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"There was a time when I was obsessed with finding good, free, stable, Adobe Flash animation software, because at the time I was also obsessed with Homestar Runner and other online cartoons and I wanted to make my own. This was before I knew about how much hassle Flash actually is across multiple platforms and long before I knew of the disadvantages of making online animations in proprietary formats."

Depending on your point of view, the daily news delivers up a glass either half empty or half full. In the short term, the negative impression can be particularly powerful, with disasters both natural and man-made arising with distressing regularity. But the glass can also be viewed as half full, and that can lead to a false sense of security.

Virtual desktop computing is a controversial and emotional topic. There’s the fear of change, fear of the Cloud and fear of loss of control.

It’s not the least eventful package installation I’ve ever done in Linux and BSD, but tapping into Debian Backports to install the Document Foundation’s new LibreOffice suite and replace the formerly Oracle-controlled, now-in-limbo OpenOffice is fairly easy if you follow the steps, refrain from panic and just type in the letter “y” a few times.

This week, the 5 links for developers and IT pros looks at how IT can lead innovation, when Agile might not work and 5 Chromebook concerns.

Both GNOME and KDE recently underwent massive redesigns. GNOME 2 morphed into version 3.0 with a radically different look and feel. KDE 4 is also graphically much different from the KDE 3 lineage. Meanwhile, Ubuntu has added Unity to the mix. The future of all will depend on ease-of-use perceptions and end-user hardware.

OIN or the Open Invention Network is an industry-supporting independent group consisting of Linux users in a royalty-free environment and be protected from lawsuits for license infringement by proprietary software owners.

This document describes how to integrate Postfix/Dovecot with Microsoft Active Directory on CentOS 5.x, and you can manage mail users in Microsoft Active Directory. You will learn how to enable Postfix to look up email addresses in Active Directory and how to enable Dovecot to authenticate against Microsoft Active Directory.

Red Hat declared war on VMware’s Cloud Foundry today, announcing that 65 new companies have joined the Open Virtualization Alliance backing KVM in a month’s time. In May, Red Hat, SUSE, BMC Software, Eucalyptus Systems, HP, IBM and Intel, announced the formation of the Open Virtualization Alliance. As of today, 65 new members have joined, including Dell. Scott Crenshaw, who leads Red Hat’s cloud effort, denounced what he called VMware’s proprietary cloud platform.

This isn’t something you’ll often do for work or a real project, but it’s fun and it can look cool. Tilt shifting a photo is something that can be done by expensive fancy camera equipment or, fortunately for us, free software. The idea is that when you take a photo of small scale objects like model towns, part of what reveals them as miniature is the difference in focus. When a camera is up close to small objects, it can’t focus on other nearby objects, making them blurry. Tilt shifting is applying this blur effect deliberately, to make large-scale objects appear small. Getting it just right can take a lot of time and effort, but the basic method is quite simple, and that’s what we’re covering today.

Adobe is preparing to supplement its popular-but-proprietary Flash product with a standards-based animation tool based on HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. Supporting imported bitmap and vector graphics, Adobe Edge produces output compatible with browsers including Firefox, Internet Explorer 9, and the Safari versions used in Apple's iPad and iPhone, the company says.

For all its flaws, Flash (or on of its incarnations like AIR or Flex) is still one of the few ways to create fully fledged desktop style applications that can be run in a web browser, mobile device, or as a traditional desktop application. By simply changing the target device when compiling, your code base can be used by almost any modern personal computing device without any significant changes. The exception however, as announced by Adobe recently, is the Linux desktop.

What is wrong with everyone in Linux land bagging on Mozilla Firefox and their 5.0 release? Complaints pretty much have one thing in common: They claim there isn’t enough ‘new and shiny’ things inside FF5 to warrant a major version. This is illogical thinking because major version means NOTHING when it comes to usability of software.

Yesterday I wrote about how WordPress has evolved into a first rate platform that can be easily customized. One of the ways that WordPress is customized to meet the unique needs of a site is through the use of plugins that add functionality. Most of these functions are visual and offer visitors a richer experience while on your site. Others are never even seen by the visitor and only indirectly affect his or her experience.

Dropbox is probably the most popular online file storage and synchronization tool among Linux users. And as we have seen earlier, it is rather easy to install Dropbox in Ubuntu. But as a Linux user, what really are the alternatives to Dropbox for online file storage? Lets find out.

I’ve received some information from Jean-Michel regarding DoudouLinux a project he’s leading, you can read an interview with him and more info on Doudou in a former article.You probably know that my project DoudouLinux is still alive and, much more than that, really active! Indeed we have just released our first version officially tagged as stable (not that previous ones were unstable ;) ). Its name is DoudouLinux 1.0 Gondwana and it is available in 15 officially supported languages, using 5 different alphabets.

Three months ago, when we saw the Firefox 4 release, there was a hell lot of buzz surrounding it, and the news trended in Twitter for hours as people felt that, it had been quite a while since they got a new Firefox, unlike the case with Chrome(the direct competitor). Some may admit that, a huge release with a lot of new features is better than frequent releases with not so important features!

BleachBit quickly frees disk space and tirelessly guards your privacy. Free cache, delete cookies, clear Internet history, shred temporary files, delete logs, and discard junk you didn’t know was there. Designed for Linux and Windows systems, it wipes clean 90 applications including Firefox, Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari,and more. Beyond simply deleting files, BleachBit includes advanced features such as shredding files to prevent recovery, wiping free disk space to hide traces of files deleted by other applications, and vacuuming Firefox to make it faster. Better than free, BleachBit is open source.

How serious is Red Hat about pushing beyond Linux? Take a look at Red Hat’s latest quarterly results, disclosed yesterday, and a cloud seminar that’s set for today. You’ll get a feel for how the open source company is striving to reinvent its business amid a march toward $1 billion in annual revenues. Here's the evidence.

The open-source developers working on the drivers for AMD/ATI Radeon and NVIDIA (via the Nouveau project) graphics hardware have tossed all their weight behind the Gallium3D driver architecture. The Gallium3D drivers have surpassed the "classic" Mesa DRI drivers in terms of capabilities, performance, and stability. The only strong holdout to Gallium3D has been Intel since they aren't convinced that it's the appropriate choice and they aren't interested in overhauling their Linux driver stack once more with the large upfront investment that's required in rewriting their user-space 3D driver in moving from classic Mesa to Gallium3D.