After ten years of working on Apple laptops, I’ve left the fold. Not only was the expense of owning and maintaining Apple hardware a key factor in my switch, but the operating system had become a frustration to me. Details like not having a tree-view in the right hand panel of the Finder window slowed me down. Ubuntu, on the other hand, feels more like an operating system made for grown-ups. And what’s especially nice is that Ubuntu scales nicely to the expertise of the user. Your cousin the computer geek or your Grandma can install and use Ubuntu and get as deep as they like. Combine this with the recent rash of cheap, powerful laptops, and Ubuntu’s market share is bound to grow.
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Linux Music Workflow: Switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009Why aren’t schools adopting open source?
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009Recently, I had a bit of a run-in with my daughter’s high school. She was undergoing an eSchool class over the summer called “Computer Applications,” and it turns out the class only actually “covered” Office Suites, namely Microsoft Office. Now in our household we do not own a copy of Microsoft Office. Instead, we use OpenOffice and have never had an issue - that is, until now.
Educational institutions are supposed to be a pillar of learning and intelligent decisions. But it seems, as far as software is concerned, our educational system is consistently making some fairly unintelligent choices.
Build A Real Time Audio Studio
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009Although it might not seem like it, properly dealing with audio requires an intricately tuned PC. The main issue is audio latency, which refers to both the time it takes for a sound to enter your machine and the time it takes for your machine to produce a sound. In everyday use, we don’t really notice this latency. When you click on a button that makes a beep, you don’t care that it might take several hundred milliseconds for the sound to reach your ears. But in the delicate world of audio engineering, several hundreds of milliseconds is far too long, and even a delay of just tens of milliseconds is undesirable.
Luckily, Linux is a highly configurable operating system, and this means that you can create the perfect audio platform just by making a few tweaks. We’ve chosen the latest version of Ubuntu to be our guinea pig.
Adobe open sources Flash platforms
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009On Tuesday Adobe launched the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), a rich media player platform. OSMF was previously part of a project codenamed Strobe.
Adobe also open sourced the Text Layout Framework (TLF), a typography platform for Web apps.
“Adobe is committed to providing core Flash platform technologies to the community as open source,” said Dave McAllister, director of standards and open source at Adobe, in a statement. “By releasing OSMF and TLF as open source, we are helping facilitate the creation and sharing of best practices for media players and rich text-based Web application development.”
Open Source for America Promotes FOSS for Government
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009As the US struggles with a continuing recession, both the private and public sectors are looking for ways to cut or mitigate operating costs, particularly in the arena of information technology.
Starting today, a new coalition of technology industry companies, organizations, and academic institutions will be actively promoting one sure way of cutting IT costs: using open source software and open technology solutions.
The Wide-Open Career Landscape of FOSS Tech Support
Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009The growing popularity of free open source software (FOSS) is a sure sign that consumers and software developers alike are becoming more disenchanted with costly proprietary products. However, the promise of free software can be tarnished when software packages need configuration help and that help proves hard to find. When users have to wade through dozens of forum messages seeking a solution, the FOSS philosophy can turn into a turn-off.
As free software use grows in business, so will the demand for qualified tech help. The demand for open source support specialists is growing at a tremendous rate, according to Kim Weins, senior vice president of products and marketing at OpenLogic.
Open Source Word Processors Give You Lots of Free Choices, Part 1
Saturday, July 18th, 2009With interest heating up around Linux on netbooks, notebooks and desktop PCs, more and more people are hunting for good word processing software that runs on Linux. Luckily, while a lot of word processing options for Linux have fallen by the wayside, new ones keep springing up, too. Meanwhile, some of the older standbys are picking up features that rival those of Microsoft Word.
The end result is a wide range of choices for Linux across several different categories of software. Whether you want to crank out your master’s thesis or dash off a few quick business letters, you can take your pick from among dozens of different open source word processors, “proprietary” Linux word processors, open source desktop publishing (DTP) programs, and online offerings.
To help users sift through the choices, Linux.com is launching a series of articles about software in these four categories. For starters, we’ll dive into a sampling of five different applications: OpenOffice.org Write; AbiWord; KWord; LYX, and e:doc.
Open Office’s Presenter’s Console For Impress Slideshows
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009The Presenter’s Console is an OpenOffice.org Impress extension that will help you to perform just like that outstanding speaker.
Without turning away from your audience you can very casually glance at the current slide while seeing the next one in the stack. Slide notes are also easy to see. If you are subtle, you can use the queues to give the impression of speaking “off-the-cuff.” There is a nice timer and clock, to keep you in sync with the agenda.
The Proprietary Software/Linux Conundrum
Wednesday, June 24th, 2009For most people, computing comes down accomplishing their daily tasks with as much time saved and cost efficiency as possible.
There are also users (such as myself) who want to know that the applications we use are running code that is not locked in by any one company. This gives us freedom of choice.
Where things tend to go wrong, however, is that we do not live in a world where Open Source software and mainstream needs are always on the same page. No matter how much I might wish that everything could just be Open Source, sometimes the issue is a bit more complicated than it seems on the surface.
HTML 5: Could it kill Flash and Silverlight?
Wednesday, June 17th, 2009HTML 5, a groundbreaking upgrade to the prominent Web presentation specification, could become a game-changer in Web application development, one that might even make obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX.
The World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) HTML 5 proposal [1] is geared toward Web applications, something not adequately addressed in previous incarnations of HTML, the W3C acknowledges. In other words, HTML 5 tackles the gap that Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX are trying to fill.
While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) [9] duke it out with their own technologies to implement multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors’ lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard.