.NET Open Source Community – CodePlex / GitHub Comparision

The .NET segment of the open source ecosystem has been one of the fastest growing over the last few years.  The vast majority of all projects on CodePlex are .NET related, and among .NET developers CodePlex is generally the most well-known open source project hosting site.  The number of new projects started on CodePlex has been ever accelerating as shown in the following chart:

CodePlex / GitHub Comparisons

GitHub is another open source project hosting site that has been rising in popularity.  Although GitHub is primarily used by developers preferring Mac or Linux, there are also many .NET developers that use it for their projects.  Sometimes we get questions about how the .NET open source developer community compares between CodePlex and GitHub, so below includes some information around that.

Project Counts

After CodePlex, GitHub probably has the largest number of .NET projects among the various open source project hosting sites.  The following table shows both the total counts and “Popular Project” counts (projects with at least 5 followers):

Popular Projects (5+ followers)

Between the two sites there are over thirty thousand projects, although CodePlex has approximately 2.5x as many .NET projects as GitHub.  For popular projects, CodePlex has approximately 4x as many.  We’re not sure whether this is because popular .NET projects are more likely to choose CodePlex, or the community on CodePlex is more likely to make a .NET project popular, but it is probably some combination of both.

* GitHub does not require developers to specify a license, and typically less than half of them do.  Without a license specified, a project is not considered true “Open Source” since without specifying a valid open source license, project users do not actually have the legal rights that an open source license provides.  The above table counts the total number, not just the number of C# projects with an open source license specified.

Popular Projects

I think another interesting statistic is the percentage of total projects that are “Popular” using the same metric of having 5 or more followers.  The following table shows the popular project percentage for CodePlex and GitHub, including for just the subset of GitHub projects that are C# and Objective-C:

The percentage of popular projects on CodePlex is higher than for C# projects on GitHub, but both are higher than the percentage of popular projects across all languages on GitHub. However for Objective-C projects on GitHub, a very high percentage of them are popular. GitHub is very popular among Mac developers, so is presumably the correlation there.

Overall Summary

I think it is great to see the growth in the .NET open source community, and all indications are it will only continue growing faster. I believe CodePlex has done a lot to help encourage and support .NET open source developers and look forward to helping many thousand more open source projects become popular and successful!

The Best Open Source Graphics And Design Software

A few years ago Novell conducted an online public survey to determine which MS-Windows apps need to be ported on Linux desktop. Adobe Photoshop and other graphics application that user want ported to Linux. However, Linux comes with the sheer numbers of open source software projects produced by the community. You may overwhelmed by the choices available under Linux and not know where to begin.
This blog post covers Vector-based editors, Raster-based editors, Photo editing, Specialty, Desktop publishing (DTP), Web design, 3D modeling, Animation Typography and other softwares:

Even when looking at just a subset -- such as graphics applications -- if you are not already familiar with the options, the volume can make it hard to track down the application that fits your needs. The major categories tend to break down the same way, however -- just a few major players; the large projects often catering to slightly different design goals, and a second set of smaller projects each of which has a smaller team and a more narrow focus.

Let's examine each design field in turn. We'll start by describing the leading program or programs in each, followed by the smaller or younger projects, and end with the special-purpose tools.

Top 5 Open Source Linux Server Provisioning Software

Server provisioning is nothing but load the Linux or UNIX like operating systems automatically with actual operating systems, device drivers, data, and make a server ready for network operation without any user input. Typically you select a server from a pool of available servers, load the operating systems (such as RHEL, Fedora, FreeBSD, Debian), and finally customize storage, network (IP, gateway, bounding etc), drivers, applications, users etc. Using the following tools you can perform automated unattended operating system installation, configuration, set virtual machines and much more. These software can be used to install a lot (say thousands) of Linux and UNIX systems at the same time.

From the official Redhat guide:

Many system administrators would prefer to use an automated installation method to install Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora Linux on their machines. To answer this need, Red Hat created the kickstart installation method. Using kickstart, a system administrator can create a single file containing the answers to all the questions that would normally be asked during a typical Red Hat Linux installation. Kickstart provides a way for users to automate a Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation.

Kickstart Configurator allows you to create or modify a kickstart file using a graphical user interface, so that you do not have to remember the correct syntax of the file.

Fig.01: RHEL - Kickstart Configurator

FAI is a non-interactive system to install, customize and manage Linux systems and software configurations on computers as well as virtual machines and chroot environments, from small networks to large-scale infrastructures and clusters. It is a tool for fully automatic installation of Debian and other Linux Distributions such as Suse, Redhat, Solaris via network, custom install cd, or into a chroot environment. Some people also use it to install Windows.

Installs and updates Debian, Ubuntu, SuSe, RHEL, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, Solaris, etcCentralized deployment and configuration managementIntegrated disaster recovery systemEasy set up of software RAID and LVMInstalls XEN domains, VirtualBox and VserveEvery stage can be customized via hooksFull remote control via ssh during installation

See the official project website and wiki for more information.

Cobbler is a Linux provisioning server that centralizes and simplifies control of services including DHCP, TFTP, and DNS for the purpose of performing network-based operating systems installs. It can be configured for PXE, reinstallations, and virtualized guests using Xen, KVM or VMware. Again it is mainly used by Redhat and friends, but you can configure a PXE server to boot various non-RPM boot images such as Knoppix and other flavors of Debian such as Ubuntu.

There is also a lightweight built-in configuration management system, as well as support for integrating with configuration management systems like Puppet. Cobbler has a command line interface, a web interface, and also several API access options.

Fig.02: Cobbler WebUI (image credit: Fedora project)

See the official Cobbler project home page and wiki for more information.

From the official website:

Spacewalk is an open source (GPLv2) Linux systems management solution. It is the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived. Spacewalk manages software content updates for Red Hat derived distributions such as Fedora, CentOS, and Scientific Linux, within your firewall. You can stage software content through different environments, managing the deployment of updates to systems and allowing you to view at which update level any given system is at across your deployment. A clean central web interface allows viewing of systems and their software update status, and initiating update actions.

Inventory your systems (hardware and software information)Install and update software on your systemsCollect and distribute your custom software packages into manageable groupsProvision (kickstart) your systemsManage and deploy configuration files to your systemsMonitor your systemsProvision and start/stop/configure virtual guestsDistribute content across multiple geographical sites in an efficient manner. Fig.03: Spacewalk Server Provisioning System

See the official project website for more information.

From the official website:

openQRM is the next generation, open-source Data-center management platform. Its fully pluggable architecture focuses on automatic, rapid- and appliance-based deployment, monitoring, high-availability, cloud computing and especially on supporting and conforming multiple virtualization technologies. openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT-infra structure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins.

Complete separation of "hardware" (physical servers and virtual machines) from "software" (server-images)
Support for different virtualization technologiesFully automatic Nagios configuration (single click) to monitor all systems and servicesHigh-availability : "N to 1" fail-over Integrated storage managementDistribution support - openQRM 4.x comes with a solid support for different linux distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS and openSuse. A single openQRM server can manage the provisioning of servers from those different linux distributions seamlessly. Fig.04: OpenQRM Dashboard (image credit: OpenQRM project)

See the official project website for more information.

You can build your own server using PXE, TFTP server, and DHCP software. PXE allows you to boot up a system and have it automatically get an IP address via DHCP and start booting a kernel over the network. See the following articles for more information:

There are many proprietary software solutions available to automate the provisioning of servers, services and end-user devices from vendors such as BladeLogic, IBM, or HP. But open source software gives you more freedom to automate the installation of the Linux server. Some of the above software support UNIX and Windows operating systems too.

I'm wondering if you use Server Provisioning Software regularly. Drop your discussion below and share what works for you in the comments.

Open Source Photography Software

I recently brought Canon EOS 500D mid-range DSLR cameras with good promotional discounts. My photography interests date back to my school days but I did not take photography seriously until recently. Now, I'm researching for quality open source photo-software which may be available to photographers. This blog post gives a quick and dirty view of the different photo applications available for Linux operating systems:

Photography on the free software desktop has come a long way in recent years. All of the major desktop environments support camera import and provide image management and editing applications, including the all-important raw file conversion. But the desktop defaults are really geared towards casual users, optimized for point-and-shoot cameras and sharing photos online. Don’t be fooled by that, though; open source can and does offer the tools to support professional photographers and high-end enthusiasts.

Rather than drop in a long, bulleted list of applications, though, let’s take a look at what the open source alternatives are, task-by-task, to get a better feel for how the pieces fit together into a normal photographic workflow.

Read more: Photography with Open Source / Linux

Open Source Computing

What follows are notes from a brief presentation to the Computing at School working group meeting in Cambridge this morning.

 It has often seemed to me, and thus I’m sure others, that open source tools and methods provide a diverse and fertile ecosystem in which the craft of programming might be mastered and computer science studied. My own discipline is education rather than computing, but I hope some of the following aspects might illustrate the opportunities which open source offers for those concerned to encourage computing at school. 

 A number of interesting and accessible programming languages are essentially open source projects, in which source code for interpreters and compilers in the reference implementation is available for all under an open source licence, and where the standard build of the language includes open source libraries. The most obvious examples here are of scripting languages for web based applications such as Perl, PHP and Python, which represent a way in to software development for many who may not have studied academic computing.

Open source tools can also be used to provide rich, fully featured development environments for a very wide range of programming languages. Examples here would include the tools such as the Gnu Compiler Collection (C, C++ Objective C, Fortran, Java and Ada), which lies at the heart of the Gnu/Linux project, as well as multipurpose development environments such as Emacs, Eclipse and KDevelop.

Beyond this, it’s worth acknowledging the opportunities presented by Linux for open source development at operating system rather than application level.

In a school setting, such open source environments not only offer the opportunity for pupils to become familiar with alternative operating systems and interfaces, but also provide one way of offering the freedom which many network managers might be reluctant to provide on their networks, either via live Linux distributions booting from CD or memory stick (such as the splendid Sugar on a Stick GUI for children), via shell access to a dedicated Linux computer or within a Linux powered virtual machine.

It seems significant that so many of the great educationally focussed tools environments for programming at school level are available under open source licences, including Scratch, Alice, Squeak E-Toys and Greenfoot. Scratch’s share button and the resultant collection of open source scripts uploaded by its user community is, I suspect, one of the significant factors in its success, with the Greenfoot Gallery providing similar encouragement for those learning Java using this tool. It’s because Scratch is open source that variants such as BYOB Scratch, used at Berkeley for their beauty and joy of computing course, as well as my own ‘creativity and computing in the primary school’ module.

Enshrined within the free software definition are the freedoms to:

study how the program works – thus allowing those learning computing to learn from and critique ‘real’ software in all its complexity from kernel modules to scripts for web 2.0 applications;change it to make it do what you wish – allowing young programmers to build on as well as learn from the work of others; anddistribute the modified version to others – which is crucial from a constructionist perspective, reflecting Papert’s insight that the most effective learning happens when we create public knowledge artefacts. 

These freedoms create the opportunity for anyone to contribute to open source projects, from supporting others and helping with documentation (‘legitimate peripheral participation’) through spotting and then fixing bugs to contributing and maintaining modules and even the core code of a project. The communities that develop around the best open source projects have much in common with Wenger’s notion of communities of practice, with all that this implies for those learning the craft of programming through a modern, self-directed form of apprenticeship. As well as constructionist learning through creating public software for others to read and use, the young open source programmer also creates their own portfolio of source code snippets and projects, which contribute to their reputation within the community and employability in the software industry.

Google’s Summer of Code scheme has been one way to formalise this sort of programming apprenticeship, by matching up undergraduate computer scientists (and others) to small open source development projects with designated mentors from within that project’s developer community. I wonder if the joint forces of CAS and Open Source Schools might be in a position to create a similar scheme for some of our sixth formers, or perhaps even younger students.

Open Source Schools Steering Group

After the election and looking to the post-Becta future, Open Source Schools has been making new plans to ensure that the community is able to respond to the changing educational landscape where the benefits offered by open source are becoming ever more important.

A number of core community members were invited to a meeting on 29 June 2010 to develop an action plan for the future, and this group will continue to meet virtually or in real space on a regular, monthly basis. The group initially consists of:

Tim Bateson, Network Manager, Houghton Kepier Sports CollegeAlan Bell, CTO, Open Forum EuropeMiles Berry, Senior Lecturer in ICT Education, Roehampton UniversityPaul Haigh, Assistant Head, Notre Dame High SchoolBrian Lockwood, Head of IT, Egglescliffe SchoolAnne Matthews, Director, AlphaPlus Consultancy LtdDavid Willmot, Head of D&T, St Thomas More Language College 

This informal steering group agreed to work together on a voluntary basis and a number of tasks are already in hand.  Over the summer work on the website will be undertaken to develop the navigation to provide tailored content for specific audiences, initially senior leadership and network managers.

The withdrawal of the Harnessing Technology Grant is requiring senior leadership teams to review their IT strategies. within the community there is wide experience of the challenges, successes and benefits of implementing open source solutions as well as information about cost savings. This information will be shared on the website, and will form the basis of a conference for senior leaders planned for early November following the Comprehensive Spending Review. 

Wikis and turnkey solutions for network managers are also being developed.

For its part, AlphaPlus has offered to continue to host the website and to make some funds available to support the work of the community in these early stages. 

The group will also consider the longer term governance of the community and its resources, and welcomes involvement from all members of the community, whose views and character it seeks to represent.

Strategic planning for migration to open source

I have fired the starting gun on an exercise to create an information pack for schools on open source software. It will have sections on what open source is, a workbook of strategic questions to ask before embarking on a migration, implementation hints and tips a set of case studies (from this site) a directory (again from this site) and questionaire / feedback contacts and so on. The document will be public domain or CC license which is compatible with this site, and I intend to create a "release candidate" for peer scrutiny of this community as I know a lot of you actually work in schools (unlike me).

For me the low growing fruit is in the case studies and software directory that are already documented. I want to take these and cross reference them in the pack based on types of deployment, skills required and a set of other categories. In some cases a school board may have an idea about deploying an open source tool, but no current reference point, hopefully the pack will be able to link a target with a particular case study. On the other side of the coin a school may be looking for ideas but not be aware of their choices, in which case outlines of case studies with references to the full case study would be able to assist. The aim is to make one generic universally accessible pack that puts the case for open source and provides a roadmap to assist getting from concept to implementation.

However what I really need help on is the strategic planning for migration to open source. Ideally I would like to know the kinds of questions that those that have already implemented open source solutions in schools have asked themeselves or (if they were to do it again) would ask themselves before deployment.

I don't work in a school but from my experience of ICT the kinds of questions I would ask as a head or board of governers before making strategic decisions are:

What level of OSS skills do I currently have?

Would the teachers and support staff be willing to migrate?

How can I mitigate the risk of a key staff member leaving?

What will I need to invest in?

These are just 3 that come off the top of my head, I am sure that there are others out there that could think of more. If you could spare the time could you please post your suggestions (and the reasoning behind asking the question)  here so that I may include them in the pack. Similarly if you have any other ideas / suggestions for other sections mentioned (or additional sections) please discuss here.

Thanks for your assistance.

Might Google Maps be hoisted on its open source petard?

There is growing evidence that OpenStreetMap, an open source Wiki-based mapping system based in England, is becoming a serious threat to Google Maps.

Could the “Wikipedia of maps” do to Google what Google’s Android has done to Symbian? (The illustration shows the current OpenStreetMaps view of my home town.)

AOL’s MapQuest unit is especially high on OpenStreetMap, having opened new map sites in India and Europe around the product.

Since it’s dependent on user input there’s not a lot of there there, but apps based on it are still coming out for the iPhone and Android.

Microsoft is also using OpenStreetMap in Bing. A U.S. unit of the OpenStreetMap Foundation was incorporated earlier this year.

What’s possible is illustrated by The Bike Hub, an iPhone app with crowd-sourced data that lets cyclists in England steer around traffic. Reviews are positive, with free satellite navigation (even if a bit kludgy) approved of heartily. (I’d love it if they tracked hills as well as traffic.)

OpenStreetMap says it has 300,000 registered map makers on its site, but that it’s the idea behind it — free data users can adapt to their needs — that is its most powerful feature.

It’s the excitement of user-generated content that Google Maps was trying to access when it opened up its APIs. The question becomes, then, one of how open is open. Google Maps is open like Windows, while OpenStreetMaps appears to be open like Linux.

Ouch.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

5 Best Free and Open Source File Archivers for Linux

A computer program that merges a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for simpler transportation, storage, or backup is called a file archiver. Archiving or packing refers to the process of making an archive file, while unarchiving, unpacking or extracting means reconstructing the original files from the archive.

The simplest file archivers just gather a list of files and concatenate their contents sequentially into the archive. For transferring a large number of individual files over a high latency network like the Internet, numerous file archivers employ archive formats that provide lossless data compression to reduce the size of the archive.

If you are looking for a capable free and open-source file archiver for Linux, you should check out this list, and then pick out the one that would suit your needs:

Xarchiver
Xarchiver is a popular GTK+2 based file archiver that is designed to be independent of the desktop environment. It is utilized in a good number of lightweight Linux distributions like Xfce and LXDE. Xarchiver supports 7-zip, arj, bzip2, gzip, rar, lha, lzma, lzop, deb, rpm, tar and zip archives, archive navigation with mimetype icons, archive comment ability and archive listing as HTML or txt. Cut/Copy/Paste/Rename actions within files of variety of archives are also supported. Password detection and protection is automatic for arj, zip and rar files.

File Roller
File Roller is a simple and easy-to-use archive manager for the GNOME desktop environment. It has a graphical user interface and can create and modify archives, view the content of an archive and files contained in the archive, and of course extract files from the archive. It supports plenty of archive files such as 7-Zip (.7z), Tar, WinAce (.ace), gzip, RAR, and a whole lot more.

Ark
Ark is an archiving tool for the KDE desktop environment that is included into kdeutils package. It can view, extract, create, and modify archives through its intuitive GUI. Ark can handle different file formats that include tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, rar and lha. If the appropriate plugin from kdeaddons package is installed, it can be integrated into Konqueror in the KDE environment to handle archives through KParts technology.

PeaZip
PeaZip is both a file manager and file archiver that supports its native PEA archive format, featuring compression, multi volume split and flexible authenticated encryption, and integrity check schemes. It also has support for other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. With PeaZip, users can run extracting and archiving operations automatically using command-line generated exporting the job defined in the GUI front-end. For speeding up archiving or backup operation's definition, it can also create, edit and restore an archive's layout.

FreeArc
FreeArc is a fast and efficient file archiver that is said to work 2–5 times quicker than best programs in each compression class (ccm, 7-zip, rar, uharc -mz, pkzip) while retaining the same compression ratio. From technical grounds, it is superior to any existing practical compressor. Features include:

* AES/Blowfish/Twofish/Serpent encryption
* FAR and Total Commander plugins
* Solid compression with smart updates
* Ability to create self-extracting archives and installers
* Archive protection and recovery

If you know of other free and open-source file archivers for Linux that I fail to include on my list above, feel free to share them with us via comment.

Open source runs a house of cards

All software is a house of cards.

(This picture, from CBS, shows the world record-breaking card house, from Bryan Berg, of the Venetian Casino. The man who controls the Venetian empire, Sheldon Adelson, formerly ran the Comdex computer shows.)

It’s inherently fragile. For any software program to work it must be perfect, or it collapses. The larger the system, the harder this is to maintain.

Then there is the fact that you have all sorts of people trying to blow holes in it all the time — the number and tenacity of such people increases as the software becomes more critical.

The difference between “open” and “closed” software is mainly a legal one. You can see and edit Microsoft code. Criminals do it all the time. Both open and closed source are equally vulnerable.

But most people are not criminals. Most people are good. Most people even follow EULAs, that’s how good they are. This is the social reason why open source works. Both types of software have people trying to blow holes through them. But open source can bring more resources to bear in fixing them.

Anyone who has tried to build a large, proprietary system from scratch knows how hard it is. It gets exponentially harder as the system scales. You might call it Moore’s Law of Software Degradation. Bigger stacks mean more things can go wrong.

Thus we have Steve Jobs’ secret source. Every once in a while he drops what he built before and starts again from scratch. The Mac OSX is large, but based on an open source LinuxUnix, so it can maintain. The iOS is new, and relatively small — everything old becomes new again.

Innovation can happen within smaller systems. The houses are smaller. They can be built by small teams. So throughout my 30 year career I’ve watched constant reiterations of the same old things. Web games of the ’90s copied PC games of the ’80s. Phone games of the ’00s were the same. Apps, again, mostly, the same. Only the displays get better.

As a system gets bigger the need for an open source process grows, the need to cooperate grows if this skyscraper of cards is to keep standing and growing.

That’s why Mozilla joined the Open Invention Network — to protect its growing code base. It’s also why the Bilski case matters little in the end — the incentive for people to cooperate despite patents is too great.

Once you understand that all software is a house of cards, subject to Moore’s Law of Software Degradation, the need for open source becomes clear.

If it didn’t exist we’d have to invent it.

 

5 Best Free and Open Source File Archivers for Linux

A computer program that merges a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for simpler transportation, storage, or backup is called a file archiver. Archiving or packing refers to the process of making an archive file, while unarchiving, unpacking or extracting means reconstructing the original files from the archive.

The simplest file archivers just gather a list of files and concatenate their contents sequentially into the archive. For transferring a large number of individual files over a high latency network like the Internet, numerous file archivers employ archive formats that provide lossless data compression to reduce the size of the archive.

If you are looking for a capable free and open-source file archiver for Linux, you should check out this list, and then pick out the one that would suit your needs:

Xarchiver
Xarchiver is a popular GTK+2 based file archiver that is designed to be independent of the desktop environment. It is utilized in a good number of lightweight Linux distributions like Xfce and LXDE. Xarchiver supports 7-zip, arj, bzip2, gzip, rar, lha, lzma, lzop, deb, rpm, tar and zip archives, archive navigation with mimetype icons, archive comment ability and archive listing as HTML or txt. Cut/Copy/Paste/Rename actions within files of variety of archives are also supported. Password detection and protection is automatic for arj, zip and rar files.

File Roller
File Roller is a simple and easy-to-use archive manager for the GNOME desktop environment. It has a graphical user interface and can create and modify archives, view the content of an archive and files contained in the archive, and of course extract files from the archive. It supports plenty of archive files such as 7-Zip (.7z), Tar, WinAce (.ace), gzip, RAR, and a whole lot more.

Ark
Ark is an archiving tool for the KDE desktop environment that is included into kdeutils package. It can view, extract, create, and modify archives through its intuitive GUI. Ark can handle different file formats that include tar, gzip, bzip2, zip, rar and lha. If the appropriate plugin from kdeaddons package is installed, it can be integrated into Konqueror in the KDE environment to handle archives through KParts technology.

PeaZip
PeaZip is both a file manager and file archiver that supports its native PEA archive format, featuring compression, multi volume split and flexible authenticated encryption, and integrity check schemes. It also has support for other mainstream formats, with special focus on handling open formats. With PeaZip, users can run extracting and archiving operations automatically using command-line generated exporting the job defined in the GUI front-end. For speeding up archiving or backup operation's definition, it can also create, edit and restore an archive's layout.

FreeArc
FreeArc is a fast and efficient file archiver that is said to work 2–5 times quicker than best programs in each compression class (ccm, 7-zip, rar, uharc -mz, pkzip) while retaining the same compression ratio. From technical grounds, it is superior to any existing practical compressor. Features include:

* AES/Blowfish/Twofish/Serpent encryption
* FAR and Total Commander plugins
* Solid compression with smart updates
* Ability to create self-extracting archives and installers
* Archive protection and recovery

If you know of other free and open-source file archivers for Linux that I fail to include on my list above, feel free to share them with us via comment.

View the original article here

The Best Open Source Graphics And Design Software

A few years ago Novell conducted an online public survey to determine which MS-Windows apps need to be ported on Linux desktop. Adobe Photoshop and other graphics application that user want ported to Linux. However, Linux comes with the sheer numbers of open source software projects produced by the community. You may overwhelmed by the choices available under Linux and not know where to begin.
This blog post covers Vector-based editors, Raster-based editors, Photo editing, Specialty, Desktop publishing (DTP), Web design, 3D modeling, Animation Typography and other softwares:

Even when looking at just a subset -- such as graphics applications -- if you are not already familiar with the options, the volume can make it hard to track down the application that fits your needs. The major categories tend to break down the same way, however -- just a few major players; the large projects often catering to slightly different design goals, and a second set of smaller projects each of which has a smaller team and a more narrow focus.

Let's examine each design field in turn. We'll start by describing the leading program or programs in each, followed by the smaller or younger projects, and end with the special-purpose tools.

Read more: Periodic table of the open source graphics and design apps

Featured Articles:20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know20 Linux Server Hardening Security TipsMy 10 UNIX Command Line Mistakes The Novice Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop

Top 5 Open Source Linux Server Provisioning Software

Server provisioning is nothing but load the Linux or UNIX like operating systems automatically with actual operating systems, device drivers, data, and make a server ready for network operation without any user input. Typically you select a server from a pool of available servers, load the operating systems (such as RHEL, Fedora, FreeBSD, Debian), and finally customize storage, network (IP, gateway, bounding etc), drivers, applications, users etc. Using the following tools you can perform automated unattended operating system installation, configuration, set virtual machines and much more. These software can be used to install a lot (say thousands) of Linux and UNIX systems at the same time.

Kickstart

From the official Redhat guide:

Many system administrators would prefer to use an automated installation method to install Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora Linux on their machines. To answer this need, Red Hat created the kickstart installation method. Using kickstart, a system administrator can create a single file containing the answers to all the questions that would normally be asked during a typical Red Hat Linux installation. Kickstart provides a way for users to automate a Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation.

Kickstart Configurator allows you to create or modify a kickstart file using a graphical user interface, so that you do not have to remember the correct syntax of the file.

Open Source Photography Software

I recently brought Canon EOS 500D mid-range DSLR cameras with good promotional discounts. My photography interests date back to my school days but I did not take photography seriously until recently. Now, I'm researching for quality open source photo-software which may be available to photographers. This blog post gives a quick and dirty view of the different photo applications available for Linux operating systems:

Photography on the free software desktop has come a long way in recent years. All of the major desktop environments support camera import and provide image management and editing applications, including the all-important raw file conversion. But the desktop defaults are really geared towards casual users, optimized for point-and-shoot cameras and sharing photos online. Don’t be fooled by that, though; open source can and does offer the tools to support professional photographers and high-end enthusiasts.

Rather than drop in a long, bulleted list of applications, though, let’s take a look at what the open source alternatives are, task-by-task, to get a better feel for how the pieces fit together into a normal photographic workflow.

Read more: Photography with Open Source / Linux

Featured Articles:20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know20 Linux Server Hardening Security TipsMy 10 UNIX Command Line Mistakes The Novice Guide To Buying A Linux Laptop