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Jeremiah Gray wants to provide an interesting way to learn about Linux, so he's created a new comic strip, called Hackett and Bankwell, about the open source operating system. The strip will be published as a series of comic books that Gray hopes will appeal to new Linux users, but he says it is "more than just a comic book version of a Linux training guide."

If you click this link, you can see my house. That vehicle in the driveway is my 1991 Ford Ranger. I give you that link without hesitation, because with the current state of technology, it's a simple point and click to get my address, and a copy/paste after that to get a map. I'm not so naive that I consider an unlisted phone number viable protection from the prying eyes of the world. Does that mean privacy is dead? Well, I'd argue yes and no.

Attention computer animators -- if you've ever felt limited by working in three dimensions with tools like Blender, check out Pencil, an open source, cross-platform animation app that lets you create in glorious 2-D. Pencil mimics hand-drawn animation techniques, but it's easy to use and produces high-quality output. You can download source code packages as well as pre-built binaries for Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The latest release is 0.4.4b for Macs and Windows boxes, and 0.4.3b for Linux. The differences between the two versions are minor, but include a change to the file format, so if you run Pencil on multiple platforms, you may want to stick with 0.4.3b until the Linux build is updated.

Keeping the files on multiple machines synchronized seems to be a recurring problem for many computer users. Until I discovered Unison (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/) I never really had a completely satisfactory solution. What we'd like to be able to do is efficiently keep two or more servers completely synchronized with each other no matter what gets changed on any of the servers. In the simplest case, we have a production server and a backup server that we need to keep in sync. We might have a cluster of servers used in a load balancing configuration. In the worst case, we might have a group of computers where changes are occurring on any or all of the devices. Consider the case where we have a computer at the office, a laptop, and a work computer at home. We want to be able to work from any computer at any time.

Linux is not just good for programming and system administration. PolishLinux.org has an article listing top 27 educational tools for you and your kids to learn maths, chemistry, geography, astronomy and languages and type-writing.

Many Web forms these days feature a Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) as an effort to stop people from setting up computers to automatically fill in Web forms. A typical CAPTCHA is an image with some numbers and letters in it with distortion and/or background noise, and a Web form input field where you are to enter the numbers and letters from the image. This article investigates three CAPTCHA applications that you can use on a PHP Web site.

The Debian GNU/Linux project will be led by Steve McIntyre from April 17 onwards after he was declared elected on Saturday US time in the 2008 elections.

Last month we had looked at the Radeon HD 3200, which is part of the AMD 780G Chipset. In that Linux-based review we had found the performance to be admirable for being an integrated graphics processor (IGP) and it was quickly supported by the proprietary fglrx driver, aside from AMD not yet introducing the CrossFire/Hybrid Graphics Linux support. To deliver those Radeon HD 3200 benchmarks we had used the ECS A780GM-A Black and today we're publishing our full run-down on this AMD 780G motherboard that's paired with the AMD SB700 Southbridge. The A780GM-A boasts support for AMD Phenom processors, DDR2-1066 memory, PCI Express 2.0, and an HDMI port in addition to one VGA output.

Years ago, Florida Hospital in Orlando faced problems with its IT system, much of which relied on proprietary software. Innovative projects were abandoned due to high costs, and disaster recovery time was unacceptably long. So the hospital turned to open source. It was difficult at first, but officials say things are becoming easier as OSS goes more mainstream.

Xfce isn't for everyone, but for servers or minimal desktop systems, it's just what the doctor ordered. Rather lightweight in Window Manager terms--weighing in at around 63MB--Xfce arrives with a full complement of applications from Abiword, gnumeric, and pidgin to CD/DVD burning software (Brasero), Thunar File Manager, and a host of administrative applications. For this article, I am reviewing the Xfce Fedora Spin based on Fedora 8 and Xfce4.

If you like to customize your applications' appearance, then Firefox themes probably haven't impressed you. Although there are hundreds of themes available, typically all they allow users to do is change the icons and background color of your browser -- not too exciting. Personas for Firefox offers a new way to customize the browser. Though the project was quietly introduced last year, it recently moved into Mozilla Labs, where work has begun in earnest to give users more than just a way to change icons from blue to green. While right now Personas aren't much more than fancy skins, they're easy to change on the fly, and the prototype shows that Mozilla plans to give Firefox users more customization options than ever

It is time to wake up and smell the elephant in the room. Vista is struggling to achieve escape velocity. Microsoft finds itself the butt an international joke, but does not seem able to get a grip. The issue of choice of platform is once more up for grabs. Of course there is an alternative; a popular computing platform whose design attracts universal admiration. But although we all look forward to literally punching in the numbers, the Wii does not yet quite hack it (use of a dread phrase coming up) 'in the enterprise'.

When it comes to desktop publishing, a lot of people might think of big organizations producing newsletters, or your local boy scouts producing a fund raising flier. But the average person out there might not see where any kind of desktop publishing is really needed. Honestly, if you really look deeply, you might be surprised. There are a lot of great uses for desktop publishing. A lot more than people realize. What do we do when we want a good quality, free, open source desktop publishing program? You need to look no farther than Scribus.

The findings from the fourth-quarter 2007 Open Source Industry and Community survey is out. The authors say the results show open source is effective in combating trade deficit and that IT professionals involved in open source earn more than their more proprietary colleagues. Let’s check it out.

You've heard about Linux. It powers everything from servers to mobile phones, can be found in schools, governments, industry and homes, and a good chunk of the internet’s infrastructure is powered by it. CHOICE Computer’s Editor even runs it at home! Linux is a bit of a jack-of-all-trades, and traditionally the domain of hardcore computer geeks. But that’s changing. The last few years have seen rapid development in the desktop sphere for Linux, so much so that it’s now emerging as a replacement for Windows. In this report we tell you all about Linux — what it is, the various distributions, where you get it from, and what its capable of. We also provide a tutorial on how to install Ubuntu Linux alongside Windows, so you can enjoy the best of both worlds.

Welcome to this year's 14th issue of DistroWatch Weekly! The release of Mandriva Linux 2008.1 last week started a small avalanche of distro releases that will keep us busy downloading and installing new distributions for weeks. But which of them will eventually become the "keeper"? One way to evaluate them all is to follow the development branches of the major distributions as they converge towards the point when they are declared stable and ready for deployment. This is the topic of today's feature story. In the news section, Debian elects a new project leader, ASUS releases a Software Development Kit for the Eee PC, gOS and Symphony OS continue to experiment with unusual user interfaces, and Darkstar Linux announces the availability of Disk Manager, a new utility for managing hard disk partitions. Also worth a read - a rare interview with Texstar, the founder of PCLinuxOS, and another with Jeremy Katz, a well-known Red Hat and Fedora developer. All these topics and more in this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly - happy reading!

Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 86 for the weeks April 6th - April 12th, 2008. In this issue we cover: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS archive freeze, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS LoCo Team CDs, Brainstorm update, Ubuntu UK Podcast #3, Euro-Parliament testing Ubuntu, and much, much more!

The GIMP team announced today the first release from the 2.5 development series. It is true that this version is unstable, but a little bird told me to give it a try and see what's it capable of. First of all, let me tell you that its interface is quite redesigned and I think that some users will have problems adjusting with it, but that's just my two cents. On the other hand, version 2.5.0 of The GIMP includes some hot new features, like the integration of GEGL (Generic Graphics Library) which will finally get support for higher color depths, more colorspaces and eventually non-destructive editing. But enough chitchat, and let's take a closer look at some of the new features and improvements to be found in The GIMP 2.5.0.

After failing to get any response from Linspire as to why they are not holding annual shareholder meetings, I asked them publicly to do so in my last blog, in a hopes that pressure from customers, partners and shareholders would encourage them to do the right thing. Their lack of responsiveness only heightens my concern with Linspire's present management and the company's future prospects. As a shareholder, seeing Linspire's new management destroying the company gives me great concern. This week I am working on my next blog which will outline the facts as to what Linspire has done since my resignation.

You will all no doubt be aware that a few months back I reviewed the original gOS, and I was enthusiastic about it. In my opinion, the original gOS was a great Linux distribution for the average computer user - someone who used it to write up a few documents, send a few emails, and surf the Internet a bit. With its emphasis on web apps, it was not only an ideal operating system for casual users, but was an indication of where desktop computing appears to be headed, with the real work being done "in the cloud", with the desktop just the front end for that. But now, gOS Space is here, and it's a radical departure from the original. So, once again I downloaded a copy and gave it a try.