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Looking at the software listed at Kokkini Zita it's easy to see where developer Fons Adriaensen's interests lie. He has written one of the best organ synthesizers for Linux, he has contributed to the LADSPA collection of processing plugins, and he has provided Linux sound researchers with some excellent tools for measuring and representing audio signals. He is also involved in improving Linux support for the Ambisonics technology of encoding and decoding multichannel audio.

As you might expect, GNOME 2.22, the latest version of the popular desktop, which was released last week, has some functional tweaks and new default applications. If the release has a focus, it is on utilities, ranging from added features in standard GNOME applications such as Evolution and Archive Manager to improved accessibility and a handful of new applets. Few of these changes are dramatic, but the overall impression is of dozens of small enhancements that nudge GNOME toward greater usability.

Former Novell CEO Ray Noorda used to speak about coopetition — the need to both cooperate and compete with technology companies. But the current Microsoft-Novell relationship is giving new meaning to the term coopetition, especially during this week’s BrainShare. Here's the scoop.

Since Asus announced that it would release a Windows XP version of phenomenally popular Eee PC for the extra cost of a Windows license, market pundits have been kissing the cheaper Xandros Linux version goodbye. However, Asus is ambivalent about the issue.

Ardour is currently the most advanced digital audio workstation for Linux. However, several other useful applications are also available. This article presents Traverso, Qtractor, Wired, Frinika, and Protux DAWs.

Today is St. Patrick's Day, a national holiday in Ireland that's celebrated by people of Irish lineage worldwide. Like Ireland itself, the holiday is associated with the color green -- as are many things in the Linux universe.

The Online Publishers Association (OPA) of South Africa on Friday elected a new chair in Habari Media’s Adrian Hewlett with Ananzi MD Mark Buwalda taking up the deputy chairmanship. The election of the 2008/09 board for OPA comes at a time when the OPA faqces challenges to its monopoly over the local online publishing metrics system.

The first alpha release of KDE 4.1 isn't planned until the end of April, but this past weekend the OpenSuSE team had updated their KDE Four Live spin against the latest KDE 4.0.66 snapshot packages. The KDE 4.0.66 development packages contain new Kickoff and Plasma features along with much other work to the numerous packages that will ultimately make up this first major update to KDE 4.

On March 15th Dan Kegel sent a email to the wine-devel mailing list with a outline of the new release schedule for Wine 1.0

Most users know about proprietary software packages such as Norton Ghost that can be used for cloning hard disks for backup or distribution purposes. And a few may know about Partition Image, an open source alternative for saving partition images. But how many users know about Clonezilla, an all-in-one cloning tool that promises both speed and power?

Welcome to this year's 11th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! PC-BSD, a user-friendly variant of FreeBSD with a web-based software installation system, continues to deliver updated releases on a regular basis. We'll take a look at the just-released version 1.5. Does it support modern hardware well? And can it challenge the popular desktop Linux distributions? Read below for some answers. In the news section, Ubuntu enters a beta freeze stage, KNOPPIX gets busy with bug fixes, the Hungarian PCLinuxOS community releases PCe17OS, OpenBSD publishes the 4.3 information page, and Dru Lavigne announces the availability of an up-to-date BSDA certification DVD. Also in this issue, learn about pkg-get, a package management utility for OpenSolaris and follow an interesting analysis of the DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking logs as published by a group of data mining researchers in France. Happy reading!

Sunbird, Mozilla's calendar application, supports extensions just as Firefox and Thunderbird do. What kind of extensions work with a calendar? How about being able to get a weather forecast when you're setting up a golf date, or exporting your desktop calendar to a Web service? World Weather+ is a great extension that grabs weather data from the Weather Channel. It displays the current conditions on the left side of Sunbird, below the task section. To get started, download and install the add-on, select the add-on's preferences, and provide it your ZIP code. It will then display your location's current weather conditions along with the option to view the forecast for the next nine days.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Support for alternate direction layouts (vertical, horizontal) in Kickoff. Improvements in the Device Notifier applet, with support for window icons in the Pager Plasmoid in Plasma, with the "Trash" applet moving into kdebase, the "Luna" applet moving to extragear, and the "Contacts" and "Converter" runners moving into kdereview. Support for online play (using the GGZ network) in the KSquares game. A new default theme for the KSame game..

OLPC is a lost cause. It's amazing how an otherwise interesting project with headline-grabbing mission could spiral out of control with disastrous results. The project has always had noble intentions. I can't fault them for that.

There is no question that most Linux distributions are too much for most people. I say this as a PC power user who happens to be a full-time Ubuntu/Fedora user. And back in 2004-2005, Linspire was indeed, the best overall beginner-friendly Linux option in the market. Then came improvements to Mandriva, new options like Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS (based on Mandriva), and recently, the new Fedora 8.

Asterisk is an open source private branch exchange (PBX) originally created by Mark Spencer of Digium. A PBX, is a type of phone switch, that allows multiple attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Not totally unlike routers that connect multiple computers to a network. As the guest speaker at the Triangle Linux User’s Group (TriLUG) in Raleigh, NC on Thursday Mark recounted how he built the open source Asterisk project and the for-profit company Digium.

Hardware compatibility has long been a problem for Linux—though it has gotten much better over the years—so it will be surprising to some to see a kernel change that will make some hardware cease working. For others, who follow kernel development a bit more closely, it will come as no great surprise that NDISwrapper was disabled by a change made to the kernel back in January. NDISwrapper has never been very popular with kernel hackers, but, because it is GPL licensed and allows more hardware to be used, there are folks on both sides of the argument. For a while, it looked like NDISwrapper had lost that argument, but the 2.6.25-rc4 release restores the functionality it requires.

Ken Starks and Larry Cafiero answered a number of questions about Lindependence 2008, an ambitious, multifaceted new advocacy project they have started recently.

The splash screen can be a useful way of providing visual feedback that OpenOffice.org is starting. However, some people don't like the splash screen, and others prefer to customize the splash screen to match the system theme.

Introduced in Ubuntu 7.10 was install-time encryption support where using the alternate installer one can fully encrypt their disk in an LVM using dm-crypt. Unfortunately, the Ubiquity installer in Ubuntu 8.04 continues to lack LVM and encryption support, but using Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 6 we have looked at the performance cost of this encrypted configuration on Ubuntu Linux. Rather than looking directly at the disk read/write overhead caused by the encryption process, we have provided some benchmarks to see how the real-world performance is impacted in both gaming and other desktop tasks.