Linux Mint is a derivative distribution of Ubuntu. Its purpose, according to its Web site, "is to produce an elegant, up-to-date, and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution." Unfortunately, it falls short in at least one of those areas, and suffers from several other disappointing shortcomings.

The US Navy’s research and development and acquisition policy site at acquisition.navy.mil uses eZ Systems’ open source content management system to help civilian and military users access the Navy’s myriad policy documents. Before the switch to eZ Publish in November 2003, the site was an unorganized collection of hard-to-navigate static HTML pages. Today, IT project manager Tina Minor, who manages the system for DOD contractor Automation Technologies, says she really likes the customizability and low price of open source software.

Since slide shows are graphical themselves, most people associate them with GUI programs. Yet you can build slide shows just as effectively with some of the simplest and oldest of GNU/Linux tools. A case in point is LaTeX Beamer, which adds extensions to the classic LaTeX typesetting program to produce PDF presentations. Although LaTeX Beamer is capable of considerable complexity, you need to know surprisingly little in order to produce a slide show.

All Linux distributions have things in common, but many differ in software installation and updating. Gentoo Linux is based on Portage, SUSE uses YaST, Red Hat and Fedora opt for yum, Linspire prefers CNR…. Oh, and don’t forget the different package options: RPM, Debian, source, and more esoteric options. Smart Package Manager works with all major distributions, replacing native tools and installing different types of packages.

The OpenDocument Foundation, founded five years ago by Gary Edwards, Sam Hiser, and Paul "Buck" Martin (marbux) with the express purpose of representing the OpenDocument format in the "open standards process," has reversed course. It now supports the W3C’s Compound Document Format instead of its namesake ODF. Yet why this change of course has occurred is something of a mystery.

Many people are giving up blogging to try their hand at podcasting — creating a downloadable audio file that will play on any standard MP3 player. Recording, editing, and packaging a session isn’t very difficult but, until recently not very many tools existed to help you get the job done. Now Linux-friendly applications are starting to pop up everywhere.

As more and more traditional publishers accept digital images, artists are turning to free and open source software (FOSS) tools to create cartoons and illustrations.

flvorful.com brokers online video ad space and creates commercials for clients to embed in existing content, similar to television advertising. flvorful.com CEO Jake Varghese calls his company "AdSense for videos. It’s a way for video publishers to monetize their work." Publishers can create their own commercial content, or hire flvorful.com to create it for them, and then insert it before or in the middle of the videos. Varghese is a big proponent of open source; he says he wouldn’t use anything else to build his business.

The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which allows you to access and search a directory (another name for a specialized database or data repository that stores typed information about objects), is becoming a common component in Linux environments. If you’re looking for a Linux option to search a directory with LDAP, check out Luma.

When you’re programming a shell script, you often only need the current directory name, not the whole path that the pwd command returns. Here are four ways you can extract only the current directory.