When did I become such a tool?

“What was able to drain the marrow of life from my body and leave only hollowed-out shell of the man who once occupied this space?

Six years ago I began working for Microsoft.”

Read more: Making The Switch

~LC

Today, we interviewed Quinn Storm, the initiator of the Beryl project.

What does Beryl do? For those of you who are only recently entering our marvelous free software world, Beryl is a window manager — it’s a program in charge of drawing window borders on your computer screen. Now, you’ll probably be saying to yourself Window borders? Isn’t that idiotic or a job for the operating system?. In Linux-land, it isn’t, because everything is modular.

As it turns out, being a window manager means Beryl is in the perfect position to exploit the latest technology, namely ubiquitous accelerated 3D rendering. Aside from drawing window borders (helped by its trusty companions Emerald, Heliodor and Aquamarine), Beryl also commands how windows are drawn on the screen. This lets Beryl implement fantastic animation effects.

Source: rudd-o.com

~LC

The GeForce 8500GT is NVIDIA’s value-priced contender in the GeForce 8 series. The 8500GT has a 450MHz core clock and 400MHz memory clock, but how is this $100 creation able to compete against other graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA? We have our hands on the passively-cooled Gigabyte GeForce 8500GT 256MB graphics card and have run our usual Linux graphics tests along with some of our first overclocking attempts with this new solution. Without further ado, we present the world’s first Linux benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT.

 

Technorati tags: Linux, Hardware

Source: NVIDIA GeForce 8500GT 256MB Benchmarked on Linux

Some days ago the the community around the web sites KDE-Apps.org, KDE-Look.org, etc launched two new web sites: Qt-Apps.org and Qt-Prop.org. Both sites will be a home for presenting Qt based applications like kde-apps.org already is for presenting KDE applications. The difference between both new sites is that Qt-Apps will be pure FLOSS only, while Qt-Prop is a home for proprietary software. The launch was done in cooperation with Trolltech.

 

Technorati tags: Linux, Software

Source: Qt Apps Community Sites Launched

I love it!!

Compared to BloGTK, ScribeFire is faster, and has more options.

Posts pop up in seconds and I can post to more than one category, which wasn’t possible in BloGTK.

Yep, this is a keeper!

Thanks Baldy, for finding this little gem! Guess you are good for something…

~LC

What’s new in this release:

– Midi support in the CoreAudio driver.

– Mixer support in the Alsa driver.

– A lot of MSI fixes.

– Implementation for most D3DRM functions.

– The usual assortment of Direct3D fixes.

– Lots of bug fixes.

Source: winehq.org

~LC

April 27, 2006 – AfterStep 2.2.5 released!

Lots of changes:

* Everything got touched. It’s all good.

Get it from here : ftp.afterstep.org/stable/AfterStep-2.2.5.tar.gz
Or if you already have 2.1.0 or later installed – you can use smaller upgrade packages : ftp.afterstep.org/stable/AfterStep-2.2.5-noimages.tar.gz

I used to love this WM, maybe I’ll have to make some free time to see what it looks like these days.

Source: afterstep.org

~LC

Overview:

Xbindkeys is a program that allows you to launch shell commands with your keyboard or your mouse under X Window. It links commands to keys or mouse buttons, using its configuration file. It does not depend on the window manager and can capture all keyboard keys.

Prerequisites:

* a keyboard with special/multimedia buttons

* xbindkeys

* working X Window, doesn’t matter if it is KDE, Gnome or any other

Complete Tutorial: Howto Forge

~LC

Are open source security tools really as secure as those available for sale? Yes, say a growing number of enterprises. While some are understandably hesitant to employ solutions that are openly available to hackers and users alike, many organizations are finding that open source tools not only cost less, they are at least as secure as commercial products, if not more so.

(Really a good read for the IT manager or the normal Linux user that wants to increase the secruity of their systems, and they are open source and free. Baldy)

Source: Ten Open Source Security Apps Worth Considering

There are some basic things I have learned as I convert more an more people over to Ubuntu and if I don’t I get them curious. I have compiled a list of necessary things people must show off to attract more interest and attention to the open source world of Ubuntu.

Source: How To Convert Windows Users To Ubuntu!