Jan 29, 2013 GMT
While GIMP offers a wide range of tools for working with photos, it lacks one feature that is essential for serious photographers: the ability to automatically fix lens distortion. Fortunately, the GimpLensfun plugin fills the void quite nicely. As the name suggests, the plugin uses the excellent LensFun library as its back end. One way to install the plugin is to compile it from source. Start with installing the required packages. On Ubuntu, this can be... more »
Jan 25, 2013 GMT
TiddlyWiki probably needs no introduction. This nifty little personal non-linear notebook has been around for quite a while, and it has a large base of devoted users. Until recently, TiddlyWiki worked fine with practically any browser, including Mozilla Firefox. But under-the-hood tweaks in the latest release of the popular web browser brought some bad news for TiddlyWiki users: starting with Firefox 15, TiddlyWiki could no longer save changes. To rectify this unfortunate situation, Jeremy Ruston (the original... more »
Jan 24, 2013 GMT
Want to use your Android tablet as a sketchbook and a tool for taking handwritten notes? Then you need Quill. This open source app (source code is available on the project's Google Code page) offers several essential tools for drawing and scribbling notes, including a pencil and a fountain pen. The latter tool is pressure sensitive (i.e., more pressure results in a thicker line), but this feature works only on tablets... more »
Jan 23, 2013 GMT
Here is a simple trick that makes it significantly easier to locate often-used folders on KDE. Right-click on the desired folder and choose Properties. Under the General tab click on the default blue folder icon and pick a color folder icon you like (e.g., folder-brown or folder-green). Press OK twice to apply the selected icon to the folder.
Jan 18, 2013 GMT
rsync is arguably the best command-line tool for performing local and remote backups, and you can set up a perfectly workable backup solution using a one-line shell script like this:
#!/bin/bash rsync -avh sourcedir/ tartgetdir
This solution has one major drawback, though. It simply mirrors the contents of the source directory, so if some files and documents in it get corrupted, the script will duly back up the broken data. One way to solve this problem is to use a rotating backup which takes a full backup archive and then backs up all changed files in separate archives. This... more »
Jan 14, 2013 GMT
Not comfortable with hosting images and files using third-party services? If you already have a Linux server, then you can easily turn it into a no-frills file hosting solution using a PHP script from sebsauvage.net. Download the script and change the default password in it. Rename then the script to index.php, create a separate directory for it on your server (e.g., uploads), and upload the script into it. Use then the chown -R www-data uploads command to make the uploads writable... more »
Jan 11, 2013 GMT
Debian and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions offer a wide range of tools for administering the system. For example, you can install packages using the apt-get and dpkg tools, while the apt-cache tool can come in handy for finding specific packages. Then there is the wget utility that can be used to fetch files and archives from remote servers. But to get the most out of these and other tools, you have to learn each and every one of them. wajig offers a solution to the problem. This Python-based tool provides a simplified... more »
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
ack is a grep-like, command-line tool that has been optimized for programmers to search large trees of source code.
New features in SUSE Studio 1.3 include enhanced cloud integration, VM platform support, and lifecycle management.
The Linux Foundation recently announced that the Xen Project is becoming a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
Open source version of LiveCode is now available for developing apps, games, and utilities for all major platforms.
OpenDaylight is an open source software-defined networking project committed to furthering adoption of SDN and accelerating innovation in a vendor-neutral and open environment.
