Photo mosaics are recreations of one large image composed of tiny tiles of other smaller images. They can be a fun project and make good use of the hundreds of less-than-extraordinary photos on your hard drive. We compared three easy-to-use Linux-based utilities for generating photo mosaics -- Pixelize, Metapixel, and Imosaic -- on speed, quality, and other factors.

I installed Ubuntu 8.04 “Hardy” Alpha 4 a day or two ago and I finally got some time to poke around with some of the new features. The new features that are of the most interest to me are the security related features such as firewalling, SELinux, etc.

Initially I was quite excited by the release of Elisa 0.3.3 from the team at Fluendo. In general, I like the work Fluendo does - amongst other initiatives they have codecs for sale that alleviate any legal qualms you may have about installing "non-free" video codecs from various locations, they have an interesting Java streaming video applet called Cortado and they provide a reasonably priced online streaming service. So, high hopes for Elisa 0.3.3. Unfortunately, it looks like I won't be using this software.

Are you thinking about moving your computer to Linux, but worried about living without office software? Well don't be. You can run Microsoft Office, and many other native Windows programs on Linux using Wine, which is a Windows compatibility layer for Linux and similar operating systems. However, you do not need to do this, and the majority of Linux users do not, because Linux has bucket loads of its own high-quality office software.

From http://www.techthrob.com/tech/hardyalpha4.php

This is a look at the fourth Alpha release of Hardy; including many of the applications that are now included by default and other major changes. Among these are the addition of Firefox 3 and Remote Desktop on the applications side, and a new method for systems control known as Policy Kit, which allows admins to unlock system functions for users.

Read More at Techthrob.com

Back in November we started sharing some of the exciting features planned for the GNOME 2.22 and 2.24 releases, and now that the first GNOME 2.22.0 Beta release is planned for later this week, we have taken another look at the packages set for inclusion and the changes that have actually been made. While nothing groundbreaking will be introduced in GNOME 2.22 (compared to KDE 4.0 at least), this desktop environment does have some moderate changes worth noting.

While you can quickly find an article about a particular topic using Wikipedia's search capabilities, there are other ways to explore the online encyclopedia that break away from the traditional search box approach. With Indywiki, for instance, once you've found the article you're looking for, you can continue to browse related topics visually, because Indywiki processes the current and related articles and extracts images from them. When you click on an image, Indywiki displays the article that the picture links to.

What would life be without music? Given the proper codecs, in Linux you can play almost any digital audio format. Linux has many graphical applications that can do the job, such as Amarok, Rhythmbox, Audacious, and XMMS, all of which provide an intuitive user interface, playlist sorting, and various other options. But what if you want low resource usage so you can play tunes on aging hardware? Here are some alternative players for the Linux command line.

Allow me to introduce the software that will change graphics on the Linux desktop forever. The Linux graphics toolkit has been missing one crucial tool: a way to quickly render human models, similar to the commercial, proprietary Poser. Well, we've got that now.

Now that I have had a chance to install Lotus Symphony Beta 3 on my Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon (aka - version 7.10) installation and have run it for several days, I have decided that it is time for a review. For this review, I have decided to show how to get Symphony working on Ubuntu, as well as the major features found in the Beta 3 release.

Backing up your data is critical. Hard drives fail, filesystems currupt, and in general, bad things just happen. But until now, there's been no easy way for most people to backup their data in Linux; most backups consisted of rsync tied to a cron job - far too complex for the average user.

A first-person shooter (Commonly called FPS) is an action video game that involves "an avatar, one or more ranged weapons, and a varying number of enemies". FPSs render the game world from the visual perspective of the player character. FPS was one of the first genres to use key technologies such as 3D graphics, online play, and modding. Enhanced realism combined with graphic violence has also made FPS a common topic in ongoing controversies over video games.

View Your Mind is a graphical mind mapping tool, which can be used for brainstorming, planning, drafting, gathering resources; or as a quick way to convert ideas into a web page or Open Office presentation. The UI is intuitive and takes almost no time to learn. When you open the program you are presented with a blank map with a yellow starting box already selected for your central idea.

1. Beep Media Player: MP, or Beep Media Player, is a compact media player that was originally forked from XMMS with the goal of porting XMMS to GTK2 and make use of more modern desktop standards. The original XMMS is based on GTK 1.2, which is now deprecated for roughly 4 years, and was deprecated at the time of the fork for approximately 2 years. This, and the fact that the developers were developing XMMS under a mostly cathedral-style model led M. Derezynski to fork BMP from XMMS.

Since Writely, being able to edit documents with others has gone from some fancy new technology to being the standard in most web applications. It was “the thing” to work on a document with three others at the same time, and still is. But the trend seems to stick with web editors.

The developers at Fluendo have been working on an open-source, cross-platform media center application called Elisa. Version 0.3.3, which was released last week, includes a complete user interface overhaul that dramatically improves usability.

With all the people out there willing to offer help on Linux, getting started should be pretty easy. But with many options in introductory books and easy-to-install distributions, choosing a place to start can be the hard part.

The Amarok developers have announced the availability of an Amarok 2 technical preview, an early pre-release that demonstrates new features that are planned for the next major release the popular open-source media player. Amarok 2 leverages many of the underlying frameworks provided by KDE 4, including the Phonon audio abstraction layer, Solid hardware interface, and Plasma widget library.

or many like me IRC is the de-facto chat medium to share information about things we love. Be either Hacking, linux, Ubuntu, games, whatever; there are always channels with like minded people to talk to. With wide variety of IRC Channels comes a wide variety of IRC clients. This is such a list of IRC clients for Linux.

Why waste your money on expensive commercial games when you can play for free, and, if you're so inclined, dive into the code and modify the game to suit your exacting requirements? Apcmag.com presents its selection of the most addictive, fun and refined Open Source games for January 2008.