Blender Institute, part of the Blender Foundation, made another animated open content film entitled Big Buck Bunny. The short movie is created using only free and open source software.

The GNU diff and patch utilities let you compare files to generate a patch that describes the changes between files. You can then apply the patch file on that machine or another. You might think to use diff and patch on XML files, since they are just text files -- and depending on your application, diff and patch might serve your needs well.

Note-taking applications are far from scarce on GNU/Linux desktops. If your needs are simple, you can use KNotes in KDE or Sticky Notes in GNOME. However, by far the most versatile note-taking application is KDE's Basket, a tool so flexible and complete that you might prefer to think of it as a personal wiki, a producer of scrapbooks, or even a creator of temporary desktops.

According to Gianpiero Morbello Acer, Acer's VP of Marketing and Brand:

"We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft. "

KDE 4.0.5 comes with several bugfixes, performance improvements and translation updates. KDE continues to release updates for the 4.0 desktop on a monthly basis. KDE 4.1, which will bring large improvements to the KDE desktop and applications will be released in July this year.

Pat Volkerding and the Slackware team released the latest version of Slackware Linux, 12.1, on May 2. Even though it is a "point one" release, the list of new features reads like what other distributions would consider a major new version. Slackware 12.1 features the latest KDE 3.5.9, Xfce 4.4.2, and a number of improvements, especially to udev.

When I make videos, I almost always use Ogg to encode the audio. Storing the audio in Ogg saves space on my machine without sacrificing quality. However, I invariably need to loop, concatenate, or change the audio in some way, which can be difficult. For many of these tasks I turn to the OGMtools suite to make the process easier.

For those not already in the know, gNewSense is a distribution based upon Ubuntu. The aim of the distro is to strip Ubuntu of all non-free software components and offer a completely ‘pure’ free software distribution to those who wish for it. This new 2.0 release is based upon the recent Ubuntu Hardy Heron version, as the announcement states.