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In this article series by Reynante Martinez, we will learn how to go about creating a underwater scene from scratch. We will begin by creating the terrain for the underwater environment. In the sequel of the article, we will learn how to add vegetation, pebbles and corals. After which we will discuss how to add distant terrains, lighting effects and finally composition.

I’m certain, given the things that have, or in some cases, have not, happened since the completion of the sale of Sun to Oracle, that many would have wished that IBM had purchased the flailing company. Those seeing the commitment of IBM to many open source projects would tend to believe that the progress of the many Sun projects would be better served under the aegis of IBM. As it is, many are wondering what is going to happen to the many Sun projects, with the Java stream being probably the only thing not in some cloud of possible excision from living efforts.

Microsoft has been busy these past few days reminding the world that it really is an organization of monstrous proportions and its tendrils reach from the humblest consumer desktop right up to the level of super-computing. Its message is clear: The company has no intention of giving up any of the markets in which it competes to open source operating systems like Linux -- at least not without the mother of all fights.

Google will take a swashbuckling step towards license-free web video playback next month when it open sources the leading video codec from a company it just acquired for $124.6 million, according to a report citing multiple people familiar with the matter. NewTeeVee reports that Mountain View will open source On2's VP8 codec at its Google I/O developers conference in San Francisco in mid-May. The publication also says that Google will roll the codec into its Chrome browser, and that Mozilla will do the same with Firefox.

Originally, PDF export in OpenOffice.org was limited to three levels of quality, whose exact differences were obscure to most users. But that was many releases ago. The latest versions of OpenOffice.org provide, for no cost, most of the features available in Acrobat Standard for $299 -- to say nothing of a few features that even Acrobat Pro Extended does not include even at $699. The problem for many people is knowing what options they might want, especially since the wording of the dialog window is sloppy in a couple of places.

Expected for release in May, Linux kernel version 2.6.34 contains several new network drivers and various advancements designed to improve network performance or increase network configuration flexibility, which will particularly impact virtualisation.

What happened to the old "sysadmin" of just a few years ago? We've split what used to be the sysadmin into application teams, server teams, storage teams, and network teams. Now look at what we've done -- knowledge is so decentralized we must invent new roles to act as liaisons between all the IT groups.

Last week we shared that we were benchmarking Ubuntu's current and past LTS releases and began by running graphics benchmarks looking at how the proprietary drivers from the past compare to open-source drivers from the present, but now we have our assortment of system benchmarks to publish from the Long-Term Support releases of Ubuntu 6.06.1, Ubuntu 8.04.4, and an Ubuntu 10.04 development snapshot. In this article, we are looking at how Ubuntu's performance has evolved over the past four years.

First, relax. The new baby is called "WePad" and it's an Android device. Or, as the developers put it: The WePad is an open platform and everybody can contribute. It's based on established technologies like Linux, Android and Adobe AIR. Every developer in the world can create applications for this device. And you can also use existing Android applications. It also features multitasking, a webcam, Flash, two USB ports and can "play anything you throw at it". Some sources claim you can also make phone calls, but I have no confirmation for this.

Canonical developer Jamie Bennett presented a new project 2 days ago: Zoho Webservice, which is basically the online office suite Zoho (which comes with tools such as: Presentations, Spreadsheet and Word Processor), but with Ubuntu integration. Zoho was chosen over Google Docs because it does not require the user to log in to use it, so using Zoho Webservice in Ubuntu, all you have to do is double click a file and read / edit it online.

One thing I have noticed on just about all windows installed computers outside of my strict control is that they are full of viruses, spyware and there are more programs installed than they know what to do with. These programs are also not updated with the latest service patches and virus lists. Most of the time the programs are junkware that are installed automatically with other programs and automatically start up when they log in. Consequently their machines are a mess and run slower than I can swim through frozen molasses. It is easy to see why virus and malware writers love windows machines.

Besides the Fedora 13 Graphics Testing Week taking place over the next few days, this week is also significant within the Fedora community as it will mark the release of Fedora 13 Beta. There's just one month left to go until Fedora 13 (codenamed Goddard) will be officially released, but over the past few hours we have been testing out what will become the official Fedora 13 Beta spin this morning. Fedora 13 is quite exciting and worth checking out.

This tutorial shows how to set up a USB-over-IP server with Mandriva 2010.0 as well as a USB-over-IP client (also running Mandriva 2010.0). The USB/IP Project aims to develop a general USB device sharing system over IP network. To share USB devices between computers with their full functionality, USB/IP encapsulates "USB I/O messages" into TCP/IP payloads and transmits them between computers. USB-over-IP can be useful for virtual machines, for example, that don't have access to the host system's hardware - USB-over-IP allows virtual machines to use remote USB devices.

NagiosGrapher can be used to create graphical presentations of your data that you collect with Nagios. This tutorial will provide you with some of the tricks to get it working and show graphs once you have it all installed. The response time for your web server is used as an illustration.

If you're looking for a handheld hd multimedia device, your search ends here. This is such a cool device. The only downside is apparently the korean manufacturer can't keep up with demand as it's fully sold out at the moment of this writing.

fter covering the war of words over IBM's use of patents in a business dispute with French start-up TurboHercules and giving my two cents on this open-source family fight, I'd hope the matter would die down. I was wrong. Florien Mueller, the founder of the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign, who started this most recent open-source internal fuss, has now published an analysis which claims that some of the patents "IBM asserted against Hercules may also [jeopardize] other major Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, including but not limited to OpenBSD, Xen, VirtualBox, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite and Kaffe."

Google appears to be prepping an Android-based tablet device, says The New York Times. Meanwhile, a study by IMS Research predicts that at year's end, Apple's iPad will own 51 percent of the $3.6 billion tablet PC market, with Android taking 24 percent.

For a long time, using an iPhone with Linux was a complete no go. With a jailbroken phone, you could mount it over a wireless connection using fuse, and then sync music your music that way – but syncing an entire music collection via wifi? No thanks. However, thanks to some rather clever folk, there’s a new solution that gives you access to a whole lot of your iPhone functions on Linux “natively”.

While TonidoPlug is a great personal server as it is, you can teach it a few neat tricks. For example, how about turning your TonidoPlug into a fully-fledged server running the MySQL/PHP stack?

Most folk know if they want a secure gateway between the Internet and their home or business they should use Linux for maximum protection. The new IPFire distribution seeks to take security to the highest level while also making things a breeze for the less experienced to set up.