Articles by Jack M. Germain

Chakra is an unusual Linux distro that rethinks what the Linux desktop should be. It gives users the tools to do it their way.

Kona, an innovative social networking platform for businesses and organizations, was launched in late 2012. It grew out of a vision developer Scott DeFusco had for a way to solve communications issues shared in peoples' business and social lives. ...

Synapse is a desktop utility that adds speed and convenience to finding files and launching applications. It does not eliminate the Linux distro's menu, favorites bar or panel icons. Instead, it cuts down on how often you resort to using them....

Founded in 2010 by trading technology experts, OpenFin is growing on the heels of HTML5 standards edging out ill-fitting older Web solutions. Built onto an open source platform, OpenFin Desktop helps financial institutions to bridge the security gaps in their outdated Web-browser technology ...

If you package e-books in the EPUB format, one of the handiest editing tools available is Sigil....

Mentioning open source to a typical consumer will no doubt result in puzzled looks or a reference to that "free stuff." Even in some business circles, the open source concept may only be synonymous with an alternative computer operating system known as Linux On the software development side of the computing industry, however, open source is known f...

The creators ofNirvana Editor, or NEdit for short, consider it paradise for writers. I found, however, that it's not yet the perfect text editor....

Puppy Linux is a distro I keep coming back to. No matter how entrenched I become with any flavor of Ubuntu -- sans the Unity desktop -- or Linux Mint's Cinnamon and KDE desktops, nothing can beat the speed, convenience and reliability of Puppy Linux on a stick Boot it directly from a hard drive or from an external drive; either method is fast and c...

Blender Master Class: A Hands-On Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Renderingby Ben SimondsNo Starch PressFebruary 2013, 288 pp., w/DVDUS$49.95 Print Book and FREE Ebook$39.95 Ebook (PDF, Mobi, and ePub)...

If you subscribe to the view, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," perhaps Fuduntu is the Linux distro most ideal to your computing needs....

OpenGammais the developer of the first open source analytics and risk management platform for the financial services industry. Its products help companies explore flexible open source alternatives to conventional and costly risk analytics tools The OpenGamma Platform is a unified system for front office and risk calculations for financial services ...

Fedora 18, dubbed "the Spherical Cow," was finally released on Jan. 15 after seven postponements that stretched two months beyond its scheduled six-month release cycle. Despite some noteworthy improvements overall to the operating system, I found little about Fedora 18 to justify adopting it over other Linux distros or upgrading to it from an earlier version...

The ZE Rescue Diskis a very handy rescue tool to fix damaged or missing hard drive sectors that prevent a computer from booting into its operating system. It runs automatically as a boot-repair rescue tool at startup from the optical drive....

eScholar's only business is helping state and local education agencies get the best bang for their buck from collecting and using educational data to drive better school performance results That sometimes involves helping its customers work with data gleaned from a variety of commercial and open-source enterprise databases. Other times, it becomes ...

Linux lacks any clear-cut system for determining which is the most popular or the best distribution, or which desktop environment is used more than others. That may be one of the major frustrations among Linux developers trying to spread the word about adopting the Linux desktop instead of Microsoft Windows or Apple's OS X. Linux, like the countle...

Wink, developed by Satish Kuma, is a software package for creating tutorial and presentation screen shots. It works reasonably well -- when it works at all. However, getting it to run may not be worth the bother, given the better alternatives available. Wink's premise is a good one for anyone who needs to create a show-and-explain presentation on...

Are you looking for a reliable virtualization package to run multiple virtual machines that handle unmodified Linux or Windows images? Then look no further than your existing Linux configuration. It already has the underpinnings to support Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)....

In 1996, two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, created a unique search engine called "BackRub" that ran on the school's server. After one year, BackRub's bandwidth outgrew the university's needs. Its creators rebranded BackRub into Google, a respelled reference to "googol." It is a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros...

OpenArtist is an infant Linux distribution that holds impressive promise for users heavily involved in graphic productivity. Based on Ubuntu 12.04, openArtist is infused with audio, 2D and 3D graphics, and video production tools, plus Blender software ...

You could call Ian Sefferman's initial rise to CEO of MobileDevHQ a bootstrap career move. Seeing the rapid growth of consumer interest in mobile apps, he jumped into an infant industry to learn what would push it forward. His interests fell on a gaping opportunity He focused not on business as a fledgling mobile applications developer. Instead, he...