Articles by Jack M. Germain

The Calligra Suite is an unusual compilation of office tools with much potential -- but it has a good deal of maturing to do before it can advance beyond its mediocre performance following a debut almost three years ago.

Oracle's proprietary posture may have soiled the welcome mat and vilified its good standing in the FOSS community as CEO Larry Ellison has pushed the balance point between servicing his customers and nickel-and-diming them to turn a higher profit. Clearly, since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems -- and with it OpenOffice and Java -- the company has not acted very neighborly with open source developers.

If you fancy game playing, the latest release of the Mageia Linux OS will be a fun experience. Even if you never open a game, Mageia 2 is a solid distribution well suited to newcomers and seasoned Linux users alike.Mageia is a fork of the now defunct Mandriva distro. It was developed by a team of former employees of the France-based company that f...

Ubuntu Made Easy: A Project-Based Introduction to LinuxBy Rickford Grant with Phil BullJuly 2012, 480 pp.ISBN: 978-1-59327-425-2$34.95 Print Book with free Ebook$27.95 Ebook (PDF, Mobi, and ePub) Ubuntu is one of the most popular and user-friendly Linux operating systems you will find. That said, Ubuntu can be intimidating and frustrating to comput...

Zorin Linux 6.0 is a very capable replacement operating system for Microsoft Windows. It is also a bother-free alternative to other Linux distros that suffer from the usability issues of the Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity desktop interfaces.The Zorin Linux distro is an offshoot of Canonical's Ubuntu Linux but it has much more of the look and feel of Linu...

One of the stumbling blocks in migrating to the Linux desktop is the mistaken view that you can't take it with you. Your data must remain captive to the Microsoft operating system. Not true at all A related misconception that stalls many Windows users from adopting the Linux OS is the belief that when you buy a new computer or install Linux to an e...

The VectorLinux distro does an impressive job of blending a traditional Linux environment with the performance of other more mainstream offerings.VectorLinux is not a newcomer to the Linux desktop world. Despite its more than 10 years in development, this distro is not as well known as other Linux choices....

SolusOS is a relatively new Linux distribution that is attracting considerable interest as an alternative to unpopular desktop replacements for traditional Linux user interfaces. It has much to offer Linux users who reject the Gnome 3 desktop and find little appeal from the KDE and Unity desktop environments.It also provides Linux newcomers from t...

Blender is such a highly specialized and powerful rendering app that at least two Linux distros are built around it. This cross-platform 3D graphics application matches features and performance of the leading commercial equivalent software packages....

Mousepad is a notepad-like graphical text editor for Xfce based on the Leafpad text editor that runs on any Linux desktop. It is very handy as a go-to tool when you do not have any heavy lifting to do....

The latest release earlier this month of the K Desktop Environment, or KDE, is a solid upgrade that could very well win back the hearts and fingers of Linux users who wandered off to other, less powerful desktop shells. I am particularly impressed with its smooth integration into the dedicated KDE distribution in Linux Mint 13.

The latest incarnation of the XFCE desktop proves once again that when you delve into the wonders of the Linux OS, something old definitely becomes something new again.

Dia is an editor for diagrams, graphs and charts. It is the perfect tool to use for explaining a process or procedure in a concise, standardized visual representation....

WinFF is one of the simplest methods I have found to convert audio and video file formats to make them compatible on my growing collection of mobile media platforms. Unlike other excellent single-purpose media converters for the Linux desktop, WinFF can convert any mix of multiple selected file formats as easily as performing a batch operation in ...

TreeLine is a unique information manager that combines the characteristics of both a traditional outliner and a PIM (Personal Information Manager). Use it to stow away contact information, bookmarks, text snippets, bibliography, task lists, or whatever else you track or catalog.

GanttProject is an impressive project management tool that can be a useful alternative to similar applications locked onto other OS platforms. For enterprise and small-business users, GanttProject's cross-platform access and easy data portability make it a winning choice for Linux users....

Pinta, a raster image editor, is the app equivalent of a diamond in the rough. Years of testing and reviewing open source and commercial software taught me never to assume that a relatively new application is not worthy of attention....

7-Zip and p7Zip belong to a family of file compression utilities that are among the best available for Linux/Unix. So you would think that the development communities would offer to Linux users what is available in similar compression apps on the Windows and Mac platforms. Think again!...

No matter how much you change your desktop background image and switch distro themes, staring at the same computer's screen day in and day out can become humdrum. Conky can be used to decorate the desktop in endless ways and provide a stream of useful system monitors in the process....

Linux Feed Reader, aka "Liferea," is part of a highly specialized category of apps. It is an aggregator for online news feeds, weblogs and podcasts. As such, it provides a tool for pulling into one spot an eclectic collection of your newsfeed content so you do not have to go to each separate source....