As I had mentioned last week, I went to the Ohio LinuxFest. I was generously rewarded not only by the presentations, but also by the luminary class event as a whole. Friday’s keynote speaker was none other than Jon Hall. Jon spoke about how Linux is used around the world. Two key things I loved about this talk was how Jon Described his interaction with Linus Torvalds and how Jon was able to get Linus a DEC Alpha so that Linus could port Linux to that platform.

As well, I greatly appreciated the tale of how Jon had left a Linux CD behind at the University of the Pacific on Fiji. On his next visit there, Linux ruled the installed environment. There was of course more, but suffice it to say, it was an engaging talk.

On Saturday, Dr. Kirk Marshall McKusick gave a talk on how to manage a project. He used the BSD / FreeBSD projects as the basis for this talk. One of the keys to running a successful project, Dr. McKusick suggests, is getting rid of the deadwood. In the case of the BSD project, he did this by ensuring that there was a core team that changes on a regular basis; members to the core team, who can grant commit privileges and are elected by the committers. It seems an excellent model for project organization.

I saw other presentations that I valued. Of note was the presentation given by Emma Marshall from System 76 about how she works with a team to help get Ubuntu into classrooms. I also learned a little about how Juju is used to help deploy in a server environment by Jorge Castro. I was interviewed by the Sunday Morning Linux Review crew. I show up at about the 58 minute mark.

If you’ve never been to OLF, I recommend you put it on your conference calendar for next year and that you take a friend.

Daniel Hinojosa, SourceForge Community Manager

Infoworld has announced the winners of their “Bossie” Awards, their top OSS picks for desktop and mobile; there are a lot of SourceForge based projects in that list. Check them out:

d.: Please tell me about your project, West Point Bridge Designer and Contest, and how or why this came into being in the
first place.

Col. Ressler: This is a team of 3 effort; I work on this with my brother Steve, who is a civil engineer and also a Colonel / Professor at West Point. I am the computer guy and Cathy Bale is our coordinator, doubling as publicist; we all do this part time. This project is designed to interest kids in engineering careers. We hope that this is a good introduction to what engineering is about, in a form that is digestible by kids – ages 13 and up.

We started building this in 1999 as a one-time event for the bicentennial of West Point. West Point was of course created by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 as the nation’s first engineering school because he saw the need for people with skills to map out and build all kinds of infrastructure across a huge land mass. Today, West Point’s programs are still about half Math, Science, & Engineering, a classical liberal education. Since 2002 was a big celebration of the school’s history, we wanted to do something that not only celebrated that, but also highlighted our engineering heritage. We thought, wouldn’t it be cool to have some sort of engineering competition? We looked at things others had done: balsa wood bridges, toothpick bridges, etc. We were looking for interesting ways to celebrate engineering…

With these existing contest formats, you build the bridge and then destroy it to see how strong it was. But that’s not how it works in real life. The joy of creating something that will endure is a big part of the experience. If the bridge breaks, you’ve failed. So we decided to try a virtual contest that would take this into account. My brother had done much work by 1999 on an educational bridge design program in Visual Basic. I had done enough web site development to be pretty sure we could make a national contest work with only the three of us if we had a clever back office operation. Some of the technology I used originally is “ancient” now: perl, Sybase for the database, and custom web services in C for scalability (though the term web services hadn’t yet been coined). It all worked. We had about 20,000 kids participate in the first year. They submitted over 50,000 designs. The system allowed us to review and post scoreboard updates a few times per day. We were congratulating ourselves and moving on to other things. Then, teachers from around the country starting calling and emailing, asking when next year’s contest would start. We decided to do it one more year and have now done that 11 times, 12 contests in all.

We have been living with design decisions we made back in 1999. Until about 2 years ago, this code was closed source as I didn’t have time to make it Open Source. I teach computer science and made a decision to take the code Open Source as a professional exercise to learn the tools get some street cred in the classroom. My first Rails app is a re-implementation of the back end on that platform. I am open to expanding development and the team. I hope continued contribution to the contest can be a retirement activity in a couple of years. For example, a sponsor has come forward to make the Bridge Designer mobile on iPad, etc.

d.: Tell me about the program itself.

Col. R.: The program is a simplified CAD interface; it looks like a drafting board with just 4 tools. The designer can drop joints and connect them with members, which are simulated pieces of steel. The designer’s job is to span a river gap with triangles consisting of joints and members. You can then press a button and see an animation of a truck crossing the bridge. If your bridge works, the truck keeps going over the bridge. You can fly around to see different points of view and also what the driver sees. The program includes color coding that shows the stresses different parts of the bridge are carrying in real time. If you fail to build a viable bridge, the truck breaks it and falls into the river. Once you have a working bridge, the next thing is to note the upper right hand corner of the window shows a dollar figure, which is the cost of that bridge. You need to get this cost down to make a cheaper bridge that succeeds. This is how your rank in the contest is decided. Cheapest bridge wins. The cost model makes decreasing the cost both realistic and difficult, just like true life engineering. Kids who are the best in the world at this are amazing. One usually beats my brother’s best design each year about 15 minutes after the contest starts. He’s a civil engineer. I guess today you’d call this crowd-sourced design optimization.

The biggest contest was about 40,000 kids submitting nearly 80,000 bridges. The back end of the contest infrastructure tracks everything we need to enforce the contest rules – and kids worldwide can keep track of their standing minute by minute. They can see the top 30 teams in the world. There is a process to review scoreboards. Also, anyone can run a local contest with their own scoreboard. Groups from homeschool co-ops up to foreign countries have done this.

d.: As a Colonel in the Army, how did you get here?

Col. R: My brother Steve is also a Colonel in the Army and is the head of civil & mechanical engineering here at West Point; he just retired. I am the head of the electrical engineering and computer science department. I joined the Army through West Point, graduated in 1978, served as engineer officer in field until 1993. I then came here and have been here ever since – about 20 years. Professors at the U.S. Military Academy normally serve out their careers as such until retirement once they are appointed.

d.: Why was taking your project Open Source important?

Col. R.: I believe that there is great potential for the contest by going OSS, to tap enormous expertise in OSS community; I think that we can take the technology to the next level. Social media can help make the contest more collaborative. I want to engage the OSS community to get ideas to implement this.

d.: What possibilities exist?

Col. R.: Going mobile is the next big thing for this project; schools are making iPads available to students. I’m trying to gauge the Android platform (tablets) uptake. I would like to get a mobile tablet version of the Bridge Builder client, then relook at the whole back end infrastructure. I’d like to integrate it better for how kids interact on the Internet and with platforms. Social media is probably an untapped resource. The third thing is to broaden the bridge building scenario. This is a very male oriented task. Boys are stimulated by this challenge. Girls don’t seem to be attracted as much to this particular scenario. We know that research indicates girls are attracted to problems that involve people. We want to broaden the scenario to include a social dimension. I had envisioned incorporating environmental conditions, making scenarios where property must be condemned so that the people in a village have to move… Our project does not have these sorts of elements right now. Adding them may help make this more attractive to women / girls. Right now, there is about a 70/30 mix of boys versus girls in this competition; we would like to see it move closer to 50/50. The technology for the program is now relatively up to date; it’s built on Java and OpenGL. The backend is in Rails for Heroku. This is my first rails project; it may not be pretty, but it’s there and functional.

d.: What cost the most time to solve?

Col. R.: In 1999 there were so many questions about how to do something like this. We had a lot of publicity back then due to the Bicentennial. There weren’t that many big websites, and pre-built infrastructure for high volume web traffic didn’t exist. We designed a web capability that had to work just in case we happened to get 2, 5, or 10 million users; we needed to be prepared to handle that level of traffic. We also had prizes in the 5 figure range, so we had concerns about the legal risks. We wanted to avoid damaging West Point’s reputation at all costs. That was our nightmare. The contest needed to be part of the celebration, not a liability. In the end, there were no significant outages or system failures. The contest has never grown to that point of millions of users, but we’re still ready for that kind of load. We designed everything by assuming we might get 1 in 10 of schools in the U.S. to participate. In the end, this was reasonable. We rolled our own server scheme to grow capacity on the fly. It’s a primitive version of what Heroku today calls “dynos.”

d.: And the next contest?

Col. R.: We don’t have dates yet, but it will be at about the same as last year, in the spring. See http://bridgecontest.usma.edu for the schedule. We will publish on this site any day now. Registration will open and once things start, we have a qualifying round which ends in late March. The semifinals are generally in April and are done using the same internet infrastructure. We recruit a teacher or other volunteer to watch each kid at that level, so there are many folks involved. Then, small groups of finalists comes to West Point in May; the contestants are flown out with their parents and the final round is held in West Point facilities. At the end, we have an awards dinner and ceremony. It’s all a blast.

d.: Out of the past winners, have any gone onto West Point?

Col. R.: To our knowledge, no finalist has attended West Point. But I have done informal surveys and found about 1 in 30 cadets either knew about or participated in the contest. But remember our main goal is to get kids into engineering. Most finalists end up as science or engineering students in college. We have been able to track this to some extent. Cathy Bale is key for this because she forms personal relationships with teachers and contestants. This program has achieved a lot of what we set out to achieve, or we wouldn’t keep doing
it!

Another way to win is locally. Anyone in the world can write Cathy and request a local contest code; this registers them in a local contest, which provides a custom autogenerated scoreboard. There are contests at small group, school, district, cities like Boston and other levels up to states. The West Virginia state bridge contest is one of our favorites run by a great group in their Highways department. Other countries have conducted contests! In all, this has helped build a community of educators who are in our network, which allows us to continue to reach kids year to year.

d.: What else do I need to know?

Col. R.: The American Society of Civil Engineers has been a financial sponsor for a long time. They currently provide most of the financial resources. As a government official, I can’t endorse them or what they do, but it’s a fact that their donations have enabled the
contest to flourish. As you can read on the web site, the 2013 contest offered a $10,000 prize for first place, $5,000 for second. All team members who get to the finals received a laptop computer.

d.: There you go; a big thank you to Colonel Ressler and his brother Colonel Ressler at West Point. Also, from SourceForge, a special thanks to the American Society of Civil Engineers for their support of this most awesome project and contest. Go check it out.

Daniel Hinojosa – SourceForge Community Manager

While this tool is an excellent way for a team to pick a place to go to lunch, this module could easily be used for “ranked choice” voting like what Alameda County in California uses.

To learn more about this Perl module, check out the PrefVote.org page.

Daniel Hinojosa.

Here are my picks to help you get through the school year:

Best flash card pick:

Mnemosyne Project

Flashcards are a tried and true tool to help you learn everything from math facts to science and language definitions to foreign languages. And Mnemosyne helps you learn faster and retain longer by optimizing how frequently cards are shown from the deck.

You can easily create your own flashcard decks and share with your teacher for distribution to the whole class.

Best offline reference pick:

Kiwix – Wikipedia offline 

   Wikipedia is great. It can be used for Social Studies homework, when you need to find the longest river in North America, and for science research. Kiwix extends access to that greatness offline, letting you use Wikipedia data when you’re in the car, working places that have no Internet access, or even using your laptop to finish homework when the power is out. As Wikipedia continues its march toward complete world knowledge, Kiwix gives you powerful options to pare down which pieces of information you want to carry portably and offline. Budget some time to try this out and download data before you need it.

Best unit conversion pick:

JConvert

Whether you’re converting imperial to metric to avoid space vessel calamities, or just bantering about nibbles and yottabytes, a dedicated unit conversion tool can be handy when accuracy counts (like when doing homework). JConvert fits the bill, covering units including acceleration, mass, angles, areas, and data size. Also, it’s Java-based, so you can just download the .jar and double-click to start it up.

Best office suite pick:

Apache OpenOffice 

If you need a Word processor, spreadsheet, presentation slides and more in one easy package (and who doesn’t?), then you have to check out Apache OpenOffice. Compatible with data formats from other popular office suites, you can work in .odt and export to .doc or PDF. The PDF Import Extension allows you to import and modify PDF documents too! This is truly must-have software for everyone.

Best drawing tool pick:

Inkscape 

Channel your inner artist or engineer with Inkscape, a vector graphics editor. Inkscape uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format and allows for export to many formats, including PDF and AutoCAD.

Best e-reader pick:

CoolReader 

You want an e-reader that is easy on the eyes, and Cool Reader fits the bill perfectly. Font, font size, page layout and background are easily tunable. With a great e-reader, you can tap into the wealth of e-books available freely from the likes of Project Gutenberg.

I hope you have a great semester and that these apps help you succeed!  Your feedback is always welcome. I’d love to hear from you.

I also want to give a shout out to the folks helping all of us life-long learners — TED, Khan Academy, and local ham radio operators.  Keep up the great work.

Daniel Hinojosa

SourceForge Community Manager

Daniel Hinojosa.

SourceForge Community Manager

• Warzone 2100

  You command the forces of “The Project” in a battle to rebuild the world after mankind has almost been destroyed by nuclear missiles. The game offers campaign, multi-player and single-player skirmish modes, and an extensive tech tree.

  [ Download Warzone 2100 ]

• Openfiler

  Openfiler is a browser-based network storage management utility. Linux-powered, Openfiler delivers file-based Network Attached Storage (NAS) and block-based SAN in a single framework. It supports CIFS, NFS, HTTP/DAV, FTP, and iSCSI.

  [ Download Openfiler ]

• Simplicity Linux

  Simplicity Linux uses Puppy Linux and derivatives as a base, uses the XFCE window manager, and comes in 3 editions: Netbook, Desktop and Media. Netbook features cloud based software, Desktop features locally based software and Media edition is designed to allow people who want a lounge PC to access their media with ease.

  [ Download Simplicity Linux ]

• ZABBIX

  ZABBIX is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution designed to monitor and track performance and availability of network servers, devices and other IT resources. It supports distributed and WEB monitoring, auto-discovery, and more.

  [ Download ZABBIX ]

• MinGW-builds

  Snapshots and releases builds of the MinGW compiler that use CRT & WinAPI from the mingw-w64 project.

  [ Download MinGW-builds ]

• The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library

  The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library is a simple tool that helps C/C++ developers initialize extensions and write portable applications. GLEW currently supports a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Darwin, Irix, and Solaris.

  [ Download The OpenGL Extension Wrangler Library ]

• Double Commander

  Double Commander is a cross platform open source file manager with two panels side by side. It is inspired by Total Commander and features some new ideas.

  [ Download Double Commander ]

• OS X Portable Applications

  OS X FOSS applications packaged as portable so that can carried around on any portable device, USB thumb drive, iPod, portable hard drive, memory card or other portable device.

  [ Download OS X Portable Applications ]

• Pootle, Virtaal & The Translate ToolkitTools for localization: Pootle: web based translation management system. Virtaal: Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool, Translate Toolkit: QA, format conversion and support (PO, Java .properties, OpenOffice, Mozilla, XLIFF, TMX, TBX, CSV, Qt .ts)

  [ Download Pootle, Virtaal & The Translate Toolkit ]

• jEditjEdit is a programmer’s text editor written in Java. It uses the Swing toolkit for the GUI and can be configured as a rather powerful IDE through the use of its plugin architecture.

  [ Download jEdit ]

• tuxbootTuxboot helps you to create a bootable Live USB drive for Clonezilla live, DRBL live, Gparted live and tux2live. It is modified from unetbootin and runs on both MS Windows and GNU/Linux. You can choose to download the latest version of ISO file then create the live usb.

  [ Download tuxboot ]

• Openbravo ERPOpenbravo 3, the agile ERP, is a modular, ready to use, 100% web-based open source business management system written in Java, that automates all of the core business processes for small and mid-sized companies.

  [ Download Openbravo ERP ]

• winPenPack: Portable Software CollectionwinPenPack is a project that aims at collecting the most frequently used and most popular open source applications made portable, so that they can be executed without installation from any USB Flash Drive or Hard Disk. The winPenPack suites offer a wide range of portable applications like office tools, internet tools, multimedia tools, development tools, security applications and other frequently used utilities. Everything you need, completely free, open source and portable!

  [ Download winPenPack: Portable Software Collection ]

• SamyGOThis project created for research on Samsung TV Firmware Hacking

  [ Download SamyGO ]

• Tiggit Indie Game InstallerTiggit is a game distribution system modeled after Steam, Desura and the likes. It is currenly experimental, very minimalistic and only features freeware & OSS games, but has an ambitious goals list for the future.

  [ Download Tiggit Indie Game Installer ]

• grampsGramps is a genealogy program for Linux, Windows, Mac, and FreeBSD that allows you to easily build and keep track of your family tree. It supports the GEDCOM standard, allows fine grained privacy controls and can generate many different types of reports (descendant trees, graphs, connection diagrams, ….)

  [ Download gramps ]

• Alt-FThis site is Alt-F main download and a secondary source site. Main Code site: http://code.google.com/p/alt-f Homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/altfirmware Discussion Forum: http://groups.google.com/group/alt-f Alt-F provides an alternative firmware for the DLINK DNS-323 and DNS-321, that can be either run “on top” of the vendor firmware, or flashed into the hardware. Alt-F has Samba and NFS; supports ext2/3/4, VFAT, NTFS and ISO9660 filesystems; RAID 0, 1, 5 (with external USB disk) and JBD; greater than 2.2TB disks; rsync, ftp, sftp, ftps, ssh, lpd, DNS and DHCP servers, DDNS, fan and leds control, clean power up and down… and more. Alt-F also has a set of comprehensive administering web pages, you don’t need to use the command line to configure it. Besides the built-in software, Alt-F also supports additional packages on disk, including ffp packages, that you can install, update and uninstall using the administering web pages

  [ Download Alt-F ]

• Clover EFI bootloader

  This is EFI-based bootloader for BIOS-based computers created as a replacement to EDK2/Duet bootloader http://www.tianocore.org. To compile it needs to place Clover sources into edk2/ folder.

  [ Download Clover EFI bootloader ]

• Data Crow

  Data Crow allows you use the standard movie & video (divx, xvid, DVD, Blu-ray, etc), book (and eBooks), images, games & software, music (mp3 and other music files) cataloging modules. Beside these module (which you can change to fit your requirements) you can create new modules (want to catalogue your stamps, equipment, or anything else?). The GUI is skinnable. Data Crow allows you find information on your items through services such as Amazon, Imdb.com, Sourceforge.net, Softpedia, Ofdb, MusicBrainz and many others. Reporting (based on XLST stylesheets and graphs), loan administration, item importing & exporting, backup & restore, web service and many other optional features are waiting for you..

  [ Download Data Crow ]

• PNotes

  PNotes is light-weight, flexible, skinnable manager of virtual notes on your desktop. It supports multiple languages, individual note’s settings, transparency and scheduling. Absolutely portable as well – no traces in registry.

  [ Download PNotes ]

• OS4

  Linux distribution focused on ease of use and includes many tools that allow users to create and publish their own content

  [ Download OS4 ]

• LibreCAD

  LibreCAD is a 2D CAD drawing tool based on the community edition of QCad LibreCAD has been re-structured and ported to qt4 and works natively cross platform OSX, Windows and Linux

  [ Download LibreCAD ]

• Dungeon Crawl Reference

  Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup is a free rogue-like game of exploration and treasure-hunting. Stone Soup is a continuation of Linley’s Dungeon Crawl. It is openly developed and invites participation from the Crawl community. See http://crawl.develz.org !

  [ Download Dungeon Crawl Reference ]

• Pinguy OS

  Pinguy OS an out-of-the-box working operating system for everyone, not just geeks.

  [ Download Pinguy OS ]

• OpenCPN

  OpenCPN: A concise ChartPlotter/Navigator. A cross-platform ship-borne GUI application supporting * GPS/GPDS Postition Input * BSB Raster Chart Display * S57 Vector ENChart Display * AIS Input Decoding * Waypoint Autopilot Navigation

  [ Download OpenCPN ]

• Synfig

  Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality 2D animation with fewer people and resources.

  [ Download Synfig ]

ProcessMaker is part of the new SourceForge Enterprise Directory.

ProcessMaker 2.5 offers significant speed and performance improvements and also includes new features to enhance the user experience. Large installations which run tens of thousands of new cases each month will find that ProcessMaker runs up to five times faster on the new platform. These same users will also now enjoy lightning fast, deep data enterprise search thanks to an optimized integration with the Solr enterprise search engine from the Apache Lucene open source project. Besides speed and performance improvements, The 2.5 platform also features new WYSIWYG HTML editor allows users to quickly edit forms, email templates and output documents, and a PDF generation engine improves output document quality. Other new features include grid form improvements, including new file upload and suggest fields inside DynaForms, and a new administration area to allow administrators to centralize and improve log files.

“We have always had one of the most elegant and simple-to-use interfaces in the industry, but the ProcessMaker 2.5 release marks a major milestone,” explained Colosa CEO Brian Reale. “We improved the ProcessMaker core, adding scalability to accommodate even the most demanding enterprise implementations that are generating tens of thousands of new requests or cases per month on our platform.”
To learn more about Colosa’s workflow simplification tools and the newly released ProcessMaker 2.5 platform, please see the press release on processmaker.com.

• Password Safe

  Password Safe is a password database utility. Users can keep their passwords securely encrypted on their computers. A single Safe Combination unlocks them all.

  [ Download Password Safe ]

• BibDesk

  BibDesk is a graphical bibTeX bibliography manager for Mac OS X.

  [ Download BibDesk ]

• boot-repair-disk

  See http://sourceforge.net/p/boot-repair

  [ Download boot-repair-disk ]

• The FreeType Project

  The FreeType project develops free, portable and high-quality software solutions for digital typography. We focus on bringing small, efficient and ubiquitous products.

  [ Download The FreeType Project ]

• America’s Army 2.5 Assist

  A GUI client application for Downloading Installing and Playing Americas Army 2.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux with a new custom authorization system. On the server side a Desktop server manager for Windows, Mac and Linux and a Command line dedicated server manager for Windows and Linux. Backend server components include a replacement authorization system using the Battletracker account & stats database and a PunkBuster log streaming server which records players possible cheating activities.

  [ Download America's Army 2.5 Assist ]

• KXStudio

  KXStudio is a collection of tools and tweaks, targetted at audio and video production

  [ Download KXStudio ]

• NAS4Free

  NAS4Free is an embedded Open Source Storage distribution and supports sharing across Windows, Apple, and UNIX-like systems. It includes ZFS, Software RAID (0,1,5), disk encryption, S.M.A.R.T / email reports etc. with following protocols: CIFS (samba), FTP, NFS, TFTP, AFP, RSYNC, Unison, iSCSI, UPnP, Bittorent (initiator and target), Bridge, CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) and HAST (Highly Available Storage). All this can easy be setup by it’s highly configurable WEB interface. NAS4Free can be installed on Compact Flash/USB/SSD media, Hard disk or booted of from a LiveCD with a usb stick.

  [ Download NAS4Free ]

• RSS Owl | RSS / RDF / Atom Feed Reader

  RSS Owl is a powerful application to organize, search and read your news feeds in a comfortable way. It runs cross platform on Windows, Linux and Mac and can also be installed into Eclipse. RSS Owl is translated into the popular languages of the world. Some of the unique highlights are google reader synchronization, tabbed reading, powerful searches that can be saved, news filters with automated actions, embedded browser and newspaper layout, tray notifications, clean-up wizard and powerful user customization. RSSOwl requires no installation, simply start it with a doubleclick and find a large list of sample feeds already provided. For your convinience, an installer is provided on Windows. On Linux, you can obtain RSSOwl from the online repository (http://www.rssowl.org). You can also easily import existing feeds from other readers into RSSOwl or synchronize with Google Reader always be in sync with your subscriptions.

  [ Download RSS Owl | RSS / RDF / Atom Feed Reader ]

• Zentyal Linux small business server

  Zentyal (formerly eBox Platform) is a Linux Small Business Server that can act as a Gateway, UTM, Office Server, Infrastructure Manager, Unified Communications Server or a combination of them. Zentyal offers an easy-to-use web interface to manage all your network services, from Internet access, network security, resource sharing, network infrastructure or communications. Zentyal is the open source alternative to Windows Small Business Server and it is being widely used in the small and medium businesses regardless of sector, industry or location as well as in the public administrations or in the education sector. It is estimated that there are over 50,000 active Zentyal installations all over the globe. Zentyal Migration Tool for Windows Server is also available for download, making the migration process from existing Windows environments easier. Zentyal development is funded by eBox Technologies that offers commercial support and cloud-based services on top of Zentyal server.

  [ Download Zentyal Linux small business server ]

• Semplice Linux

  A non-innovative, lightweight, fast and simple GNU/Linux Distribution, based on Debian Sid.

• Zekr: Multimedia Quran Study Software

  Zekr is an open source Quran study software for Windows, Linux and Mac. It’s designed to ease access to the most authentic and valuable text of Muslims. Zekr provides Quran translations, recitation, search and other features to study Holy Quran.

• Bodhi Linux

  Bodhi is a minimalistic, enlightened, Linux desktop.

• Extropy’s DevPaks

  A collection of the DevPaks for Dev-C++ that I maintain: zlib libpng GMP MPFR wxWidgets GNU C Library Reference Cpp_manpages FANN Expat PCRE libtiff libjpeg JBIG-KIT

• MediathekView

  Das Programm durchsucht die Mediatheken verschiedener öffentlich-rechtlicher Sender (3Sat, ARD, ARTE, KiKa, MDR, ORF, SRF, ZDF etc.), lädt Beiträge daraus herunter oder spielt diese ab (mit VLC Media Player oder mit einem Programm eigener Wahl). Es können auch Sendereihen/Serien abonniert werden.

• VBA-M

  Our goal is to improve upon VisualBoyAdvance by integrating the best features from the various builds floating around. In order to uncompress the downloaded package, you need WinRAR or 7-Zip: http://7-zip.org/

• TurnKey Linux

  TurnKey Linux is an opensource project that aims to develop high-quality software appliances that are easy to deploy, easy to use and free. In a nutshell, we believe everything that can be easy, should be easy! http://www.turnkeylinux.org/

• NonVisual Desktop Access

  A free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

• antiX-Linux

  antiX is a fast, lightweight and easy to install linux live CD distribution based on Debian Testing for Intel-AMD x86 compatible systems.

• HiJackThis

  HijackThis is a free utility that generates an in depth report of registry and file settings from your computer. HijackThis makes no separation between safe and unsafe settings in its scan results giving you the ability to selectively remove items from your machine. In addition to this scan and remove capability HijackThis comes with several tools useful in manually removing malware from a computer. IMPORTANT: HijackThis does not determine what is good or bad. Do not make any changes to your computer settings unless you are an expert computer user. Advanced users can use HijackThis to remove unwanted settings or files.

  [ Download HiJackThis ]

• Little Registry Cleaner

  Little Registry Cleaner will remove obsolete or unwanted items that build up in the registry over time in order to improve the stability & performance of your computer.

  [ Download Little Registry Cleaner ]

• regshot

  Regshot is a registry compare utility that allows you to quickly take a snapshot of your registry and then compare it with a second one – done after doing system changes or installing a new software product. It’s a great way to tell what exactly gets changed.

  [ Download Regshot ]

• Little Registry Optimizer

  Little Registry Optimizer is a part of Little Apps` Little Registry Cleaner. This project is aimed to analyze the windows registry and optimize it so it will be smaller and run smoother.

  [ Download Little Registry Optimizer ]

• Small Registry Editor

  Small registry editor for windows system provide you ability to change your registry setting even if your default registry editor is blocked by a virus.

  [ Download Small Registry Editor ]

• Performance Maintainer

  Performance Maintainer has combined open source tools such as Little Registry Cleaner, diskcleaner.nl and Ultradefrag that run periodically for PC maintenance and performance. It is very simple and automated.

  1.Little Registry Cleaner scans and Cleans the registry,
  2.Disk Cleaner Performs Disk Cleanup
  3. Ultradefrag defragments System Drive.

  The Programs also lets you install additional tools for tweaking and better performance. The installer schedules the program to run according to your requirement. Requires .NET Framework 4.

  [ Download Performance Maintainer ]

• Registry Alert

  Registry Alert protects your computer from spyware or from other software which start automatically on system start up and effects your computer performance. It will monitor your start up registry keys, and if it finds any changes then it will give you an alert and allow you to stop those running processes. You can add a specific registry key into ‘Always remove list’ so that it will automatically remove that registry key. You can add your own registry keys for monitoring.

  [ Download Registry Alert ]

• Mobile Atlas Creator

  This application creates off-line atlases of raster maps for various cell phone apps on Android, iPhone and WindowsCE as well as GPS devices (Garmin, Magellan and others)

• Super Audio CD Decoder

  Super Audio CD Decoder input plugin for foobar2000. Decoder is capable of playing back Super Audio CD ISO images, DSDIFF and DSF files. Direct DSD playback for compatible devices.

• WOT – addons

  Stiahni si čo chceš… Nahadzujem sem addony pre WOT , vylepši si svoju hru novým zemeriavačom, skinmy, damage panelmi…atď

• MySQL

  MySQL is a well-known relational database manager used in a wide variety of systems, including Twitter, Wikipedia, Facebook, Google, WordPress, and countless more websites and other applications. Offering a wide range of features and highly scalable performance, MySQL is a good choice for any situation requiring a database.

• sslc analyser

  A GUI applet that helps analyze the result of Kerala SSLC examination. All you need to input is the school code which generates the result report in PDF

• Clover EFI bootloader

  This is EFI-based bootloader for BIOS-based computers created as a replacement to EDK2/Duet bootloader http://www.tianocore.org. To compile it needs to place Clover sources into edk2/ folder.

• Album Art Downloader

  The Album Art Downloader is a program designed to make life easier for anyone who wishes to find and update their album art for their music collection. The sources for the pictures can be defined by creating plugin scripts.

• MediathekView

  Das Programm durchsucht die Mediatheken verschiedener öffentlich-rechtlicher Sender (3Sat, ARD, ARTE, KiKa, MDR, ORF, SRF, ZDF etc.), lädt Beiträge daraus herunter oder spielt diese ab (mit VLC Media Player oder mit einem Programm eigener Wahl). Es können auch Sendereihen/Serien abonniert werden.

• NonVisual Desktop Access

  A free and open source screen reader for the Microsoft Windows operating system.

During the last 8 years (since Dec. 2005) we have been working on developing a General-Purpose Visual Programming Language, Our goal is to present a tool for novice programmers and expert programmers at the same time.

The project development is a based on the implementation of new research ideas and getting feedback from our users.

We created the following movie today to present some of the PWCT features and how programmers can use it to create real world applications:

We are going to release PWCT 1.9 (Art) during the next 60 days with these features.