Graphics drivers: where they are, where they come from, where they are going
I appreciate NVIDIA’s existing support for free software operating systems: their drivers are various, quite full featured, and they do upgrade the source of their minimalist free “nv” driver for those...
View ArticleDesktop diagramming with Dia and Kivio
Don't let the simplicity of use fool you. Both Kivio and Dia, two free software diagramming tools, are very efficient at what they do. If you need to design a complex flow chart or create a no-fuss UML...
View ArticleHow to fix your computer's graphics with dpkg-reconfigure
There is always a time when your GNU/Linux machine's screen output stops working. Maybe it's displaying garbage to your monitor instead of Gnome or KDE. Or maybe it's displaying 640x480 resolution with...
View ArticleSound filtering... with the Gimp!
Gimp is universally used for image manipulation. However, with a bit of creativity and a couple of tricks, it can also be used as an audio filter! Here is how...Category: End usersTagging:...
View ArticleMaking free software culture feel right
Why it should be a lot more about feeling, rather than knowing, that free software and free culture is right.Over the last ten years or so, free software has grown from being just a geek-phenomena....
View ArticleMaking eye candy for GRUB
One of the cool things about custom distributions of GNU/Linux is that they usually have better "eye-candy". However, it's not really that hard to provide your own. If you are setting up a multiple...
View ArticleFree software vector graphics applications: a guided tour
One of the more challenging application areas for free software development is computer graphics. However, there are a number of excellent and popular tools for handling them. I use graphics a lot in...
View ArticleXara LX and the leading, bleeding edge of free software graphics
The latest vector graphics package for GNU/Linux is a Linux port of a proprietary Windows application called "Xara Xtreme", which is in the process of being converted to a GPL license. There are a...
View ArticleXfig: a classic program for diagram editing
Just as there are "classic" cars that never seem to go out of style, there are some classic pieces of software that remain useful long after most of their contemporaries. One of those programs is Xfig,...
View ArticleDebian: contempt for "end user" values has to stop!
Three recent problems with packages in the last stable release of Debian GNU/Linux ("Lenny"), brought me face-to-face with what is still a major obstacle for acceptance of free software on the desktop:...
View ArticleAn Easy and Inexpensive Quad-Core System for Debian or Ubuntu GNU/Linux
My son's hand-me-down motherboard recently gave up the ghost, and I decided that was a good excuse for an upgrade. Shopping around, I found that multi-core CPUs were finally in my price range, so I...
View ArticlePainting Sound with ARSS and Gimp
As I was working on a sound track project for a science-fiction film I've been working on, I remembered reading an article in Free Software Magazine, by Gianluca Pignalberi, in which he described...
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Python Scripting in Blender: A Piece of Pie - Part 1
Since script extensions are going to be a part of our toolchain on creating Lunatics, I thought it would be a good idea to familiarize myself with how scripts are created and run in Blender. As a...
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Opening large PDF files in GNU/Linux: muPDF comes to the rescue
I was recently given an ebook by a friend. It was a photography book, with tons of hi-res images and very little text. When I opened it with Ubuntu, Evince (the default PDF viewer that comes with...
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