Archive

The Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday announced that smartphones running its Firefox OS will be available to developers in February. The preview phones are being produced in collaboration with Geeksphone and Telefonica. The idea is to entice devs to create apps for the Firefox OS. "These devices have no...

Last month, Jos Poortvliet's job as openSUSE community manager brought his career full-circle. He was chosen to lead a discussion on open governance at the Summit of New Thinking in Berlin. The open innovation concept is what got him interested in free software communities while studying organizatio...

FocusWriter uses an intriguing concept that makes you wonder why other word-processing tools do not offer the same hide-away tool panels to eliminate distractions. It offers a set of writing tools with the ease and speed of unencumbered text editors. Focuswriter is a full-screen writing program. It ...

There are many topics that tend to come up in a recurring manner around water coolers throughout the Linux blogosphere, and not just the great "Year of" debate, either. No indeed, another shining example more than a little familiar to most of us who spend any time here is the much-abused command lin...

KMyMoney is a comprehensive finance-tracking application that does not require an accounting degree to use effectively. Linux provides several hearty checkbook and banking programs. Among the more well-known are GNUCash, Grisbi, Skrooge and MoneyDance. Each of these contenders for your attention hav...

Gnumeric is a lightweight spreadsheet program that is fast and feature complete. Much like its chief open source competitors OpenOffice and LibreOffice, its graphical user interface is nothing fancy. What it lacks in colorful design or exciting visual menu displays, however, it surpasses with its fo...

The recent release of Ubuntu 12.10, aka Quantal Quetzal, is a more palatable version of the open source OS built around the Unity desktop environment. Perhaps I am growing more accustomed to Unity, or maybe Canonical's developers are succeeding in refining the graphical user interface, so it seems l...

OCRFeeder is a document layout analysis and optical character recognition application. It is a type of software that leaves much to be desired on the Linux desktop. OCR software is a companion tool to scanning a document. The scanner software creates a photo-like image of the scanned document. The ...