Among advanced open source graphics tools, GIMP has a lot of fans, and there are many free online resources available for it, but if you're looking for a drawing and illustration tool that can compete with Adobe Illustrator and is especially good for logos and splashy still graphics, give Inkscape a try.

One of the best and the most widely used graphics tool for linux is GIMP , the GNU Image Manipulation Program. This GIMP is a full featured image editing program with many menus, tools and filters.

My granddaughter has been sitting on my lap at the computer since before she could even hold herself up. She was only a few months old when she became interested in the mouse and began learning to place the cursor on the screen. A friend of mine laughed at us and stated that I'd "have her compiling kernels by the time she was three."

Allow me to introduce the software that will change graphics on the Linux desktop forever. the Linux graphics toolkit has been missing one crucial tool: a way to quickly render human models, similar to the commercial, proprietary Poser. Well, we've got that now.

Inkscape is an open source vector graphics editor, similar to Illustrator or Xara. It uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. It's capable of creating objects with a variety of drawing, shape and text tools. You can edit previously created objects with scale, gradients, masks, and filtered effects.

For January and February, we chose some of the staples of open source security (GnuPG and Nmap) as the tool of the month. And deservedly so; both have just celebrated their ten-year anniversary in the open source realm, a rare feat for any open source project, much less one founded on security.

Software development company Loohuis Consulting and process management consultancy OpenDawn have released a new binary analysis tool that is designed to detect Linux and BusyBox in binary firmware. The program, which is freely available for download, is intended to aid open source license compliance efforts.

Security company Qualys has released a new open source tool, 'BlindElephant', which can accurately fingerprint web applications down to version level in order to better manage the security issues which now plague such software. According to the company, the need for such a tool is pressing.

A former assistant professor from Harvard, now at UofW, Dr. William Stein, and several students, have created a new open-source complex math solving tool called Sage. It is an Internet-based graphical tool which allows the user to do basically anything mathematically, from "mapping a 12-dimensional object to calculating rainfall patterns under global warming."