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Tuxpaint is an open source graphics program that occupies a special niche: it is designed for children. This makes it a rarity in the software community known for every developer scratching his or her own itch. Tuxpaint has just six tools: paintbrush, rubber stamp, line tool, text tool, polygon tool, and eraser.

A couple of days ago, I talked about Yahoo's warning messages saying my system (Linux) had not been tested with their mail program and that resulted in a very impassioned plea to help a group of Yahoo Groups users to protest the changes that Yahoo has apparently made to the way Yahoo Groups work. Changes to the way mailing lists work are nothing new. I am a member of several Yahoo Groups. But I am also a member of a number of Google Groups and a mess of mailing lists running on Mailman. While reading the complaint, I had two thoughts.

This morning brought the significant -  and long overdue – announcement of the launch of an independent foundation to host development of the open source, ODF-compliant OpenOffice productivity suite.  It should have happened ten years ago.

An independent foundation is set up to develop, promote and drive further growth of OpenOffice.org, the world’s leading free office software. Introducing The Document Foundation and LibreOffice…

LibreOffice will be uncompromisingly free software, and as one developer observes, "it is hard to think of anyone of any note in the community that isn't involved," including developers from Red Hat and Debian. The hope is that OpenOffice / Libreoffice "will go where people want it to go, because it hasn't been going where people want it to. Initially the focus will be on cleaning up the code, adding polish and increasing usability." In the longer term, the project will be much more ambitious. If LibreOffice takes off, which it has every chance of doing, the test for the developers will be to prove that a distributed free software development model not only gives the developers greater freedom and initiative, but also produces results.

This guide explains how to set up an NFS server and an NFS client on CentOS 5.5. NFS stands for Network File System; through NFS, a client can access (read, write) a remote share on an NFS server as if it was on the local hard disk.

Freescale Semiconductor announced a Linux-ready, ARM9-based i.MX28x SoC and a Coldfire-based MCF5441x MCU, both targeting fanless industrial applications as well as automotive systems. The i.MX28x and MCF5441x each consume less than half a Watt, support extended temperatures, offer clock synchronized Ethernet, and with some models, include a Layer 2 switch for low-cost daisy-chaining of devices.

They say the best blogging is about story-telling. So, let me tell you one of mine how I came to write this post. First, some background: I run a Windows-free environment, and have for a long time. I put in my time with “Windoz” many years ago, and quickly left it behind.

The Eclipse development team has released version 3.6.1 of the open source development environment. This is a first service release of the IDE, which was released in the summer as part of Helios and consists of around 40 Eclipse projects. The new version is primarily a bug fix version and does not contain any new functionality. The release notes provide detailed information on what's new in Eclipse 3.6.1.

Linus Torvalds and Jeremy Allision were both in Sao Paulo, Brazil a few weeks ago for LinuxCon, where they were both presenters. Later in the week when they were waiting to go on a safari at the Sao Paulo Zoo, Jeremy seized the opportunity to go on a trip down memory lane when he asked Linus about the Sinclair QL they each owned while growing up. Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland, Linus wrote his own assembler and editor (in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries). They continue to reminisce about more archaic hardware like floppy drives, microdrives, 512 K RAM expansion packs and the Acorn Archimedes.

If you're looking for good open source developer tools, you literally have thousands to choose from. For this list, we focused on 60 of the best and most well known. Rather than trying to rank them, we've arranged them into categories and listed them in alphabetical order. That said, we're sure to have left off a few (or perhaps even a few dozen) that deserve to be included. Feel free to add your suggestions in the Comments section below.

Open source blog CMS WordPress became the default platform for Windows Live today following an announcement from TechCrunch Disrupt. Windows Live currently uses Windows Live Spaces as its blogging platform. After this announcement, Spaces users will have six months to migrate blogs to WordPress before they become unavailable.

It has been a long time coming, but finally it happened: OpenOffice.org has been forked under the name of LibreOffice. The Document Foundation will oversee the development of LibreOffice.

Last article of my series on tools for network analysis, after wireshark, ntop and a fine assortment of tools to use with the command line is the time to see nmap. Nmap (“Network Mapper”) is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Nmap uses raw IP packets in novel ways to determine what hosts are available on the network, what services (application name and version) those hosts are offering, what operating systems (and OS versions) they are running, what type of packet filters/firewalls are in use, and dozens of other characteristics.

I’ve reviewed so many different Ubuntu remasters that I’ve more or less become numb when I see a new one. After all, aren’t they all pretty much the same? Well no, not really. Different remasters offer different things. This week I decided to look at Pinguy OS. Pinguy OS is a strange blend of Ubuntu, Linux Mint and a bunch of other stuff all rolled into a unique package. It contains the default Ubuntu features and a whole lot more including a ton of multimedia codecs, additional desktop goodies, and a great range of default software.

If you like playing around with your Terminal, you will love this cute little program that can create a small Matrix style animation in your Terminal.

"The worst thing that could come of this is I could fall down the steps of the FTC building, hit my head and kill myself," quipped Microsoft Chairman William H. Gates in 1992, as the Federal Trade Commission launched an investigation of his company. But nobody joked on the third day of April, 2000, as Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson delivered his decision on what had morphed into the biggest software antitrust case in history: The United States of America vs. Microsoft.

Eduke32 is awesome first person shooter game and a cross-platform Duke3D (Duke Nukem 3D) port which provides many new features for mod authors, including an enhanced scripting system and OpenGL renderer. It offers countless platforms on which to build and improve on and with no shortage of Duke Nukem enthusiasts it can only get better, Thanx to Eduke32's creators we are able to match memory and relive our gaming youth with much greater graphics.

MeeGo developers eager to test the operating system on a mobile device have brought the Linux-based mobile OS to the Nexus One, HTC Desire, and Dell Streak. Maybe Nokia should hurry up and announce an official MeeGo smartphone.

Page through a major newspaper (remember newspapers?) today and you’re likely to run into two enormous ads, one by Google and one by AOL. Leaving aside the irony of Google advertising in a form of media that it has almost competed out of existence, there’s something potentially transformative going on here that’s worth exploring.