Articles by Jack M. Germain

Blender is such a highly specialized and powerful rendering app that at least two Linux distros are built around it. This cross-platform 3D graphics application matches features and performance of the leading commercial equivalent software packages....

Mousepad is a notepad-like graphical text editor for Xfce based on the Leafpad text editor that runs on any Linux desktop. It is very handy as a go-to tool when you do not have any heavy lifting to do....

The latest release earlier this month of the K Desktop Environment, or KDE, is a solid upgrade that could very well win back the hearts and fingers of Linux users who wandered off to other, less powerful desktop shells. I am particularly impressed with its smooth integration into the dedicated KDE distribution in Linux Mint 13.

The latest incarnation of the XFCE desktop proves once again that when you delve into the wonders of the Linux OS, something old definitely becomes something new again.

Dia is an editor for diagrams, graphs and charts. It is the perfect tool to use for explaining a process or procedure in a concise, standardized visual representation....

WinFF is one of the simplest methods I have found to convert audio and video file formats to make them compatible on my growing collection of mobile media platforms. Unlike other excellent single-purpose media converters for the Linux desktop, WinFF can convert any mix of multiple selected file formats as easily as performing a batch operation in ...

TreeLine is a unique information manager that combines the characteristics of both a traditional outliner and a PIM (Personal Information Manager). Use it to stow away contact information, bookmarks, text snippets, bibliography, task lists, or whatever else you track or catalog.

GanttProject is an impressive project management tool that can be a useful alternative to similar applications locked onto other OS platforms. For enterprise and small-business users, GanttProject's cross-platform access and easy data portability make it a winning choice for Linux users....

Pinta, a raster image editor, is the app equivalent of a diamond in the rough. Years of testing and reviewing open source and commercial software taught me never to assume that a relatively new application is not worthy of attention....

7-Zip and p7Zip belong to a family of file compression utilities that are among the best available for Linux/Unix. So you would think that the development communities would offer to Linux users what is available in similar compression apps on the Windows and Mac platforms. Think again!...

No matter how much you change your desktop background image and switch distro themes, staring at the same computer's screen day in and day out can become humdrum. Conky can be used to decorate the desktop in endless ways and provide a stream of useful system monitors in the process....

Linux Feed Reader, aka "Liferea," is part of a highly specialized category of apps. It is an aggregator for online news feeds, weblogs and podcasts. As such, it provides a tool for pulling into one spot an eclectic collection of your newsfeed content so you do not have to go to each separate source....

Linux Mint 13, the Maya release, is an impressive upgrade that builds on the progress found in version 12. It contains few additional innovations to the operating system. But it updates numerous core elements and provides more solid performance from the two new desktop interfaces introduced in Mint 12.Linux Mint 13 offers one of the best alternati...

Few things scare me more than disk partitioning and GRUB configuration software. Both of those chores involve knowledge about hard drive operations and a good slice of luck. And both can render a computer unbootable with one slight user error. So discovering the latest version of Grub Customizer helped lower my anxiety levels considerably....

Whether you are writing code or creating editorial content, a noisy computing environment often can silence your productivity. The Pyroom Text Editor gives you a quiet environment where computing noise cannot distract you from your creativity....

The Internet is a hub for acquiring music, video and a just about anyother form of content. Miro is one of the most capable player apps thatI have seen for all of this media.

The latest edition of Canonical's Ubuntu 12.04 desktop operating system shows considerable maturity. Precise Pangolin is built around the default Unity interface with an optional Heads Up Display (HUD) designed to keep hands on the keys rather than constantly interrupting the work flow by grabbing the mouse....

Music lovers have numerous strong choices for organizing and playing their collections of songs on the Linux desktop. But music creators have far fewer professional-strength options among Linux applications. With Linux MultiMedia Studio, or LMMS, though, one option may be all you really need....

Sometimes too much of a good thing in free software can create bad impressions. For instance, some of the free stuff so easily available in Linux distro package managers is so archaic that newcomers to the OS might understandably shriek in horror.

Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide by Wale Soyinka is a hands-on manual for IT staffers who must dance with Windows and Linux. It is a practical guide for network admins who deploy and maintain Linux and other free and open source software (FOSS) In this Sixth Edition opus, Soyinka provides an extensive update on the latest Linux distros. His...