In this week's article I'll bring you up-to-date on what's happening with some of the many exciting developments in the world of Linux audio software, with recent news regarding the JOST plugin host, the Audacity soundfile editor, and the new LV2 native Linux plugin standard.

There are a lot of great sound-related applications for Linux, from basic audio drivers and sound servers to sophisticated mixers, editors, and special effects engines. Which is not much consolation for the user who just wants sound to work on her system, and these days everything old is new again--once again, getting sound to work correctly, or at all, is almost as fun as in the olden days.

One of the biggest things that bothers me about Linux today is how it continues to fail at gaining any decent ground against Microsoft. Sure, it's gained ground against Windows at a steady rate over the past number of years and stands to grow for quite some time into the future, but the progress has been painfully slow. By now, Linux should be kicking in Microsoft's door, stormtrooper style.

For the past six years or so, my office productivity suite of choice has been OpenOffice.org. In that time, I've watched the suite progress slowly but steadily toward the goal of being "just as good" as Microsoft Office.

In this week's KDE Commit-Digest: Plasma continues to mature, with improvements to the Twitter applet (and the creation of a complementary data engine), and the adoption of a common visual style for Plasmoids, and the integration of support for SuperKaramba applets through the creation of the SuperKaramba Plasmoid.

It's not usually a big deal, getting sound working in Linux or BSD. In my case, however, my laptop's internal sound module is dead, and I've substituted a USB sound module from DealExtreme.com that costs about $2. It works, but it can be hard to get a given distribution to pipe the sound there rather than to the dead internal sound system.

I found a useful sound effect in an online video from NASA which replaces an earlier temporary sound I used in a scene soundtrack for the Lunatics pilot, "No Children in Space." I'm going to extract the sound from the video (with VLC), cut out the sound I need, clean it up, and insert it into an existing sound mix (all with Audacity).

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Linux adoption has increased manifold in India. Several government bodies, private firms and SMEs have been the big takers of Linux platform.