Using actors and messages, concurrency is easier to understand. However, most developers don't want to learn a new programming language in order to use actors and messages. If you want to forget a bit about threads and locks, you can add nice actor support to an existing Java application using Jetlang.

A home-cooked Microsoft license has carved out a small but growing following among the open-source community in less than two years.

So I have a laptop that I've been upgrading since Hardy (currently on Karmic Alpha) that I would like to boot faster. It has probably accumulated a lot of crufty daemons along the way that probably aren't being pre-loaded into memory. I picked up this tidbit from the fast boot expert. Add profile to your kernel command-line (at the grub prompt, press Esc e and then edit the line).

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc.-sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, has announced the availability of Fedora 11, the latest version of its free open source operating system.

For me the the best free media player for Windows and Linux is mplayer. It is not only a very fast player, but it also offers a ton of advanced options.

For those who are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you will notice that there is a change in the way the system notifies you to upgrade software. In the past, an icon will appear on the system tray whenever there is new update available. In Ubuntu Jaunty, instead of showing the icon, the update manager will now pop up the window as and when it detects new update.

Great graphics, fast and addictive. Works well on GNU/Linux.

On the 15th of May 2009 the Modartt company announced the release of version 3.0.3 of their award-winning Pianoteq, a professional-quality digital keyboard instrument created by an audio synthesis method known as physical modeling. The program is vastly praised by its users, but in order to feel the love you've had to run a Windows machine or a Mac box. Until now, that is.