Geany is a lightweight text editor for Linux based on the GTK2 toolkit. Geany supports internal and external plugins, and it excels as a source code editor, since it includes basic integrated development environment (IDE) functionality. Here's an introduction to using Geany's built-in features, including the IDE and built-in development capabilities.

In 2005, Alfresco was the first open source software company in the UK to capture venture funding, for its collection of enterprise document management applications. John Powell, formerly the COO of Business Objects, and John Newton, founder of Documentum, got together to launch Alfresco because they wanted to create a business that would have "global reach," according to Powell.

Nokia released version 4.1 of it's Linux-based Internet Tablet platform Maemo last month. 4.1 is a minor update to the operating system, but it boasts two important features that answer long-held complaints: an improved open source email client, and migration to a package updating system more like that of a desktop Linux distribution.

At a time when graphical DVD rippers and encoders propose to make the backing up of your movies just a click away, a text-based application may actually be the best tool for the job.

I ran Ubuntu for about a month. It is a very nice distribution. Everything worked very smoothly. I had no real problems with it. I’m not going to use it any more.

I saw over on Linux Planet that Sidux, another Debian derivative, has been born. It never ceases to amaze me at how needless some of the open-source community's development efforts are. Did we really need yet another Linux distribution?

I CAME quite late to the Fluxbox party, and now I am here I wish I had arrived earlier. Fluxbox is a lightweight window manager for the X window system used by Linux distributions. When I say “lightweight”, I mean it is not resource-hungry like, say, the KDE and GNOME desktop environments, and that once it is installed on your machine and configured properly, it is both stable and very quick.

Previously, I introduced my theory of the Difficulty Divide. It’s a concept that I’ve used for several years when talking about why I use Linux, and why some people may give up on it. I also promised that I would present on how I’ve modified it in recent years to reflect the current state of things. Before I do that though, I think some clarification is in order.