Archive for the ‘Open Source’ Category

December 7th, 2010

Label & Card printing resources with TeX and LaTeX

Fans of OpenOffice, Abiword, and KOffice, and Scribus dominate the open source document printing discussion, because traditional office suites and desktop publishing apps account for the lion’s share of the pages in our paper trays. But for a lot of old-school typesetters and writers, nothing in the WYSIWYG realm can hold a candle to the [...]

November 15th, 2010

An Open Source Toolkit for Your Small Business

Whether your small business has been around for years or you’re just starting out, it simply makes good sense to use open source software for everything from managing your office network to putting together slide decks for your next client presentation. Open source software is inexpensive (and often free!), secure, and easy to customize to [...]

November 10th, 2010

Finetune digiKam by Tweaking Its Settings

While you can start using digiKam without tweaking its settings, you might want to spend a few minutes modifying the application’s default configuration to make it work your way. digiKam features dozens of settings, and which ones you want to adjust is up to you. Here are a few examples to get you started. First [...]

November 8th, 2010

Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript

We recently took a look at KBarcode, GUI application for Linux desktops that lets users create and print a variety of barcode formats. But KBarcode isn’t the only option. Terry Burton’s Barcode Writer in Pure PostScript (BWIPP), which is one of the GUI app’s backends, is a fast and flexible barcode generating tool in its [...]

October 18th, 2010

Quality Printing with GIMP

In spite of Silicon Valley’s best efforts, it is still not a paperless world. On a free software desktop, this is rarely a problem, because significant work has gone into making CUPS, Foomatic, and other parts of the printing tool chain work well and integrate seamlessly into the application suite — at least, for the [...]

October 14th, 2010

Open Clip Art Library 2.6 Debuts Behind Aiki Framework 0.5

The Open Clip Art Library has seen impressive growth in 2010. Month after month, artist registrations trend higher, rich new features make their way into the interface, and the Library’s collection adds a steady stream of new and remixed clip art (now at over 35,000 unique images). October’s release is as feature-packed and content-heavy as [...]

October 14th, 2010

10 Young Open Source Projects to Watch

New open source projects launch all the time and there’s so many great ones out there it’s hard to find the diamonds in the rough. Here are 10 promising young FOSS projects to keep an eye on as their development grows. Download or use them in the meantime as they develop, they are awesome!

October 5th, 2010

50 Open Source Tools to Make Your Life Easier

The open source community is vibrant, continually growing, and just loves to create applications and tools to make lives easier. Here are 50 of our favorite open source apps that help us do everything from managing pictures on our computer to learning about Jupiter and Mars.

September 28th, 2010

Install LibreOffice on Ubuntu and Debian-based Distros

Want to install the new LibreOffice on Ubuntu or a Debian-based distribution? Although the Document Foundation doesn’t yet offer .deb binaries for these distros, you can use the provided .rpm packages to install LibreOffice on a machine running Ubuntu or Debian. To do this, you need to convert .rpm packages to .deb using the alien [...]

September 28th, 2010

Tuxpaint: hook ‘em on open source graphics while they’re young

Tuxpaint is an open source graphics program that occupies a special niche: it is designed for children. This makes it a rarity in the software community known for every developer scratching his or her own itch. Thankfully there are developers reaching out of their comfort zone to write applications for those too young to learn [...]