The future of OpenOffice.org

  • October 4, 2010
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    Peter
    Upfold

OpenOffice.org logo

Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems has been the cause of some uncertainty and concern for the open source projects and initiatives that Sun were previously responsible for. Oracle are not known for being particularly welcoming or supportive of FOSS — and with the relatively high profile OpenSolaris project being cancelled soon after the acquisition, much of that concern appears justified.

Attention has therefore turned to OpenOffice.org, the premier open …

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Blender’s Durian Open Movie Project Premieres “Sintel”

  • October 2, 2010
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    Peter
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Sintel banner

Yesterday, the Durian Open Movie Project premiered Sintel, a short animation film produced independently by the Blender Foundation and licensed under a Creative Commons licence.

What makes this film (and previous Blender films, Big Buck Bunny and Elephant’s Dream) special, is that they are designed, produced and rendered completely with free and open source software. All of the ‘source’ files of the movie — including all of the …

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Quick Reference — Converting Images with ImageMagick

  • July 28, 2010
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    Peter
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ImageMagick logo

While you might associate working with images with big graphical programs like GIMP or Photoshop, ImageMagick is an entirely different animal. It is a suite of command-line programs for converting and manipulating images.

But why would you use a command line program to work with images, which are by definition, graphical? Well, for a start, you don’t have to load up a slow (and dare I say bloated) graphical app …

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Getting to Grips with GRUB 2

  • July 14, 2010
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    Peter
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GRUB to GRUB 2 graphic

For a long time, the Grand Unified Bootloader, or GRUB, has been the standard way of getting a PC to boot into your Linux, or other Unix operating system. The flexibility offered by GRUB makes it easy to dual boot, triple boot… well, actually, do pretty much what you want in terms of installing operating systems on your own computer.

The newer versions of Ubuntu (from 9.10) and their …

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