Software

It's difficult to talk about the Gxine multimedia player as a separate app from Xine. Both do pretty much the same tasks -- let you watch videos and listen to audio files. Both of these apps hale from the same Linux library of codecs and other gutsy stuff, Xine-lib. The key difference between these ...

Google is planning to open an app store for its Chrome browser to make it easier both for users to discover Web applications and for developers to reach a large potential audience. Chrome users who find apps in the Chrome Web Store will be able to create shortcuts in Chrome for easy access, Google s...

Using a scanner in Linux is somewhat different than using that same scanner hardware in Windows. This week's Linux Picks focuses on how the XSane scanner app handles that process. In the Windows world, scanner hardware is TWAIN-compatible through manufacturer-developed scanning software. By comparis...

Lucid Lynx, Canonical's latest desktop release of Ubuntu, sports a new look and feel designed to attract new users, both in business and at home. No doubt the launch of a music store component for the Ubuntu One cloud service available through the Ubuntu OS will give consumers a reason to consider o...

The ubiquitous CD/DVD platter may be on its way to Legacyville, one town away from the FloppyTown and the once-popular ZipDisk City. Large-capacity USB and micro disk storage media go where the CD/DVD cannot go -- small mobile gadgets. But for laptop and desktop storage and bulk transfer needs, CD/D...

Linux aficionados gained a new option Monday, thanks to the release of Peppermint OS. Checking in at under 512 MB, Peppermint is a Linux-based operating system that's designed to be cloud/Web-centric, ready to use and "insanely fast," its makers said. As a fork of Lubuntu, the system is based on --...

Users of Google Goggles can now put the technology to work translating text from other languages, Google announced Thursday. Whereas a prototype demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this year could recognize only German text, Goggles version v1.1 can read English, French, I...

Rhythmbox, an integrated music management application, was originally inspired by Apple's iTunes. This open source app works on the Gnome Desktop and is based on the powerful GStreamer media framework. If you have read recent Linux Picks columns, you know that the Linux world of apps gives you sever...

Less than a month after Sony dropped Linux support from its PlayStation 3 gaming console, a disgruntled customer has filed a lawsuit, charging that the move was a deceptive business practice. He's seeking class-action status. Sony Computer Entertainment America's disablement of the "Install Other OS...

Canonical on Thursday released Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop and Server Editions, the latest in its string of popular Linux distributions. Both are available for free download. The desktop version will be preinstalled on a range of computers from a number of manufacturers this summer. Canonical wants Luc...

Gnome Commander, an advanced twin-panel graphical file manager for the Linux OS, brings back memories of my pre-Windows days. That is an era when graphical shell programs were popular before the Microsoft DOS desktop gave way to the Windows 95 GUI. If that sounds like a put-down for Gnome Commander,...

Taking its relationship with Drupal to the next level, the Obama administration announced on Wednesday that it has released to the public some of the custom code it's developed for the Whitehouse.gov website. "This code is available for anyone to review, use, or modify," wrote Dave Cole, senior advi...

Linux provides more than one way to listen to music collections. The bare-bones solution is to click on a music file from within a file manager app. The high-end approach is to playback music with Amarok. Amarok is a sound-system-independent audio player with a flexible interface that uses a browser...

The Linux world is filled with numerous capable packages for just about every computing category. Graphics manipulation applications are no exception. In any list of able-bodied graphics candidates, GIMP 2.6 should be one of the top three contenders. GIMP is Linux Speak for GNU Image Manipulation Pr...

Text editors are becoming more essential in today's Web-based computing world. Gone are the days when users need hard-copy versions of their documents. Also gone are the days when documents need to be gussied up with fancy fonts and fanciful page formatting. Now HTML handles the visual tune ups for ...