When I began my career as an assistant architect 12 years ago, I used AutoCAD R12, 3D Studio, CorelDraw 6.0, and Photoshop 4.0 for architectural drawing and 3-D modeling. Today, many architects still use their later versions, but those bulky packages provide many functions an architect will never use. Luckily, there are several open source alternatives that are well-suited for architects -- QCad in place of AutoCAD, Blender instead of 3DMax, Inkscape in place of CorelDraw, and the GIMP as a substitute for Photoshop.

I’ve written about Microsoft Small Business Server and other software suites that are marketed to small business owners. But curiosity about Ubuntu as a small business server and desktop seems to be growing.

According to the 2007 DesktopLinux.com survey, Ubuntu is the distribution of choice for 30% of GNU/Linux users. The exact figure is questionable, but Ubuntu's dominance is not. For an increasing number of people, Ubuntu is GNU/Linux. Yet, looking at the pre-releases of Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10, I found myself becoming disturbed by the degree to which this popularity has translated into uncritical acceptance.

A few days ago I was looking for a guide to export my mail and settings (my accounts, address book, calendar, filters, etc.) to my laptop and I found a few guides. I wondered why, as far as I know, there is no way to export my data in Evolution (my favourite email client)…

GNOME 2.20 was released yesterday. Even though I use GNOME regularly, I normally don't get excited over new releases, because most seem to offer little more substance than previous versions, with most of the work being done under the hood. This time, though, GNOME has a solid list of new features and upgrades. It's worth taking a look at even if you aren't a fan of this desktop environment.

This newbie's guide to Ubuntu - now updated for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), the latest Ubuntu release, which puts the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects - lets readers learn by doing. Using immersion-learning techniques favored by language courses, step-by-step projects build upon earlier tutorial concepts, stimulating the brain and increasing the reader's understanding.

Computer giant IBM yesterday released a free office suite for Windows and Linux machines called Lotus Symphony. Symphony is available from the Symphony website which requires users to register and be logged on to download the software.

RSS is a set of XML-based formats to describe articles (including title, link to the original article, description, etc.) which are usually transported via the HTTP protocol. These days, the majority of blogs and news websites provide RSS feeds. In order to read these feeds in a useful way, special programs, called RSS feed readers or RSS aggregators, can be used.

At the beginning of the month, we wrote about how Nokia's N800 tablet might compare with the iPhone. The results to our very unscientific poll, showed a strong preference for the N800. Of the 1,027 respondents, the N800 won by a landslide - 65% to the iPhone's 35%.

Now that the iPod touch is here, let's do a side by side comparison with it and see how the N800 fares, after the jump.

I do development work, and I require access to a console to run programs, check output, or monitor transmission packets. Up until now, I've used a terminal program in a different desktop, and use the mouse to change to that terminal. Now I've found a quicker way, by using any of three Quake-style consoles that pop up just by pressing a key.

Every few years, I check in on how OpenOffice.org Writer compares to Microsoft Word. The first comparison came in 2002, the second in 2005. In those two comparisons, OpenOffice.org emerged as superior, not least for its greater stability. With Microsoft Office 2007 now out for six months and OpenOffice.org 2.3 about to be released, what's the situation today? To find out, I compared the two programs on the tools that most intermediate to advanced users are likely to use.

Amarok is a really nice music player that connects to Wikipedia automatically, supports lyrics, uses AudioScrobbler and MusicBrainz, and connects to your iPod like nobody's business.

Following on from my recent exploration of Heretic, I next tried Hexen. This has been motivated by my curiosity; while we've all played Doom and Quake to death, these two interim games just never seemed to get the press.

ProFTPD is a proven, high-performance, scalable FTP server written from scratch, with a focus toward simplicity, security, and ease of configuration. Naturally, ProFTPD powers some of the largest sites on the Internet.

Blender is a super nifty graphics application that works really well with Ubuntu and most other Linux operating systems.

WiFi Radar is a sweet Ubuntu Application to set up and configure your wireless connections through an easy, intuitive inferface.

PhpGedView is an open source application that lets you post your genealogy records on your Web site. It has a lot of interesting features, and makes viewing and editing all aspects of your genealogy easy and fun.

Conky is one of my favorite applications for all of my Linux distros. It is a light-weight system monitor (according to the project page) that can monitor many different aspects of your computer.

Here are two more great open source Linux games that you may not have tried yet: VDrift and Secret Maryo Chronicles.

FileZilla is one great open source FTP client that -- up until now -- was available only for Windows. Version 3 is a ground-up rewrite that makes the application available for the first time on Linux, too.