opensource.com

The GNOME project is the Linux desktop's darling, and deservedly so. It began as the free and open desktop alternative to proprietary options (including KDE at the time), and it's been going strong ever since. GNOME took GTK+, developed by the GIMP project, and ran with it, developing it into a robust, all-purpose GTK framework.

In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look an open source election auditing tool, new open source from Alibaba and Netflix, mimicking animal vision, and more!

read more

Let's say you want a lightweight desktop environment, with just enough to get graphics on the screen, move some windows around, and not much else. You find traditional desktops get in your way, with their notifications and taskbars and system trays. You want to live your life primarily from a terminal, but you also want the luxury of launching graphical applications. If that sounds like you, then Pekwm may be what you've been looking for all along.

Vagrant describes itself as "a tool for building and managing virtual machine environments in a single workflow. With an easy-to-use workflow and focus on automation, Vagrant lowers development environment setup time, increases production parity, and makes the 'works on my machine' excuse a relic of the past."

Vagrant works with a standard format for documenting an environment, called a Vagrantfile. According to Vagrant's website:

Knowing what motivates people is a smart way to recruit contributors to an open source project—and to keep them contributing once they've joined.

No matter what desktop you use, there's always something you want to change about it. One of the most popular applications for the GNOME desktop is Tweaks, which contains all the preference settings left out of the GNOME Settings panel. The Solus Linux distribution features the Budgie desktop, which is best described as one great big GNOME tweak.

In an earlier post, Blockchain evolution: A quick guide and why open source is at the heart of it, I discussed the first generations of blockchains: the public Bitcoin and cryptocurrency blockchains, followed by the Ethereum blockchain capable of executing programs ("smart contracts"), leading to permissioned versions of code-executing blockchains (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric, Quorum).

In the previous article in this series, you simulated gravity, but now you need to give your player a way to fight against gravity by jumping.

A jump is a temporary reprieve from gravity. For a few moments, you jump up instead of falling down, the way gravity is pulling you. But once you hit the peak of your jump, gravity kicks in again and pulls you back down to earth.

Let's compare the two most popular and powerful programming languages in the world: Java and Python! Both languages have huge community support and libraries to perform almost any programming task, although selecting a programming language usually depends on the developer's use case. After you compare and contrast, please make sure to answer our poll to share your opinion on which is best.

There are many ways to control the flow of an awk script, including loops, switch statements and the break, continue, and next commands.

Create a sample data set called colours.txt and copy this content into it:

When GNOME 3 was released, some GNOME users were not ready to give up GNOME 2. The Linux Mint project was so dissatisfied with GNOME 3 that it started its own desktop as an alternative, and thus the Cinnamon desktop was born.

As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.

Would you pay $20 for a Linux desktop? I would, and in fact, I regularly choose to pay more than that when I download free software! The reason I do this is that open source is worth it. For a copy of Elementary OS, US$ 20 happens to be the default asking price (you can download it for $1 or even $0 if you can't afford anything more). What you get in return is an excellent and heavily curated distribution that ships with its own Pantheon desktop design.

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. It allows you to avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications, systems, and various classifications of network-attached devices.

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy. It allows you to avoid writing scripts or custom code to deploy and update your applications, systems, and various classifications of network-attached devices.

Java is an open source programming language specifically designed to create universal applications that run on any operating system, open source or otherwise. It achieves this apparent magic by using a runtime specific to each OS. This runtime interprets the Java code so that the application runs as expected. It's an effective method that enables programmers to write their code once but deliver it to all computers that run Java (Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac, to name the common ones).

Customer empowerment is one consequence of digital transformation. And as we explained in the first part of this series, it's a powerful one. Empowering customers can deepen their relationship with your organization—but it won't work if they don't trust you.

In this article, we'll explain how acting openly can create that foundation of trust—and why it can lead to business success.

November's wander-around-the-web has turned up some interesting Ansible stories. It's fascinating to explore Ansible development through data, as Greg Sutcliffe does in his blog linked below. On the YouTubes this month, we found a couple of really interesting talks. Read on to see them for yourself.

Everything on Opensource.com's annual selection of tech gadgets would make an excellent holiday gift for your friends and family—or even something to add to your own holiday wishlist. Each of these gadgets encourages learning, exploring, and tinkering, qualities that reflect the values and interests of open source enthusiasts.

Before Mac OS X, there was a quirky closed-source Unix system called NeXTSTEP. Sun Microsystems later made NeXTSTEP's underpinnings an open specification, which enabled other projects to create free and open source versions of many NeXT libraries and components. GNUStep implemented the bulk of NeXTSTEP's libraries, and Window Maker implemented its desktop environment.