Ubuntu Studio bills itself as the "multimedia creation flavor of Ubuntu," an official Ubuntu project "aimed at the GNU/Linux audio, video, and graphic enthusiast as well as professional." It is certainly flashy on the outside -- even if it is mostly the same Ubuntu Linux distro under the hood.

Portable applications can come in handy when you are on the move, but there are situations when using them is not an option. For instance, before you connect an external hard disk or a USB stick to a public computer, you have to ask permission. More importantly, even if you get permission, you can never be sure what kind of nasty viruses and malware you will be getting on your storage device. But why bother with portable applications at all when you can have your very own Web-based operating system bundled with a few essential applications? That's the promise of eyeOS -- an impressive and surprisingly useful open source Web-based OS.

According to a message posted over the weekend on the Full-Disclosure mailing list, the latest version of Firefox, 2.0.0.5, contains a password management vulnerability that can allow malicious Web sites to steal user passwords. If you have JavaScript enabled and allow Firefox to remember your passwords, you are at risk from this flaw.

In our house, the refrigerator door is where we post the family calendar, showing our family and friends' birthdays, school terms, and important events, along with public holidays. We create the calendar using a nifty command-line program called PCAL, which produces a standard one-month-per-page calendar with each day in a separate box. It resembles those mall-stall calendars, but the important dates in our family's life are highlighted. Visit Linux.com to see all of our great content.

Supergamer is a unique Linux distribution whose primary focus is on fun -- specifically, gaming. Supergamer VL, now based on VectorLinux, is all new, with additional games, new code base, and new look and feel. Let the games begin. Visit Linux.com to see all of our great content.

In the last two months I've been traveling a lot. During the same period my main desktop computer went belly up. I would have been in trouble without rsync at my disposal -- but thanks to my regular use of this utility, my data (or most of it, anyway) was already copied offsite just waiting to be used. It takes a little time to become familiar with rsync, but once you are, you should be able to handle most of your backup needs with just a short script.

Knowledge of a secondary language has long been a coveted skill, whether it be for academics, business, or travel, but learning another language can be a challenging task. While many Western languages at least offer a level of familiarity by sharing the Roman alphabet, Japanese and other Eastern languages offer no such comfort. Here are three applications that can help you overcome some learning roadblocks.

I stumbled across an interesting and useful tool recently called dzen, a "general purpose messaging and notification program" written by Rob Manea. Basically, dzen provides an instant-on/instant-off pop-up terminal window, along with a multitude of options that allow you to run just about any command.

Synfig is a 2-D animation program that uses vector graphics. Although it has only just released version 0.61.06-1, it is already approaching early maturity, with enough tools and innovations that professionals might seriously consider using it. The only real question about its future is the minor one of whether the developers can learn the difference between practical and merely arbitrary changes in standard interfaces and tools.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is scheduled to mark the official release of the third version of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) today at noon with a ceremony in its Boston office that features a lunch for local free software activists and the announcement of several GNU projects switching to the new license. Richard M. Stallman, FSF's president and founder, plans to repeat remarks about why developers should move to GPLv3. Video coverage of the ceremony is slated to be available from the FSF Web site.

The opening day of the 9th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) began with Jonathan Corbet, of Linux Weekly News and his now familiar annual Linux Kernel Report, and wrapped up with a reception put on by Intel where they displayed hardware prototypes for upcoming products.

I've been a fan of SimplyMEPIS for years. The distribution was one of the early pioneers in the field of user-friendly Linux development, and to this day offers a system that usually "just works." Earlier this month the MEPIS site announced a community variation for older computers based on SimplyMEPIS. AntiX is an installable live CD that features a modern kernel, recent X server, and lighter applications for use on computers with as little as 64MB RAM. I tried it, and liked what I found.

At last week's DebConf 7 Debian Conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, nearly 400 attendees had a chance to meet and socialise after years of working together online. They attended more than 100 talks and events, ranging from an update by the current and former Debian Project Leaders to a group trip to the Isle of Bute, off the opposite coast of the country.

Why bother using a dedicated FTP client when you can use FireFTP? This nifty extension turns Firefox into a full-fledged FTP tool, so you can transfer files back and forth without leaving the browser. FireFTP offers all the features you'd expect from a decent FTP client.

Earlier this week we launched a revamped version of Linux.com that combines the best of NewsForge and Linux.com, along with new features such as forums and introductory material for new Linux users. Please visit Linux.com for the latest news and features. We're briefly bringing back NewsForge in order to iron out some outstanding issues, but we'll soon be redirecting NewsForge to the new site. Thanks to all our readers for your attention and your comments.

The Avon and Somerset Constabulary in Great Britain uses animations created with the open source tool Blender to help citizens understand how to protect their vehicles and possessions from theft.

Jack Dorsey wants to change the way people communicate on the Internet. Are you used to updating your blog once every 24 hours? If Dorsey has his way, you'll soon be thinking about lots of tiny blog posts from wherever you are, whenever you want. Dorsey, a former software developer for a courier and dispatch service, is the founder and CEO of Twitter.com, a social networking Web site with a twist: in the clipped style of a taxi drivers radioing a status report to the dispatcher, Twitter users post mini-updates throughout the day and night to let friends (and the world) know the minute details of what they're doing.

Reinstalling your operating system is never a fun or welcome task, but sometimes it's unavoidable. Restoring settings and downloaded applications after installing an operating system can take quite a bit of time, so I've come up with a shell script to make things a bit easier.

Poster presentations are a common way of presenting results, proposing strategies, and explaining concepts and methods. You can create nifty poster presentations with Scribus, the free desktop publishing tool.

Twice a week, Dr. Alain Empain drives his car away from his solar-paneled home in the Belgian countryside, then parks and boards a train that an hour and 10 minutes later will take him to a bus, which half an hour later will take him a small village called Meise and to his job as a botanist with Belgium's National Botanic Garden, where since the early 1990s he has been a persistent pioneer of open source software.

Hewlett-Packard released version 4 of its Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) software this month. LinuxCOE is a front end to a set of Perl scripts that helps administrators by building customized install images for various Linux distributions. The idea is to simplify the process of installing and maintaining several Linux systems irrespective of the distribution on any one particular system. The new version streamlines the process of maintaining Linux installations created using LinuxCOE.

WordNet is one of the best English language references available, but its command-line and rather primitive graphical interfaces don't really do it justice. WordNet would greatly benefit from a graphical front-end similar to Visual Thesaurus that allows you to view and explore the connections between different words. Fortunately, there is a tool that does exactly that.

Mote Marine Lab in Sarasota, Fla., has enjoyed great success with its Google Maps-based beach conditions reporting system. Covering the six public beaches of Sarasota county and operational for eight months, the system receives 1,200 hits per day and is regularly mentioned by local media. Pleased with the publicity, Mote scientists made plans to expand the coverage to Manatee and Collier counties. What they didn't realize was that the original design didn't provide easy access for a small but significant portion of the public: people who don't own computers.

Computers can make your life easier, but you may not think so if you use more than one and like to keep your workspace the same across them. For instance, if you browse the Web, switching to another computer is a hassle. Where are your bookmarks? What was your password again? What was that URL you were looking at yesterday? Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension that can help.

I've been using OpenWrt on my Linksys router for a year or so. I take it for granted -- I ignore it because it just works. But back at X-Wrt.org, which is a related project, not a competitor to OpenWrt, developers have been busy creating a new user interface that both extends OpenWrt and makes it easier to use.

Ten years ago, when Metadot founder and CEO Daniel Guermeur was working for a large technology company, he discovered that the Web-based content management systems he was developing were too complicated for his customers, who kept saying they needed a Web-based portal application that was easy to learn and easy to use. Guermeur wanted to provide that, but he was stymied by the closed aspect of the technologies he was developing with: with no access to the source code and long waits for product upgrades from vendors, it would be too slow and expensive to roll out more efficient solutions. So Guermeur started looking at open source.

The RPM Package Manager (RPM), fundamental to an array of Linux distributions and the Linux Standard Base specification, has been on uncertain ground as a project in recent years. The versions of the utility shipped by the various RPM-based distros have slowly branched off in different directions, leading in some cases to stagnation. Longtime RPM maintainer Jeff Johnson took a big step this month toward revitalizing the application by relaunching rpm5.org, a site dedicated to reassembling the divergent RPM developer community and putting together a unified plan for future development.

All modern operating systems are able to run many programs at the same time. For example, a typical Linux server might include a Web server, an email server, and probably a database service. Each of these programs runs as a separate process. What do you do if one of your services stops working? Here are some handy command-line tools for managing processes.

The Baylor College Human Neuroimaging Lab (HNL) uses Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to record and research brain activity. The fMRI scans human brains at work, detecting areas of greater blood flow that indicate which part of the brain is active as subjects perform a variety of activities. The data flows from the scanners to a high-performance 32-node CentOS cluster to be analyzed and returned to researchers in statistical form. HNL Systems Administrator Justin King is a big fan of open source software and frequently writes his own applications when he can't find what he needs in the community. King also takes advantage of commercial open source projects.

I run a Postfix-based mail server that services a few hundred users with an average load of a couple of thousand legitimate messages a day -- but thanks to spam, the actual load on the server is much higher. I use Realtime Blackhole Lists (RBL) and Distributed Checksum Clearninghouse (DCC) clients on Postfix and SpamAssassin to reduce the impact of spam.

When you power on your computer, the first software that runs is a bootloader that invokes the computer's operating system. GRUB, the GRand Unified Bootloader, is an integral part of many Linux systems. It starts the Linux kernel. Here's some background on GRUB, and some tips on installing and configuring the software.

The press release started with the words, "Answering the call for an open source option from Information Technology professionals, Intuit Inc. (Nasdaq: INTU) announced today that businesses will soon be able to operate QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions® from Linux servers. It is the first time the company has made one of its products available to users of open source systems." Except QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions itself is not now and may never be open source. And even though a Linux version of the server software is now available for Linux, you will still need Windows on your desktops to use it.

I find myself not browsing the Web as much as I used to, thanks to Liferea, a Linux-based aggregator for online news feeds.

Turbolinux's Linux-based wizpy music player is a beautiful device. It's slick, black, and slightly smaller than the smallest cell phones. Unfortunately, its value and functionality doesn't live up to its good looks.

The top leader of Linuxchix resigned yesterday in the midst of a controversy over her leadership style. In a statement released to all Linuxchix mailing lists, coordinator Mary Gardiner said her decision was a difficult one, but because of a "mismatch in goals, LinuxChix should be run by someone with a better relationship with its current (implicit) goals."

"Do you offer a program like Microsoft Publisher?" Some version of this question appears regularly on the OpenOffice.org mailing lists. Many people automatic answer "no," and say that Scribus is more suitable for desktop publishing. But, in fact, OpenOffice.org boasts two mid-level layout programs -- Draw and Writer -- each of which is far more versatile than its name suggests.

OpenOffice.org released its first native packages for Mac OS X this week. These "development snapshots" aren't intended for end users, but are still an important milestone in porting the productivity suite to the Mac.

Newly released VMware Workstation 6 has lots of new features and improvements to ease collaboration between the host and guest operating systems. Add to that improved support for USB devices and rock solid performance and VMware Workstation 6 easily outshines competition and justifies its $189 price tag.

The OpenWengo project recently released version 2.1 of its WengoPhone VoIP softphone. It's a big step forward for Linux users.

For IT managers researching software purchases, the Internet is both a blessing and a curse. While there is an abundance of information available on virtually every piece of software on the market, knowing which software -- or whose -- to trust is part skill and part luck. The process is also difficult because typical software review Web sites don't allow users to customize search criteria based on their unique needs, so Internet-based research is often painstaking and sometimes fruitless. Nicolas Vandenberghe, founder and CEO of the new site ITerating, hopes to ease the pain of software comparison shopping by blending the usefulness of user reviews with the power of wiki-based search functionality.