Science is the effort of trying to understand how the physical world works. From observation and experimentation, science uses physical evidence of natural phenomena to compile data and analyze the collated information. Science really prospers and advances when individuals share the results of their experiments with others in the scientific community. There is a certain logic that scientific software should therefore be released in a freely distributable environment.

I’ve been using GNU Parted to slice and dice my disk in preference to the fdisk for almost as long as I’ve been using Linux. We all fill up our hard-drives from time to time, but thanks to Gnome GParted, rearranging disk partitions isn’t as terrifying as it used to be. In fact, armed with a GParted Live CD, there’s a swathe of disk space fiddling jobs I can tackle without gnawing my fingers to the bone:

Most Linux Distribution websites have been redesigned to sport a Web 2.0 look. To give credit to their talented web designers/developers, I’ll pick 10 Linux Distribution websites that I think stand out from the rest. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so you don’t have to agree with me. Anyway, you can always comment later on and share your views.

I have been using Wine (WINE) or various implementations of it (Crossover Office and Cedega) for a few years now. What is funny is that I often had more success with Wine proper than I did with the various offshoot products. Go figure! So when I learned this issue...

Instead of an introduction, I'll answer the question 'Why did you left out wonderful applications like Scribus, Inkscape, Cinelerra, Wine, QCad etc?'. Well, because the article is about applications which I consider essential for daily use. Of course, some work with those every day, but not the majority.

This article reviews all the most common command line tools for manipulating and listening to audio formats on Linux. Players, editors, encoders/decoders, tag editors, music servers, they are all here. Currently it includes no less than 18 CLI (Command Line Interface) tools.

This tool collection wants to help Ubuntu translators in their daily work. If you have ever aksed one of the following questions, u-t-t could provide you an answer: In which package can I translate this message/dialog? What is the difference between these two po files? How can I access the translation page of a package in a faster way compared to clicking through the whole website tree or manipulating the url? Where can I get the automatically updated language packs?

As promised, I've put together a short screencast demoing Michael Levin's handwriting recognition tool CellWriter:

It has probably been four years since I last installed Linux from scratch.  It isn't that I haven't touched a Linux command prompt or system in four years, it just that all of my installs are on my servers which just get updates applied.  I decided to install Ubuntu Linux the other morning on an older Dell laptop I have replacing Windows. 

Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community.

I use a ton of software applications, but a major portion of the time I spend using a computer goes to writing, and creating documents. There are many good open source tools for everything from word processing, to desktop publishing, to booklet creation, to weaving words and graphics together. In this post, I'll cover six free applications--five of them open source and one freeware app--that can help you create eye-catching documents.

I hadn’t expected such a response to my article about choosing the right desktop environment when I was writing it, but as most commenters noted, it was a really quick write-up, a kind of a brainstorming session about desktop environments where I indicated the pros and cons. Well this time, I tried improving it. More info, more research and more work are contained in this post. Enjoy, and favorite it if you like in the case you’re in a dilemma with you Linux install.

SMPlayer is a complete video player built in Qt 4.4.0 and based on the powerful, open-source MPlayer.

The version I decided to test in this review is 0.6.1 from SVN. SMPlayer basically plays anything video or audio, including DVDs, VCDs or DVD ISO images, audio CDs, MPEG, AVI or ASF. You can also play mounted images of DVDs by pointing to the directory which contains the VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS directories. It can also play videos from a given URL location.

Firefox is a great web browser, there is absolutely no argument about that. However those of us who are using linux long enough have went by quite well without it, and some still do. In the spirit of linux and open source (not so much for opera), it is only fair that we are aware of alternate options for linux browsers out there. Here is an attempt to list some of the linux browsers actively developed and updated.

The Hardy Heron has passed the torch to the Intrepid Ibex. The next iteration of the Ubuntu Linux distribution was made available Saturday. You can download the alpha release of Ubuntu version 8.10a from Ubuntu’s website.

SMPlayer
SMPlayer is a fully featured video player built using the Qt 4 libraries. It basically plays anything, including DVDs and ISO images, but it skipped the menus when reading DVD ISOs. It's complete and it offers plenty configuration options, including for subtitles and the interface itself, allowing to choose the icon set and the style used. You can also configure the language SMPlayer uses for its interface, including English, Romanian, Polish, German and many other. I was impressed to see translations are pretty much complete.

With Ubuntu, Canonical has had notable success in convincing people to switch from other platforms, but potential Ubuntu users are still running into trouble in several areas. Having spent some time on Canonical's forums, I've identified 10 points that seem to be common sticking points for new users -- that is, problems that have the potential to prevent a new user from adopting Ubuntu in the long term. These problems span the entire Ubuntu experience, but they all have two things in common: they are all serious enough to evoke the dreaded "I tried Linux but it didn't work" excuse, and they are all solvable.

Text editors are important for many tasks, from editing configuration files, nudging cron jobs, and manipulating XML files to quickly pushing out a README. Luckily, there are a number of interesting editors available. Here's a brief introduction to nine intriguing choices. While some may be better suited to certain tasks, it's no one tool is better than another for all tasks. Try them all and use the ones you like best.

For many like me IRC is the main chat medium to share information about things we love. Be it linux, Ubuntu, games, whatever; there are always channels with many like minded people to talk to. There are a huge number of IRC clients out there, listing them all for me would be an impossible task. However, I could list 10 IRC clients I have used over the years, which are also quite popular among IRC/Linux community.

With Gizmo5, not only can you use your PC to make or get phone calls on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh PCs. But unlike similar programs, such as Skype, Gizmo5 uses open standards like Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and Jabber, which makes it interoperable with a variety of clients.