Tweeto’s entry, voted the most popular by both judges and community members, won him a trip to Tokyo, Japan to participate in the Linux Foundation’s Japanese Linux Symposium in October 2009.

The top three spots in the competition went to :

1. What Does It Mean To Be Free?
2. The Origin
3. Linux Pub

The judging panel for the competition included Matt Asay, CNET blogger and executive at Alfresco, venture capitalist and former chairman of VA Software Larry Augustin, Ubuntu’s community manager Jono Bacon, OpenSuse’s community manager Joe Brockmeier, School of Advertising at the Academy of Art director Melinda Mettler and O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly.

Source: Tectonic

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Zend debuts PHP Middleware stack

Sun releases VirtualBox 2.2.0: Sun Microsystems today announced the release of its VirtualBox 2.2.0 virtualisation software. VirtualBox 2.2.0 is a major release which includes one of the most anticipated features: OpenGL 3D acceleration support for Linux guests.

KDE ships KOffice 2.0 release candidate: The KDE team today announced a release candidate for its KOffice 2.0 suite. The release fixes many outstanding bugs in preparation for its final release.

Source: Tectonic

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Scribus

http://www.scribus.net
If you’re into desktop publishing then you undoubtedly know about Quark Xpress and InDesign. Both are fantastic applications. But they are also fantastically expensive to buy, which is why, if you’re not actually a design house or a newspaper publisher, you’re unlikely to ever own a legitimate copy of one of these. But if you need to publish a newsletter for your local school or hobby group and you don’t want it to look like a Microsoft Word job, then consider Scribus. It’s not InDesign but it has many of the same features of InDesign, can be setup to work using the same keyboard shortcuts and does a very respectable job of producing a print-ready publication. Despite being a relatively new application Scribus has all the essentials built in. So, for example, it produces press-ready PDFs with full and correct colour matching and profiles at a resolution good enough for high quality work. Scribus does still have a couple of rough edges but it is worthy of a look for anyone wanting to do serious looking newsletters and publications.

Gimp

http://www.gimp.org
It’s hard not to mention the Gimp when considering open source graphics applications. Gimp has always been something of a Photoshop clone and in recent versions it mimmicks Photoshop very successfully. But, while Photoshop is best suited for high-end and print publication work Gimp is better suited for Web graphics work. The main reason for this, and one of Gimp’s major failings, is that it doesn’t produce CMYK formats. And in the world of printing that is the primary requirement. This doesn’t mean you can’t print Gimp-produced graphics at your local one-stop print shop, but if you’re producing a magazine with quality images on a real printing press you’ll run into problems. Having said that Gimp is great at producing the likes of animated web images, banners and logos; basically most things you can do on Photoshop without the CMYK.

Inkscape

http://www.inkscape.org
Mention illustration programs and most people immediately think of Adobe Illustrator. Again, just like Photoshop, Illustrator is a giant of a application, but unless you’re a full-time graphic artist it’s probably not worth the money. If you want to produce good quality vector illustrations there is Inkscape, a simple but highly effective illustration package. Inkscape has all the basics in place so that vector drawings can be produced relatively quickly as well as being able to open other vector formats, convert images to paths and the like. It’s not Illustrator, but it is still remarkably versatile.

OpenClipart.org

http://www.openclipart.org
Graphics tools are all well and good but you don’t want to have to start from scratch every time you need a piece of line art to illustrate your publication. Which is where OpenClipart.org comes in handy. As its name suggests Openclipart offers exactly that: free clipart that you can use for publications. Files are available online are free and can, in most cases, be downloaded as PNG or SVG format files. The browsing feature on the site is not that user-friendly but usable. On the other hand, if you have the bandwidth you could just download the whole 300MB+ collection directly to your hard drive. The SVG format files are great for kickstarting other projects in Inkscape.

Xara Xtreme

http://www.xaraxtreme.org/
Longtime PC users may remember the origins of Xara Xtreme as CorelXARA, a proprietary vector drawing application licensed to Corel. During 2006 the makers decided to open source the code and since then have been porting a version of the application to Linux. And the work has paid off with the resulting application being blazingly fast and very much full-featured. Which makes it a very viable tool for designers to create both web and print drawings. As primarily a vector drawing program Xara Xtreme includes the usual tools such as shapes, text, bezier curves and layers but can also handle imported images such as .jpg files and export files in any number of graphic formats. Xara Xtreme also supports CMYK colour models, which makes it suitable for press use.

Blender

http://www.blender.org
Like Gimp, it’s impossible not to mention Blender in any lineup of Linux and open source graphics tools. The 3D animation package is not only free software but also widely used in the film and animation arena to create high quality productions. One such example is the The Elephant’s Dream, an open film made with free software tools and released under a Creative Commons licence. Learning to use Blender is perhaps the most challenging part but fortunately there are many fantastic tutorials available. We already mentioned The Blender Basics book in last week’s roundup of great open source books. But, thanks to readers, we also suggest the following: 25 Tutorials To Get You Started With Blender and the Blender Wiki tutorials.

Krita

http://www.koffice.org/krita/
Often overlooked because it is more part of the KOffice suite than a standalone application, Krita is still a great tool for painting and image editing. While Gimp tends to get more attention for each of its new developments, Krita is every bit Gimp’s equal, especially as it supports multiple colour profiles. Being able to handle and create CMYK colour files makes it a useful tool for print workers. Krita has a vast array of tools with which to create images as well as full layer support and a neat layout. Gimp’s animation ability and its text handling make it a better choice for some tasks, but Krita is a worthy alternative for users fond of KDE applications.

ImageMagick

http://www.imagemagick.org
ImageMagick is unlike all of the applications already mentioned. For a start it is mostly used through a command line and not through a fancy graphic interface, although there are various user interfaces for it and it underpins many of these applications. It also handles almost every imaginable file format - more than 100 at last count - and can batch process endless collections of images. Which makes it the utility knife of image editing tools when it comes to re-sizing files, converting between formats, adding features such as blur or border to files or even creating animations. As with most command line tools there is a bit of a learning curve attached to getting things going but if you process files regularly then ImageMagick will save you time. A very long list of tutorials on ImageMagick can be found here.

Source: Tectonic

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Source: Tectonic

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Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.

Source: Tectonic

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Originally written by Hiroshi Seo, the comic has now been translated by two ubuntu-jp LoCo members - Fumihito Yoshida and Hajime Mizuno - and DoctorMo into English and released.

The comic can be downloaded as a PDF (4.4MB) and there are also source files for others that want to translate the comic further.

This is not the first time comics have been used to promote open source software. Back in 2005 Schoolnet Namibia created its own series of comics, called Hai Ti!, to encourage students to use open source software.

Source: Tectonic

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Mandriva Spring 2009 RC is available in a range of formats including a DVD edition for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 systems, a choice of KDE or Gnome edition for x86-32 systems, and an ISO for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems.

These editions are shipped without any proprietary software. There is also a live edition which includes proprietary drivers.

Source: Tectonic

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Portable Ubuntu runs on Windows

IBM pulls back $7 billion Sun offer: A week after rumours first started to appear suggesting IBM was about to buy Sun Microsystems, IBM has withdrawn its $7 billion bid. Sun’s share price has soared over the past week on the back of the acquisition talks.

Open source gaming rig ready to ship: Envizions has announced that it is taking orders for an open-source Linux gaming system, and will start shipping beta units to game developers, resellers, and software partners on April 10. The EVO Smart Console is based on a 2.4GHz Athlon, and includes a Fedora-based Linux distro.

Source: Tectonic

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“If you look closely at our community, it’d be wrong to say that people are lacking a vision; but the project as a whole does indeed have this issue,” the team said in its public posting. With this in mind the team is looking at a release that will both streamline the desktop as well as revamp the overall user experience by giving users new ways of interacting with their desktop and managing files.

Central to these changes are Gnome Shell, which manages the way users open applications and manage them, and Zeitgeist, which aims to change, and make simpler, the way users find and manage files.

Gnome Shell and Zeitgeist
The team says of Gnome Shell that the idea is “not just about changing the panel and the window manager. It’s about changing the way you start an activity and how you switch between two different activities. Or more generally, how you manage your different activities on the desktop.” Gnome Shell screenshots and mockups show a substantially changed desktop appearance with desktops and menus overlaying the screen.

Likewise, Zeitgeist is an attempt to completely re-write the way that users interact with files. “Having to deal with a filesystem in their daily work is not what makes users happy - on the contrary, they generally just want to access their documents and not to browse their hard disk,” the Gnome team says. Part of the solution to the challenge, the Gnome team is hoping, is to use a combination of timelines, tags and bookmarks to create multiple ways of accessing files. This video (6.9MB) demonstrates some of the early Zeitgeist capabilities.

With more than six years of development behind it since its 2.0 launch, Gnome carries with it the legacy of years of evolving development. “New APIs have landed and some other APIs have been deprecated. There are even some platform libraries that are now nearly unused. This just creates some confusion and does not make the life of developers easy,” the team says. With a fresh new start in 3.0, the Gnome team suggests moving all of the deprecated libraries out of the platform and creating a staging area for libraries intended to be in the platform so developers are clear on intension.

Timeline
In its posting the Gnome team says it is hoping that the 3.0 release will be ready by the time 2.30 is expected to be released. New releases of Gnome are made every six months and with 2.26 now out and 2.28 planned for September, a 2.30 release should be expected in at the end of March 2010. “Making GNOME 2.30 a 3.0 version is of course still an ambitious goal, but we can achieve it thanks to what we learnt in the past,” the team says.

The team has left the door a little bit open, however, saying “of course, we should be prepared to consider the fact that GNOME 2.30 might not be good enough for us to call it 3.0. All of our time-based releases are also quality-based releases: if the QA Team feels a release should be delayed, then it will be delayed … we should not be afraid of keeping GNOME 2.30 as 2.30 and waiting for Gnome 2.32 for the 3.0 release, for example. That being said, we want the community to try as hard as possible to make ‘Gnome 2.30 = Gnome 3.0′ a success.”

Source: Tectonic

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Netbooks that the new release is known to work well on include the Asus EEE PC 900, Asus EEE PC 1000, Acer Aspire One, Samsung NC10 and the Dell Mini 9.

The beta release can be downloaded from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/9.04/beta

Source: Tectonic

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