GIMP 2.2.17:The ultimate Ps replacement!

GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It has many capabilities. It can be used as a simple paint program, an expert quality photo retouching program, an online batch processing system, a mass production image renderer, an image format converter, etc. GIMP is expandable and extensible. It is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions to do just about anything. The advanced scripting interface allows everything from the simplest task to the most complex image manipulation procedures to be easily scripted.

Features and Capabilities:

Painting

1. Full suite of painting tools including Brush, Pencil, Airbrush, Clone, etc.
2. Sub-pixel sampling for all paint tools for high quality anti-aliasing
3. Extremely powerful gradient editor and blend tool
4. Supports custom brushes and patterns

System

• Tile based memory management so image size is limited only by available disk space
• Virtually unlimited number of images open at one time

Advanced Manipulation

• Full alpha channel support
• Layers and channels
• Multiple Undo/Redo (limited only by diskspace)
• Editable text layers
• Transformation tools including rotate, scale, shear and flip
• Selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, free, fuzzy and intelligent
• Advanced path tool doing bezier and polygonal selections.
• Transformable paths, transformable selections.
• Quickmask to paint a selection and more…

Bugs fixed in GIMP 2.2.17:

1. Fixed regression in PSD load plug-in (bug #456042)
2. Fixed crash when loading a corrupt PSD file (bug #327444)
3. Work around for Pango appending ” Not-Rotated” to font names

Download: Gimp 2.2.17

µTorrent 1.7 Build 3341 stable.

uTorrent is an efficient and feature rich BitTorrent client for Windows sporting a very small footprint. It was designed to use as little cpu, memory and space as possible while offering all the functionality expected from advanced clients.

Features:

• Multiple simultaneous downloads
• Configurable bandwidth scheduler
• Global and per-torrent speed limiting
• Quick-resumes interrupted transfers
• RSS Downloader
• Trackerless support (Mainline DHT)

Changelog:

• Change: use cached scrape stats if scrapes fail (up to 24 hours)
• Change: “When µTorrent has reached the seeding goal” -> “When µTorrent Reaches Seeding Goal” in Queue preferences to make capitalization consistant
• Change: Implement auto-resizing when header a divider in the addtorrent dialog treeview is double-clicked
• Change: Rework accelerator keys of toplevel menus in the download list right-click menu so that there are no duplicate accelerator keys
• Change: Use 48×48 icon
• Fix: crashes with addtorrent dialog treeview with torrents with a very large number of files in the same folder (100+)

Download: µTorrent 1.7 Build 3341 (Freeware)
Link: Home Page

Sun looks to steal Linux thunder with Project Indiana

   Looking to steal thunder from the Linux juggernaut or at least catch the same wave, Sun plans to release binaries in Spring 2008 for its OpenSolaris Unix platform, similar to how Linux is offered, as part of the company’s Project Indiana. Sun officials discussed the effort at a meeting in San Francisco on Thursday. The company wants to mimic the Linux distribution model as a way to grow the market for Solaris. “Over the last five or 10 years, orders of magnitude more people in the world know Linux environment than know Solaris. This is a problem,” said Ian Murdock, Sun’s chief OS strategist and a former CTO of the Linux Foundation.

Having already offered up Solaris to open source via the OpenSolaris project, Sun will expand its proselytizing of the platform by releasing binaries. Project Indiana seeks to combine what Sun described as the best of Solaris — its enterprise-class capabilities, innovation, and backward compatibility — with the best of Linux — its distribution model, community, and its being free and open source. “Even with open source, the binary platform is the key thing of value,” said Murdock.

View: The full story

EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.15 Released!

EnGarde Secure Linux is a highly-secure open source server operating system built on a foundation of Security Enhanced Linux SELinux policies. EnGarde Secure Linux incorporates security at all levels by drawing on best-of-breed open source tools like Postfix, BIND, and the LAMP stack.

The Guardian Digital team, which is in charge of the development and maintenance of Engarde Linux, has just announced the release of EnGarde Secure Community 3.0.15 (Version 3.0, Release 15). According to Digital Guardian this new release comes not only with many updated packages and bug fixes, but also with some feature enhancements like those to the Guardian Digital WebTool and the SELinux policy, and a few new other features.

Highlights:

• Mod_proxy for Apache available via the ‘libapache-mod_proxy’ package
• Three new instructional documents:Guardian Digital WebTool Translation Instructions , Using PHP Version 5 on EnGarde Secure Linux and Building Packages on EnGarde Secure Linux
• New packages included, such as dovecot (1.0.1), mysql++ (2.2.3), pptpd (1.3.0), rkhunter (1.2.9), sox (12.17.7)
• Latest stable versions for asterisk (1.4.5), clamav (0.90.3),kernel (2.6.21), libpng (1.2.18), libselinux (1.34.7), postfix (2.4.30, ppp (2.4.4), samba (3.0.25a) and many others
• Many bug-fixes

Regarding the bug-fixing, the Digital Guardian team has done a pretty good job. For example, they’ve addressed a bug in the Snort graph generation subsystem which would cause high CPU load. According to them, the users of EnGarde Secure Linux will just have to run the Guardian Digital Secure Network Update Agent for their system to be patched automatically and this way to get rid of the unwanted bug. There are also many other bugs fixed in this distro, such as Thunderbird’s, which couldn’t save an e-mail into “Sent” folder using IMAP, the bug caused by enabling PAM in sshd config which caused dynamic linker error or the fact that php5 upgrade didn’t work.

Download: EnGarde Secure Linux :: Mirrors

Italian Parliament to Perform Major Switch from Windows to Linux

According to some recent rumors, the Italian Parliament has decided to switch to Linux more than 3,500 desktop computers and 200 servers. The Linux distribution that would be most probably used is said to be Novel’s SuSE Linux, even though many considered Ubuntu as more appropriate.

The migration process is said to start this September and the Italian officials estimate it would take almost two years to accomplish this.

Pietro Folena, member of the Italian Communist party, who earlier this year proposed the switch, considers the size of this migration to open source an important case study. According to him, this “will present all public offices with best practices.” Pietro Folena also said he estimates that this switch would make the Parliament’s PCs almost 90 % cheaper and he expects larger savings to be achieved with the servers. According to an interview for The Inquirer, Folena stated:

“The savings are important, but the primary motive for this decision is to gain freedom. Freedom from single technology, freedom from a single software owner and a single contractor, freedom to develop our own applications and freedom from viruses.”

Some unofficial estimations reveal that, by switching to Linux, the Italian Parliament would be able to save more than EUR 3 million every year, since the Windows license for each machine is said to cost about EUR 900/year. There are also many other technical reasons, as well as the fact that an open source solution would better reflect the idea of democracy as opposite to the proprietary software (this one being in contrasts with the meaning of democracy itself).