tools to do it their way. This interesting approach to learning what makes Linux tick, however, is not a good starting point for first-time Linux users. I was intrigued with Chakra's ground-up recon...

Kona, an innovative social networking platform for businesses and organizations, was launched in late 2012. It grew out of a vision developer Scott DeFusco had for a way to solve communications issues shared in peoples' business and social lives. DeFusco and Kona cofounder Jeff Eckerle developed the...

Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro's menu, favorites bar or panel icons. Instead, it cuts down on how often you resort to using them. A semantic-based tool that makes use of the Zeitgeist en...

If you package e-books in the EPUB format, one of the handiest editing tools available is Sigil. The growing interest in mobile apps and e-reader devices such as Amazon's Kindle and Barnes and Noble's Nook is fueling the e-book business for both reading consumers and authors. Without a dedicated edi...

The cretors of Nirvana Editor, or NEdit for short, consider it paradise for writers. I found, however, that it's not yet the perfect text editor. NEdit is currently in version 5.5, so it is not a newcomer to the text editing scene. I tried it with the hope that it would bring a few new tricks to my ...

The Fedora Project is perhaps one of the hallmark Linux distributions. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, the commercial developer of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Red Hat's investment in the Fedora community is collaborative. As such, Fedora Linux releases often provide RHEL developers with a field...

DevOps represents a dramatic change from the old siloed developers and script-heavy system administrators of yesterday. Any tools that can provide some common ground for developers and IT operations professionals can help, and it seems Chef and Puppet often do.

Puppy Linux is a distro I keep coming back to. No matter how entrenched I become with any flavor of Ubuntu -- sans the Unity desktop -- or Linux Mint's Cinnamon and KDE desktops, nothing can beat the speed, convenience and reliability of Puppy Linux on a stick. Boot it directly from a hard drive or ...

Blender Master Class is a must-have for anyone who uses or even plans to use the Blender graphics tool. It is a learn-by-doing guidebook that takes all the frustration and guessing out of the Blender equation. Author Ben Simonds does a marvelous job of taking the wonder out of using the powerful Ble...

If you subscribe to the view, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," perhaps Fuduntu is the Linux distro most ideal to your computing needs. Fuduntu was first released in 2010 as a Fedora-based Linux distribution. Its developers forked it the following year. The result is a Linux distro that has a use...

OpenGamma is the developer of the first open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its products help companies explore flexible open source alternatives to conventional and costly risk analytics tools. The OpenGamma Platform is a unified system for front ...

Fedora 18, dubbed "the Spherical Cow," was finally released on Jan. 15 after seven postponements that stretched two months beyond its scheduled six-month release cycle. Despite some noteworthy improvements overall to the operating system, I found little about Fedora 18 to justify adopting it over ot...

The ZE Rescue Disk is a very handy rescue tool to fix damaged or missing hard drive sectors that prevent a computer from booting into its operating system. It runs automatically as a boot-repair rescue tool at startup from the optical drive. ZE Rescue Disk provides what was a missing link in permane...