Issue #149 / Apr 2013

Simon is a sophisticated speech recognition tool with easy access to two powerful speech recognition engines, Julius and CMU Sphinx.

A Perl script calls various plugins that sniff around on FTP and HTTP servers run by the major Linux distributions to discover when Fedora, Debian, and other distros update their packages.

The market for good image editing programs for Linux is pretty much saturated. Despite this, BrainDistrict has dared to launch two commercial programs: IFX-Supreme and PaintSupreme.

Defragfs optimizes files on a system, allowing videos to load faster and large archives to open in the blink of an eye.

Security applications like antivirus protectors respond to events, rather than preventing them from happening, but the best security in Linux is architectural – that is, in its configuration.

The Raspberry Pi computer has rekindled interest in tinkering with hardware and created a market for products combining the tiny computer with customized software.

Chronicler Zack Brown reports on the latest news, views, dilemmas, and developments within the Linux kernel community.