Sourceforge: The home of open source software

Sourceforge is an excellent repository of free software for Windows, Linux, MacOS and even Android. All the software is open source, meaning that the source code is also made available for other programmers to edit. This provides for a collaborative approach to software development.

Sourceforge hosts a number of well-known application, including VLC media player, Audacity sound editor, and Pidgin IM. It also provides Games, Educational, and Science & Engineering software. So go and browse the directory of software to see whether there is anything that you may like.

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How to show unread messages in Gmail

Apologies for not posting in a while. I thought that I would share this short and sweet post for those who want to list only unread messages in Gmail. Simply enter label:unread in the search bar, and press Enter or click the magnifying glass button.

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How to install Ubuntu - Nixie Pixel

This video is a short beginners guide to installing Ubuntu by Nixie Pixel, who you will see is far from the stereotypical computer geek. This is just one of a number of informative and useful videos that she has put up on YouTube. Nixie also has a YouTube channel dedicated specifically to Linux.

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Updates

Apologies for not posting anything recently. I have been very busy with the start of the new university year. Since things have calmed down a bit now, I have found time to tidy up the Freeware page on this blog, as well as adding a few Linux applications to the list.

If you would like to share your favourite freeware packages with your fellow readers, feel free to add a comment to this post with a link to the web site for the software.

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LibreOffice 3.4

I have featured OpenOffice.org on this blog a few times in the past. It is a free office suite featuring a word processor, a spreadsheet program, and a presentation maker. Until recently the software was produced by Oracle Corporation, but fears that they would cease to support the project or stop it being open-source resulted in many of the programmers setting up their own project: LibreOffice.



LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.org (now produced by Apache Software Foundation), so users of the latter will make an easy transition to the former. The application names have been carried over: Writer is the word processor; Calc for spreadsheets; Impress for presentations; and so on. Furthermore, the look and feel of the packages has changed little.



Version 3.4 of LibreOffice offers many improvements on version 3.3. There is much better memory management and less of a reliance on Java. Calc is more compatible with Microsoft Excel. But the most improved application is Impress, which flies along compared to the old version.



The continuing development of LibreOffice seems assured, whereas OpenOffice,org appears to be in limbo. For that reason LibreOffice is now my office suite of choice and I would recommend users of OpenOffice.org switch over to its latest version.

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What is that character called?

If you look around your keyboard, you will notice a number of keys with characters on that you may not know the name of. In this post I will tell you the most common names for those esoteric characters. I am only looking at those characters that appear on my UK qwerty keyboard. I will explore those special characters and symbols that don't appear on the keyboard in future posts.

¬
This is called 'not' and is most commonly used in propositional logic and mathematics. It may not appear on all keyboards.

¦ and |
'Vertical bar' or 'pipe' is used in mathematics and computer programming. It can be 'broken' or 'unbroken' as shown.

^
'Caret' a.k.a 'hat', 'wedge' and 'chevron' is used in mathematics, logic, computing and to indicate ordinals in Italian.

~
'Tilde' is used in a variety of ways, such as indicating an approximation as well as the usual suspects: mathematics, logic and computing.

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Recent freeware releases

It has been some time since I last posted on this blog. In that time there have been a number of major new software releases. These include version 4 of the Firefox web browser, version 11.04 of the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems, and version 4.8 of the XFCE desktop environment for Linux.

Firefox v4
The latest version of this web browser sports a new look, more similar to that of Google Chrome. According to Mozilla the latest Firefox is much faster than previous version, making better use of the graphical processing unit to lessen the load on the computer's CPU. I have been running the Linux version (which doesn't have the fancy new look) for a couple of weeks and it does indeed seem to be quicker.


Ubuntu v11.04
Codenamed Natty Narwhal, version 11.04 of this Linux operating system makes use of a new default shell interface called Unity rather than the GNOME shell. This move has annoyed some users and according to some reviews the release has a number of bugs. This may induce some Ubuntu users to switch to derivative distributions: the Kubuntu with the KDE interface, Lubuntu with the lightweight LXDE interface, or Xubuntu that uses XFCE desktop environment, all of which are also now version 11.04.

XFCE v4.8
Speaking of XFCE, it has received it's first major upgrade in over two years. This is my desktop environment of choice and I looked forward to experiencing the new features including a fancy new panel. While v4.8 still has a few minor bugs, it is still usable.

If you would like to share any other recent free software releases with other readers then feel free to leave a comment with a link.

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