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Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Mark Shuttleworth is tap-dancing to work these days, he writes on his blog. Why? His Ubuntu Linux project has hired a team of "designers, user experience champions, and interaction design visionaries" tasked with the heady chore of making Linux the world's most usable operating system. After acknowledging the significance of the challenge, Shuttleworth admitted that he does not yet have all the answers. But, he said Ubuntu's new "upstream" team -- which will work separately from its "platform" team, to avoid conflicts of interest -- would focus initially on participation in the X, OpenGL, GTK, Qt, GNOME, and KDE projects.

Unified Threat Management (UTM) devices unify all network security elements into a single device. They often include a combination of routing, firewall, intrusion detection, content filtering, URL filtering, spam filtering, VPN, and antivirus functionalities. These devices usually cost thousands of dollars and require subscriptions. However, you can secure your network and save money at the same time with Endian Firewall Community, a free, open source alternative to costly UTM devices. Endian Firewall Community is a Red Hat-based OS running on kernel 2.6.9-55. Endian designed this UTM with usability, flexibility, and ease of deployment in mind. It includes a stateful packet inspection firewall, an application-level proxy with antivirus support, content Web filtering, spam filtering, and VPN support that uses Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) or OpenVPN. The latest version is v2.2 RC2, but it's still in the development stage. The current stable version, which I used, is 2.1.2.

After buying my new Acer Aspire 7520G and to be honest I have been using its default OS for 4 month! That is a Windows using record for me and I am not happy with it since Acer been joking around with the CD-ROM player since it was requested on order. Alright to get to work with Debian I had to replace the OEM CD/DVD Player.

In the wake of free software leader Richard Stallman’s visit to New Zealand, state-owned radio network Radio New Zealand has begun delivering some of its shows in the Free Software Foundation’s favoured Ogg Vorbis format.

Phoronix.com is the definitive Linux hardware review site, featuring articles on motherboards, processors, memory, power supplies, cases, and other components. While other sites throw a hardware review into the mix occasionally, hardware reviews are the primary focus of Phoronix.com. Phoronix founder and executive editor Michael Larabel has it down to a science -- so much so that he was able to package and released his primary tools as an open source hardware testing suite. Now it is easy for anyone to obtain reliable and repeatable benchmarks for the components in their personal computer.

Eric Geier is back with more tips and tricks on transitioning to OpenOffice.org (OOo). This tutorial continues by highlighting OOo Options you may want to change, discusses the PDF exporting feature, and shows how to overcome two vexing issues you may encounter when working with images.

We've written about the folks at CodeWeavers before. They make a customized, commercial version of Wine called CrossOverLinux. and have been major contributors to Wine. (Wine allows Linux users to run Windows applications.) This post from the CodeWeavers blog details how the company has succesfully ported versions of Chromium--the open source core of Google's Chrome browser--for Mac and Linux. The ports are free and available here. You won't want to run these ports as your main browser, but as proof-of-concept for cross-platform versions of Chrome, this is good news.

I've been using KMail for several years, but I get in ruts and don't notice new features until I trip over them by accident. One such feature is Templates, which has become one of my biggest time-savers.

One brake on the GIMP's popularity is that, while it boasts dozens of filters, a rival like Photoshop boasts thousands. You may only occasionally need a special effect that imitates a pencil sketch or a famous style of painting such as Impressionism or Cubism, but, when you do, having a filter to create the effect instantly saves serious amount of time. To help bridge this divide, the GIMP is reviving the User Filter from its 1.x releases. This filter is a kind of meta-plugin that allows users to import and manage Photoship filters or, if they have the knowledge, to write their own. The GIMP User Filter is available from the project's SourceForge.net site as source code or as a Debian package that may or may not work on Ubuntu, to judge from mailing list chatter. Once you install it, you will find it under Filter - > Generic -> User Filter.

Storage is the Achilles' heel of virtualization projects, said LeftHand Networks Inc. as it announced a new version of its iSCSI SAN software, which it claimed could ease the task of rolling out virtual desktop infrastructures (VDI). The company said that the Linux-based software, called SAN/iQ Version 8, runs on an x86 server -- or preferably a pair of them, for redundancy -- and uses storage virtualization technology to turn a bunch of disk arrays into a powerful but relatively cheap SAN in a box. LeftHand said that new features in Version 8 -- including SmartClone volumes, an integrated performance manager, a virtual connection manager and application programming interfaces (API) for links to other management consoles -- would make it easier to manage virtualized environments and cut storage costs.

Designing and building Web sites can be a maze of tasks these days. One tool that can simplify the task is the well-known Firebug extension, which lets you edit and debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript from within Firefox. As useful as Firebug is on its own, it can actually be extended past its initial setup with additional extensions that can make your work as a developer or designer even easier.

Faithful readers of this column may remember news we reported back in early April that the next Ubuntu release had been cunningly named"Jabbering Jackass." The news came from a memo that got leaked to the Linux Loop, the story went, and it was, of course, an April Fools' Day joke -- which we knew all along.

In spite of its best efforts, Microsoft remains a company back on its heels flailing wildly at the market forces changing the software business. Seinfeld isn't going to change that and neither is a PR blitz. While Microsoft remains a business force, it needs to change fundamentally the way it does business to maintain its industry position moving forward.

MIME HTML or MHT is a standard way to combine the external resources, like images or sound files, that in normal browsing situation are linked externally (downloaded), into the same file as the HTML code, using MIME.

Late last month we published our preview of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and we shared our plans for a number of benchmarks using this netbook with Intel's Atom processor. Following our Linux desktop encryption benchmarks of the ASUS Eee PC 901 and Intel Atom N270 CPU we have a performance comparison of Xandros, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva on this low-cost netbook PC.

I find myself removing packages that I do not need, especially if the packages belong to processes that are using processor resources. There is a way to start from the ground up, you can have a minimal system and just add what you need. This has the added benefit of extra security, your system does not have services running that you do not use. You will not use a Ubuntu Server CD, but the Desktop Live CD.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has not met requirements to provide "open source" intelligence--that is, publicly available information--for state and local law enforcement, a new report shows. The House Committee on Homeland Security released a report Friday criticizing the department after interviewing more than 350 state, local, and tribal law enforcement officials about the DHS's open source intelligence efforts.

Javier Colado, Novell’s new channel chief, faces some clear challenges. Many pundits say Colado has to strengthen Novell’s SUSE Linux partner ranks. But in reality, The VAR Guy believes, Colado has to build a bridge between vastly different software islands. Here's why.

NOTICE: The script in this post is terrible on purpose!