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I've shelled out a lot of money over the years on software -- Windows and Mac OS upgrades, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office -- the list goes on and on. Some of it was necessary, but more often than not there are free alternatives out there that do the job just as well or better than the paid software -- someone just has to point you in the right direction. That's what I'll attempt to do here today. Behold, some of my favorite free programs and utilities that I guarantee will make your life easier:

The techies in Kerala have one more feather to add in their cap. India's first open source movie concept is getting ready under Chamba Swathanthra Movie Project, started in Kerala. Open source films (also known as open content films and free content films) are films which are produced and distributed using free and open source software methodologies.

Many readers will have witnessed their computer system becoming progressively slower in use over time. This particularly affects Windows so much so that over time it can feel like the machine is running at half speed. This is in part due to users continually installing more applications, and not performing system maintenance.

Having now installed KDE SC 4.6 RC1 on my main desktop machine, running Kubuntu, it seems to be playing quite nicely. Here are my impressions of this latest pre-release of KDE SC 4.6.

At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress (27C3) in Berlin, security researcher Julia Wolf of US company FireEye pointed out numerous, previously hardly known, security problems in connection with Adobe's PDF standard. For instance, a PDF can reportedly contain a database scanner that becomes active and scans a network when the document is printed on a network printer.

World of Padman (WoP) is a first-person shooter game that is developed and headed by the professional cartoonist and illustrator ENTE and his team. The game was initially developed as a modification of the original game Quake III Arena and was titled PadMod. After the source code for Quake III Arena was released, the game became standalone. The current version runs on an enhanced version of the ioquake3 engine, which is based on the Quake III Arena engine.

Sqlite-Commander - A ncurses based tool to display the records and tables of a sqlite database, right in the terminal

Google Chrome accumulates traces of the web sites you visit in more places than other web browsers, but today BleachBit 0.8.5 conveniently cleans them all---even in a place the browser itself won't clean it. You've heard of cookies, cache, and URL history, but Google Chrome also quietly stores HTML5 cookies, a DNS cache, keywords table (for site search), a "top sites" list, and a "host referral" list. Editor's note: BleachBit is GPLv3 software

Sure, the webOS App Catalog lags behind the markets of other mobile OSes -- but the homebrew community continues porting apps to HP/Palm's platform. One of the more recent additions is mPlayer, the cross-platform open source media app.

It's not possible directly right now due to limitations of the existing GMA 500 drivers (IEGD, PSB, ...) and probably some other VAAPI drivers as well. But if you have mplayer running with vaapi, it's really easy - Because you can set up xbmc to use external players with XBMC 10 as described here.

While those using the NVIDIA binary display driver with any modern GeForce graphics processor have great accelerated video playback on the GPU right now via VDPAU, as a GPU-independent way to offload the video playback acceleration from the CPU there s Broadcom's Crystal HD adapter, which is backed by open-source Linux drivers. The Crystal HD has already been tapped by XBMC and other free software projects, but new patches are available to utilize this technology within MPlayer and FFmpeg...

Murach books are known for their large format trim size and one-to-one theory-practice "paired pages" approach. While a majority of their titles are Microsoft technology focused, they do offer titles on Java and other Oracle-based technologies. This latest title from Murach on PHP and MySQL expands their offerings even further. How does this title compare to other Murach and PHP/MySQL book alternatives? Read on to find out.

The window manager is the most important part of the Linux desktop environment. It defines how your windows look, how they behave, how applications are launched, and how they're closed. In many cases, window managers have evolved into complete desktop environments, helping with file management, configuration editing and computer management. They're at the very heart of your interaction with the system, but their best feature is that they're swappable, which sets Linux apart from both Windows and OS X.

Tsinghua University and Mozilla China have jointly developed a new Internet browser product that is specially designed for IPv6.

I think Arch Linux, Slackware and maybe in a slightly different level Gentoo, are some kind of advanced Linux distribution, or better said for intermediate to advanced Linux user. I like to say that those distributions are for Linux lovers, people who is not afraid of the command line. I’m that kind of person, I like to be in control of my Operating System, and one thing I really like about Slackware and Arch Linux is that you need to enable the daemons, this way no matter how many of them you install in your computer it is still running light weight. Of course if you use Fedora or Ubuntu you can disable the daemons, but I prefer to be the one that enable them, and not the other way.

This year brought quite a few headlines of note to the developer world. While we each have our favorites, from new releases of classic tools to astounding announcements from tech companies, here in no particular order are a few stories that stood out to us this year.

More details emerge around an Ubuntu based tablet out of China. Although a firm launch date has yet to be set the developers hope the Ubuntu powered tablet will launch early next year. Here’s what they had to say in an exclusive interview with Gizchina..

Setup KVM-QEMU instance on SL 6 alpha 3 and install SL6 KVM with ISO image SL-6-x86_64-2010-12-17-boot.iso to run installation via http://ftp.scientificlinux.org/linux/scientific/6rolling/x86... source. Follow [2] with minor changes for “yum install script” in previously installed SL 6 KVM via Net Repos. Virtio drivers should be enabled during install.

Grandma Embedded Linux, aka Grannybuntu: The next big thing in desktop technology, or just another fanboy pipe dream? Well, who cares; As long as it has pipes, it's cool.

Many times i download live cd distros to preview and install them, but sometimes the livecd does not have an installer, even the official site says that this cd cannot be installed, thats the case with CentOS 5.5 livecd. Well i did install it, with "some assembly required" but i did it, this are my notes to make this process "easy" to you.