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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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The Progress Of X.Org 7.4
1 week, 4 days ago
If all goes according to plan, X.Org 7.4 will finally be released this month. This release isn't quite as elaborate as X.Org 7.3, which introduced input hot-plugging, EXA enhancements, and RandR 1.2 to just name a few features, but X.Org 7.4 is another update better enhancing this X server. In this article, we are presenting a release overview of the features to be found in X.Org 7.4, what's been delayed, and how this release is panning out. -
An open palette: Tux Paint's Bill Kendrick
1 week, 6 days ago
Bill Kendrick on Tux Paint, Tux4Kids, the GSoC, computer games, KDE, Debian, the spread of Linux and open source software in education. -
Amazon's Linux answer to iTunes is a winner
2 months, 1 week ago
"Are you a Linux user suffering from iTunes store envy? If so, Amazon has a deal for you. While any good Linux media player, like my own personal favorite Banshee, will let you rip music from CDs, there hasn't been a good source to buy music online for Linux players ... until now." -
KDE 4.0: Everything that has an end, has a beginning
3 months, 3 weeks ago
This review's based on KDE 4.0 installed on openSUSE 10.3. If you're running openSUSE 10.3, KDE 4.0 is extremely easy to install. (Apologies to the Wachowski brothers for the title.) -
LV2 audio plugin standard released
4 months ago
"LV2 is a standard for plugins and matching host applications, mainly targeted at audio processing and generation .... LV2 is a simple but extensible successor of LADSPA, intended to address the limitations of LADSPA which many applications have outgrown. While LADSPA has been quite successful with many plugins and hosts, it is quite limited and can't be extended without breaking existing implementations. LV2 in contrast is designed with extensibility in mind right from start."" -
A license fee for an unrestricted access to music
4 months ago
The Digital Milenium Copyright Act (DMCA) was adapted in most of the countries under the pressure of the majors and the distributors of music. Even if everybody could easily have an access to the Culture in all its variety, laws and technical restrictions make it impossible. Recently, the Songwriters Association of Canada (SAC) proposed a licence fee for an unrestricted access to music. At the same time, a mission for the French government was detailing the best approach to prevent and dissuade Internet users from illegally downloading music. Isn't the SAC's proposal applicable to France/your country? -
A logo program I can get behind
4 months, 4 weeks ago
Neuros has proposed a new logo to identify DRM-free content and the devices that play it. -
GNOME, OOXML, and Half-Truths Colliding in the Night
5 months ago
To suggest that the GNOME Foundation become more responsive to the community or that its accusers become more responsible may assume an impossible nobility of spirit all around. -
Using HDMI with ATI Linux drivers
5 months ago
"One of the special abilities of ATI's R600 GPU family is the integrated 5.1 surround sound audio support through HDMI ...." -
Konquering the desktop with KDE
5 months, 4 weeks ago
A task bar, a menu, clickable icons, a system tray, and a customisable look make up the standard operating system GUI. It's what you expect of an operating system's GUI; it's what you get with Windows, and exactly what you get with KDE running on Linux. -
KHTML Vs Webkit: To Merge or Not To Merge
6 months, 3 weeks ago
This past Summer, the news broke that the KDE project has plans to re-merge KHTML and Webkit. It appears the KHTML team is not going gently into that good night. -
Publishing high-quality documents with Kile
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"TeX and LaTeX produce impeccably laid-out documents, and are the only practical way to show some mathematical equations. This GUI tool acts as an "integrated development environment" for the command-line document preparation tools .... " -
KDE 3.5.8
7 months ago
KDE Project Ships Eighth Translation and Service Release for Leading Free Software Desktop -
GIMPShop Review: GIMP Made Friendly
7 months ago
I have been successfully using GIMP for what seems like years. It's free, it's stable and once you understand the rather strange menu layout, it actually provides fantastic functionality. But the reality remains that some people are still trying to come off their Photoshop dependency, and for these individuals, the argument about how fantastic it is tends to fall on deaf ears. -
Schedules Direct meets membership goal, lowers price
7 months, 4 weeks ago
Schedules Direct, the non-profit service providing electronic program guide data to users of MythTV and other free software TV projects, has met its membership goals and lowered the price of its data service to $20 per year. - More News
Linux.com : Graphics & Multimedia
Adobe releases Adobe Flash Player 10 beta for Linux
Adobe Systems is reaching out for Linux desktop users with its announcement today that the first beta of Adobe Flash Player 10, a.k.a. Astro, is now available for Linux, as well as Windows and Mac OS X.
aTunes tries to be the best of two worlds
Are you looking for a free and open source music player that you can use no matter which operating system you boot or switch to during the day? Meet aTunes, a small competitor to both Amarok and Apple's iTunes. Its name sounds like a hybrid of the two, and it tries to have a unique combination of the best of both user experiences.
FusionCharts Free: Cross-platform charts that rock
It has been said that the best things in life are free. While this isn't always true, it applies in this case. If you've struggled with GNUplot, JPgraph or other charting applications, FusionCharts Free is a breath of fresh air. Have you dreamed of finding a charting and graphing application that is simple to install, easy to configure, and drop-dead gorgeous? Stop dreaming and download a copy of FusionCharts Free. You'll be producing professional quality charts and graphs in no time.
Bringing your photos from F-Spot to the Web
F-Spot is a graphical photo manager that allows you to tag your image files and search and view images based on those tags. With phpfspot, you can share the photo collection you manage with F-Spot with others through a Web interface and let them navigate through your photos using the tags you have set up.
YouTube tools for the Linux desktop
You can see YouTube videos everywhere nowadays: on blogs, Google search results, even some news sites. From time to time, you can even manage to find something interesting. This article will show you some Linux tools you can use to save and convert YouTube videos.
Batch process photos with Phatch
Virtually any photo manager lets you perform mundane tasks like adjusting contrast, adding a watermark, and applying effects to your photos. But even powerful applications like digiKam and F-Spot can't really help you when you need to perform the same action (or a sequence of actions) on dozens or hundreds of photos. For that you need a batch processing utility like Phatch. This nifty tool can perform no fewer than 35 different actions on your photos, and its user-friendly graphical interface makes it easy to create advanced multistep batch rules.
Three utilities for automatically converting audio for portable music players
While large cheap hard disks allow you to keep your audio collection in a lossless format such as FLAC on your home network, when you are on the move you probably want to squeeze the most out of every gigabyte by using a compressed format. This article takes a look at three tools aimed at making audio conversion for portable music players a painless task.
Creating charts on Web pages with Java and GChart
The Apache-licensed GChart utility lets you quickly generate nice-looking charts on your Web site.
New Inkscape 0.46 is good news
Version 0.46 of the open source vector graphics editor Inkscape is out, showcasing new tools, new effects, new filters, and a host of interface and speed improvements.
Software animation with Pencil
Attention computer animators -- if you've ever felt limited by working in three dimensions with tools like Blender, check out Pencil, an open source, cross-platform animation app that lets you create in glorious 2-D. Pencil mimics hand-drawn animation techniques, but it's easy to use and produces high-quality output.
Libre Graphics Meeting raising funds for developer travel
The annual conclave of free graphics software developers, users, and artists known as the Libre Graphics Meeting (LGM) is set for May 8-11 in Wroclaw, Poland, this year. LGM organizers are holding a fund-raising campaign this week to help volunteer developers travel to the event.
Open source video editing: what we have now and what we need
Watching the evolution of open source tools for video editing and manipulation over the last 10 years has been less than a thrilling experience. But are things about to change for the better in the near future? Can even the people most disenchanted with the current state of affairs feel tempted to regain a spark of hope?
Wash away the photo workflow blues with blueMarine
Photo buffs who are fond of open source software would do well to look at blueMarine. Right now, the free, cross-platform application's strength is image management, but it is on its way to becoming a complete workflow tool. Its cataloging features are robust, its architecture is extensible, and it takes some intriguing new approaches.
Creating graphs the old-fashioned way with Ploticus
Ploticus is a throwback to the days when Unix programs did one thing, and did it well, using a minimum of system resources. Its SourceForge.net page hints at this orientation by describing Ploticus as "non-interactive" software for "just-in-time graph generation." How useful it is depends on what you want to do, whether you use the settings that come with the program or define your own, and your willingness to master a lengthy -- if well-documented -- set of options.
Creating a Home Inventory with F-Spot (video)
With fires, thefts, and natural disasters it is a good idea to have a home inventory. In this video I am going to show you how to inventory your house using a digital camera and F-Spot on a Linux desktop.
End-to-end video podcast production with Kino and FFmpeg
Producing a video podcast entirely on Linux is not only possible but fairly easy to do. This article outlines the steps you can take to make a video podcast entirely on Linux, as I do.
Salasaga burns brightly at its start
One of the remaining gaps in the GNU/Linux desktop is an editor for producing Flash content. When viewing Flash files, users can limp along with Adobe's proprietary player or the still-incomplete although free Gnash player, but the best they can do for Flash creation is employ the limited ability of OpenOffice.org Draw to export to the format. Considering the often trivial uses to which Flash is put, this lack is not entirely lamentable, but the fact remains that nothing remotely comparable to Adobe's Flash CS3 Professional. Salasaga, which until recently was called the Flame Project, is an effort to fill this gap by providing the functionality of Adobe Captivate for producing Flash computer tutorials and animations. However, at version 0.7.7, it is focusing on bare functionality more than a polished interface.
TorrentFlux: A BitTorrent client on a server
TorrentFlux is a BitTorrent client that runs on top of a server running Apache, MySQL, and PHP. It extends the functionality of traditional clients by operating almost entirely through a Web browser interface. It uses the BitTornado client in the background to manage the queuing, downloading, and seeding of torrent files. You can run TorrentFlux on your home machine and access it through a folder on a Web server. You can also install it on an external host to increase bandwidth and transfer speeds.
KolourPaint: More than a Microsoft Paint clone
Just as Microsoft Paint is included with every Windows installation, so KolourPaint has been part of the kdegraphics package since KDE 3.3. This simple raster graphics editor works well not only in KDE, but also in Xfce, GNOME, and Fluxbox.
Extend Amarok with useful scripts
Amarok is a popular audio player under Linux. It can manage external storage devices, transfer music to your iPod, display lyrics, and play various formats. Although Amarok supports scripts to extend its functionality, not many users know about the powerful features that these simple plugins can provide.
