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perhaps Kendrick's most significant software achievement is Tux Paint, a highly acclaimed, free and open source illustration program that is primarily aimed at kids, but is used by all ages courtesy of its intuitive and effortless design.

My dream in life is to work on Tux Paint, and other "edutainment" apps I've dreamed up, full-time, salaried and hire some contributors to work full-time, too.

The Eee PC is not only an excellent way of promoting Linux among the masses, it is a great device to have around the house

The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) on desktop and server, continuing Ubuntu's tradition of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution.

Is OpenOffice.org getting faster?

Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next?

In conclusion, OpenOffice.org is generally getting slower with each release. However, startup performance has made great improvements, the performance losses are relatively small, advances in new computer hardware are more than making up the loses, and OpenOffice.org continues to mature with new features. OpenOffice.org doesn't compel users to upgrade, so you are welcome to continue using older versions.

Fedora 9 will include KDE 4.0.3 by default, so this is a look at the progress of one of the major free desktop environments. KDE 4.0 was released January 11, 2008 after a couple of years of discussions and hype. The initial release was followed by a succession of minor releases that fixed many of the glaring bugs. The project that was initiated on October 14, 1996, so its developers have nearly a decade of experience now. While a lot of things have changed, there is still a familiar feel from its initial days. So what has changed?

The new Kickoff menu is a bit unusual and takes time to get used to.

The KDE project has taken a big risk, hoping to jump-start innovation. I hope they get it right. Along with the interesting acquisition of Trolltech by Nokia, the future is exciting and uncertain… and that’s just the way I like it.

So what is the main benefit of choosing Slackware Linux over other distributions? First and foremost, it's the clean and uncomplicated system, with no hidden surprises, that is perhaps Slackware's biggest asset. As commented recently by a poster on a popular web site, it is the only major distribution that has resisted the temptation to add custom features and other bloat to Linux. Slackware is as pure and natural as a Linux distribution can be - it comes with a vanilla kernel and it includes just the necessary libraries, as well as a well-balanced set of development tools, desktop and server packages. Nothing more and nothing less.

I'm happy to announce that KDE 4.1 simply rocks.

As far as eye candy, KDE 4.1 looks simply stunning. While its theme uses the same foundation as 4.0, the developers have improved it with many tweaks.

KDE marks a triumphant return to full usability with the 4.1 release.

A few months ago Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu Linux, called upon open source developers to surpass Apple and their wonderful MacOS-X based user experience. Well, gOS release 3 could be close to doing just that. They have taken the best of Mac OS-X and Linux to a level that the user experience of using it is, well, exceptional!

The KOffice team is proud to announce the first beta of KOffice 2.0. The goal of this release is to gather feedback from both users and developers on the new UI and underlying infrastructure. This will allow us to release a usable 2.0 release, demonstrating our vision for the future of the digital office to a larger audience and attract new contributions both in terms of code and ideas for improvements.

The libcrypto.so that comes with googleearth is not compatible with libssl.so that is installed on OpenSUSE.

Just remove or rename libcrypto.so.0.9.8 in the ~/google-earth directory so that OpenSUSEs own libcrypto gets used instead.

as many screenshots as possible

No extensive Linux/Unix knowledge is assumed.

used by SmalltalkKit, implementing Etoile's Pragmatic Smalltalk, a Smalltalk JIT compiler which generates code binary-compatible with Objective-C, allowing classes to be written in a mixture of Smalltalk and Objective-C.

Preemption The server kernel has kernel preemption turned off (CONFIG_PREEMPT_NONE=y), while the desktop kernel has it enabled (CONFIG_PREEMPT_BKL=y, CONFIG_PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY=y). Preemption works along with scheduling to fine-tune performance, efficiency and responsiveness. In non-preemptive kernels, kernel code runs until completion; the scheduler can't touch it until it's finished. But the Linux kernel allows tasks to be interrupted at nearly any point (but not when it is unsafe, which is a whole huge fascinating topic all by itself), so that tasks of lesser-priority can jump to the head of the line. This is appropriate for desktop systems because users typically have several things going at once: writing documents, playing music, Web surfing, downloading and so on. Users don't care how responsive background applications are; they care only about the ones they're actively using. So if loading a Web page takes a little longer while the user is writing an e-mail, it's an acceptable trade-off. Overall efficiency and performance are actually reduced but not in a way that annoys the user. On servers you want to minimize any and all performance hits, so turning off preemption is usually the best practice.