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GIMP is my image editor/creator of choice on both Windows and Linux however I prefer Photoshop on Mac. If you have any experience of Photoshop you will know how to use these tools, brushes and effects in it.

LXer Feature: 23-May-2010

Some of the big stories this week included the secret identities of Linux distributions, a new flash filesystem, Phoronix tests the speed of Arch against Ubuntu, Android gets an OnStar application, how Linux saved a fast food giant and last but not least a story entitled 'I could license you to use this software, but then I’d have to kill you'. Enjoy!

Last week we published Arch Linux vs. Ubuntu benchmarks to finally lay to rest that for the overall system performance the speed of the rolling Arch Linux distribution is not too different from that of Ubuntu when running with similar package versions. One of the areas, however, where the performance was different with the "out of the box" experience was the OpenGL gaming where Ubuntu was using Compiz by default where as Arch had Metacity. This surprised many so we published another article entitled The Cost Of Running Compiz where we showed the performance penalties of a compositing window manager with different hardware and drivers.

The long struggle for open video on the Web may finally be over for Linux users. Last week, Google announced WebM at its Google I/O conference. What’s it mean for you? In the long run, a totally open media format for the Web, plus the backing of enough companies and organizations to push open media over the top online.

With the recent releases of Ubuntu 10.04 and Linux Mint 9 we see something that I feel really makes Linux Mint out shine Ubuntu (yet again): Community input counts.

The truth is that Linux is well on it's way to being a mainstream operating system. The bad news is that this will not happen the way many of us envisioned.

Open source is no guarantee of freedom in the world of cloud computing. The central promise of open source software has always been to release users from vendor lock-in. With open source software, users were no longer beholden to a single vendor.

Google Chrome for Linux will be one year old on Friday 4th June. To mark this relatively minor milestone I’ve decided to take a look at how Google Chrome’s growth on Linux has, well, grown in that time. I can only base my findings on my blog as a whole with some outside context provided by net statistic providers.

How to download YouTube videos in Ubuntu is probably among the first things a newbie Ubuntu user will ask for. There are simply a number of application to do the same, but there is an even better way. Downloading YouTube videos is Ubuntu is not the right keyword, you can actually copy-paste the YouTube video.

If you ever used or seen some screenshots of Linux Mint, I'm sure you noticed how amazing it's menu is. Here is how to install it in Ubuntu from a PPA (and stay up to date with the latest MintMenu versions).

Clang, the C/Objective-C/C++ compiler front-end for the Low-Level Virtual Machine, and LLVM itself have a lot to be proud of lately. LLVM 2.7 was recently released with many new features, LLVM now has its own libstdc++ replacement, and LLVM is finding itself used in many places from a JIT engine in a Flash player to providing software acceleration in Gallium3D. The latest accomplishment for Clang is that the C++ library can now build the Boost libraries.

Microsoft held a "Citizenship Accelerator Summit" at its headquarters yesterday, bringing in executives (including CEO Steve Ballmer) and global nonprofit leaders to talk about how technology can tackle social challenges around the world -- citing, as Exhibit A, its own business and philanthropic partnerships in areas including the environment, energy, disaster relief, worker retraining and the fight against child pornography. Invited to sit in were reporters from national newspapers, magazines and wire services, as well as some influential university professors, social entrepreneurs and philanthropic bloggers. Complete with the obligatory Twitter hash tag, the event was an implicit (and at one point surprisingly explicit) attempt to spread the word about a different side of the Redmond software giant.

[MS showing a different side? Now I'm scared.. - Scott]

I have used a few converter programs on Linux in the past like, Avidemux, OggConvert, and Pitivi. However, a few months ago I stumbled on a media converter for Linux that I had not heard of before and discovered they had a deb file already created for Ubuntu Linux, so I figured it was worth the few clicks to check it out. I was surprised to discover a simplistically elegant interface although importantly it also worked perfectly each time I threw a “family video” at it.

Suppose your computer commits suicide by inviting the latest virus and you are not able to get it back up and running. As a last resort you decide to backup your important documents, photos that you took of your girl friend and the ASCII text file containing your passwords. Today I will show how to do this very easily.

Filmaster.com, a social network for film lovers, has recently presented a new movie recommendations engine. The algorithm that generates recommendations is open source and has been released under AGPLv3 license

Beside its openness, there is also one more reason why ODF is great for everybody who must produce a lot of office documents: ODF is really simple to generate or edit automatically. Even if you aren't a professional programmer, it takes very little effort to put together a script that generates or processes in any way texts, presentations or spreadshets in ODF format. You can also ask for specific ODF scripting recipes that you would like to see added to the website.

As I sat in the audience at Google's I|O conference Thursday morning, I watched Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra and others unveil Android 2.2 "Froyo," an ambitious upgrade to the company's mobile OS. Gundotra began the keynote by framing Android as a moral crusade against "a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice." In case anyone couldn't figure out who the man, company, device, and carrier were, he showed a slide that alluded to Apple's most famous commercial. Then, for the rest of the Android 2.2 announcement, Gundotra and others punctuated demos of impressive stuff -- such as dramatic speed boosts and Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities -- with asides about the iPhone and iPad that appeared to be intended to elicit snickers from the audience. Which they did.

The Wine development release 1.2-rc1 is now available. The source is available now, Binary packages are in the process of being built, and will appear soon at their respective download locations. This is the first release candidate for Wine 1.2. It marks the beginning of the code freeze period. Please give this release a good testing to help us make 1.2 as good as possible.

This is something I always asked myself. How is Google Chrome different from Chromium. Apart from the logo, there is hardly any difference visually between the two. So I decided to dig further. Here are some of the interesting facts you should know.

I wrote up a how-to for PC World on how to put Android on the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 2G and it went up today. I wanted to be there to tweet about it when it went up, but I've been keeping really strange hours lately and I wasn't awake for it when it went up.