In the closing days of 2007, open source voice-over-IP (VoIP) project WengoPhone found itself without a sponsor. The project's creator and underwriter, Wengo, announced it was halting its support after more than three years of development. Fortunately, longtime contributor MBDSYS offered to take over maintainership of the project, and has begun the transition, setting out a roadmap and reinvigorating the developer base.

Brilliant Brainstorms will be a weekly-ish summary of some of the best brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. In the beginning it may not always come exactly once a week or on the same day, but, if it becomes popular, it should become more regular.

The Philippine government's official weather service, PAGASA, has replaced its SGI supercomputer with a clustered Debian Linux system that can process information vital to protection against typhoons, floods, droughts, tsunamis and other wild weather conditions at a fraction of the cost.

Amarok is a popular audio player under Linux. It can manage external storage devices, transfer music to your iPod, display lyrics, and play various formats. Although Amarok supports scripts to extend its functionality, not many users know about the powerful features that these simple plugins can provide.

One of the great new features in Fedora 8 is the inclusion of the PulseAudio sound server. PulseAudio allows multiple streams of audio to be played at once, eliminating the worry of having your sound card locked up by another running program. There's also a handy volume control applet that will let you set the volume of each audio stream independently. That's right folks, listen to your MP3s, watch (and listen!) to a YouTube video, and voice chat with your IM buddies, all at the same time and with independent control over each program's volume. Setting up PulseAudio is very easy. Read on for instructions.

"M6-IT, a Community Interest Community in the UK, are part way through a project to equip socially excluded families with computers running Xubuntu. I was recently able to interview Richard Rothwell of M6-IT about this project and its progress..."

GTK+ has come a long way. From its humble beginnings as “The GIMP ToolKit”, it is now used in a plethora of applications. In fact, GTK+ is very popular. GNOME, one of the leading desktop environment on Unix systems, uses GTK+ almost exclusively. The Gimp is built upon GTK+, of course. And there are many commercial software developers like Adobe, NVidia and VMware that decided to use it as a base for their products.

Here I’m running Dreamweaver 8 and Photoshop CS2 on Ubuntu. No tweaking or hacking needed. Just double clicked the exe files