One of the advantages to using a GNU/Linux system is the separation of the display system from the underlying
operating system. The Linux desktop has at its core the X Window System, a software architecture that provides layering
of display components. Each component provides its own set of display features. These features include the ability to
change out window managers, directly drive hardw
The past few months, I've covered a number of automated testing systems available to Ruby programmers in general and
Rails developers in particular. Automated testing, especially when you use it before and while you develop (as opposed
to afterward) is a terrific way to improve the quality of your design, as well as the robustness of your code. Whether
you practice TDD (test-driven development
Plasma is one of the most exciting technologies KDE 4 has brought to life. It often is considered to be merely the
desktop shell of KDE 4, but in reality, it is so much more.
We are just starting to see the full potential of Plasma, but it's already being used by some of the best KDE
applications. Amarok, for example, uses it in so-called context view, and the Plasma packaging system is
The theme for this month's issue is the desktop, and when I sat down to write this article, I was going to focus on
bringing the cloud to your desktop. A number of services exist, and I figured one of them would help me solve a problem
that has gotten more troublesome of late—keeping all my workstations in sync. But, in the process of doing my
research, a more pressing desktop problem ca
I talk about mutt a lot in this column, if you hadn't noticed. For me, in this day and age of large graphical mail
programs and Web-based mail applications, you still can't beat the speed, power and customization of mutt. Let's also
not forget the vi-style keybindings—I love those.
One thing you might notice the first time you use mutt, however, is that it is strictly a MUA (Mail
Last month, we circled back to Twitter and started developing a shell script that lets you actually parse and
respond to queries sent via Twitter. The idea was that if you were a store, for example, a tweet of
“hours?” could be answered automatically with a response tweet of the store's hours—simple, but
interesting nonetheless.
Have you ever found yourself working on Windows—for whatever reason—and reached for one of your favorite
applications from the free software world only to remember that it is not available on Windows?
It is not a problem for some of the best-known free software applications, such as Firefox, Thunderbird,
OpenOffice.org, GIMP or Pidgin. However, for some popular Linux applica
Last month wrapped up with a problem so complex we had to delve into a different programming language to create a
solution to the mathematics of calculating the distance between two lat/lon points on the globe. My head's still
spinning. I long ago graduated computer science, so what the heck?
This month, I thought we should move back to something a bit more fun and perhaps a bit less co
In the early 1990s, Bob Bruninga, an instructor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, devised an
interesting stunt: he wanted to track the Army/Navy game football on its travels from Annapolis to Philadelphia, about
150 miles away. To do this, Bruninga stuffed a small electronics package into a football helmet consisting of a GPS
receiver, an Amateur Radio transmitter and a radio mo
People used to say that open-source technologies were excellent at mimicking and copying proprietary projects, but
that they had few original ideas of their own. This was never completely true, but I believe that today it is
demonstrably false, and that it becomes increasingly false over time. In many respects, the bleeding edge of innovation
in the computer industry is taking place within the
When we created our new SourceForge features page, we used some icons from the Tango Icon Library. We’re trying to pay more attention to performance, so we wanted to use a CSS sprite of the icons for the page. Our Google search for tango icon css sprite didn’t turn up any pre-packaged projects, so we [...]
A couple of months ago, Italian developer Francesco Mondello had had enough. He had a host of digital images, but they weren’t identical in size or even in format. Converting them to a consistent format one by one would have been a tedious task. Instead, to improve his programming skills, Mondello built Converseen, a batch [...]
SourceForge.net is only one of the sites maintained by our parent company, Geeknet. Keeping watch over them all is marketing manager Pegah Kamal. “I manage all of our social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.) and our search engine marketing program,” she says. That makes Pegah our official social butterfly on the Web.
Pegah joined Geeknet [...]
IT departments are pretty familiar with tradeoffs. You can buy a comprehensive package to meet almost any need, but the cost might be prohibitive. Sometimes you can get something that does most of what you want, but forces you to change your work routines. But the beauty of open source software is that you can [...]
If one of your new year’s resolutions was to make sure you’ve got solid system backups (and why wouldn’t it be?), then you’ve got to check out January’s Project of the Month (POTM). Clonezilla is a slick partition or disk clone tool that saves and restores used blocks on a hard drive. It’s perfect for [...]
Agender is a small, simple scheduler. Mexican developer Gabriel Espinoza says he created Agender about a year ago “because I didn’t want to use a big application like Evolution or Microsoft Works. I started playing with the wxCalendarCtrl from wxWidgets, my favorite GUI toolkit, and after a few weeks I had something that worked.
“wxWidgets is [...]
Some SourceForge.net projects get hundreds of downloads a day. Some are updated monthly by teams of volunteers. And then there are projects like Dominoes on Acid. “I must say I don’t know if I appeal to either dominoes fans or people interested in mathematical logic,” says Matthias Benkmann, the program’s author. “I’m sure about only [...]
Typically, setting up an Asterisk software PBX server involves editing a lot of configuration files – fun for geeks, but maybe not the most productive use of anyone’s time. Elastix is a GNU/Linux/Asterisk distribution that integrates a number of tools with a graphical interface to allow administrators an easier way to configure Asterisk. That capability [...]
Can you feel it in the air? Not snow or Christmas, but rather sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Yes, the end of the year is a time when everyone slows down a bit, and we at SourceForge.net are no exception. We’re taking the rest of the week off, and we’ll be working only [...]
When I asked readers to suggest projects to spotlight, one of the first names that came up was OpenNMS, the first enterprise-grade network management application platform developed under the open source model. It’s designed to manage hundreds of thousands of devices. OpenNMS competes head to head with products such as Hewlett-Packard’s OpenView suite and IBM’s [...]
