In this article, we award 42 medals to superb open source educational software. We identify free software ideally suited for young people, parents, teachers, academics, and administrators – basically anyone involved in education.
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Category: Software
Best Free Voice Chat Software for Linux Gaming
It’s estimated that more than 1.4 billion people play computer games, with about 750 million of them participating in online gaming. That’s a colossal market for Linux to tap. The design of online games is diverse, ranging from simple text-based environments to the incorporation of complex graphics and immersive virtual worlds.
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Write and Play Interactive Fiction with Open Source Software
Interactive fiction is a form of computer game which shares many traits with fiction in book form, role-playing games and puzzle-solving. It’s one of the oldest forms of computer games. Here’s our recommendations.
Interactive fiction is a somewhat nebulous phrase. It can refer to text adventures where the player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed with text output. They are known as text adventures.
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Linux Means Business – Best Free Business Apps
A business application refers to any application that is important to running a business. The best business applications help an organization to improve how they run their operations, minimize costs, and improve workplace productivity. Sometimes business applications are thought to relate to office software suites which offer word processing, spreadsheet, database, presentation, and email applications. While office suites are very common, business applications extend far further afield.
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Open Source Alternatives to LastPass
We all face information overload. Whether you conduct business online, read for your job, or just read for pleasure, the internet is a vast source of information. Retaining that information on a long-term basis can be difficult. However, it is essential to recall certain items of information immediately. Passwords are one such example.
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5 Magnificent Linux Music Streamers
Digital streams almost totally command my music listening these days. Over the years I have amassed a large collection of CDs at considerable expense; most of them now sit neglected gathering dust. Almost all music streaming services fall short of the audio quality of CDs, but their popularity has more to do with sheer convenience than high-fidelity sound reproduction.
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Low-Spec Hardware? Try these Desktop Environments
Popular Linux distributions for beginners typically default to one of two desktop environments, KDE or GNOME. Both of these environments provide users with an intuitive and attractive desktop, as well as offering all the applications users love, ranging from multimedia software, games, administration programs, network tools, educational applications, utilities, artwork, web development tools and more. However, these two desktops focus more on providing users with a modern computing environment with all the bells and whistles, rather than minimising the amount of system resources they use.
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Free Office Suites that Cut The Mustard
An office suite is a collection of related software for knowledge workers. The software is distributed together in a single package, with a consistent graphical interface, and typically with strong integration between the different components.
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Pick of the Bunch: Console Internet Applications
A console application is computer software which is able to be used via a text-only computer interface, the command line interface, or a text-based interface included within a graphical user interface operating system, such as a terminal emulator (such as GNOME Terminal or the aforementioned Terminator). Whereas a graphical user interface application generally involves using the mouse and keyboard (or touch control), with a console application the primary (and often only) input method is the keyboard.
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5 Best Open Source Board Games to Play Online
I had a panache for abstract strategy games such as chess and draughts, as well as word games. I can still never resist a game of Escape from Colditz, a strategy card and dice-based board game, or Risk; two timeless multi-player strategy board games. But Catan remains my favourite board game.
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Excellent Free Roguelike Games
Roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing games. It literally means “a game like Rogue”. Rogue is a dungeon crawling video game, first released in 1980 by developers Michel Toy, Glenn Wichman and Ken Arnold. The game stood out from the crowd by being fiendishly addictive. The game’s goal was to retrieve the Amulet of Yendor, hidden deep in the 26th level, and ascend back to the top, all set in a world based on Dungeons & Dragons.
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Mobile Phone Management Made Easy
Mobile phone users should not regard their computer only as the means of recharging their phone, or transferring files to and from the phone’s storage. There’s a lot more than you can do with your Linux box. This article illustrates some good open source tools that let you manage your mobile phone.
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Keep a Watchful Eye with these Console Based Process Viewers
Do you need to monitor your systems, but top doesn’t provide enough information. Check out these feature-laden top alternatives.
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Focus on Your Writing by Using Markdown Editors
Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It is designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write. Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it is not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format.
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Experience Home Computers that Missed the Big Time
Home computers were a class of personal computer which reached the market in the late 1970s, and became immensely popular in the following decade, selling many millions of units. The market was dominated for many years by a small number of 8-bit machines, in particular the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and Acorn BBC Micro.
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5 Highly Promising Cross-Platform IDEs
An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to programmers for software development. Many coders learn to code using a text editor but in time they move towards using an IDE as this type of software application makes the art of coding quicker and more efficient. For example, IDEs have semantic knowledge of the programming language which highlights coding problems while typing. Compiling is ‘on the fly’ and debugging is integrated. Some languages are built around IDE support.
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24 Extra Hot Free Linux Games (Part 3 of 3)
For many individuals, computer gaming is nowadays an essential part of everyday life. This should not be seen as a negative. Whilst violent computer games have sometimes been identified as contributory factors in criminal activity, and undeniably they can be very addictive, it is important to recognise the real benefits that games offer besides simply providing a means of great entertainment.
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Top 5 Lightweight Web Servers
There is a good range of lightweight web servers released under an open source license. To provide an insight in the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 high quality open source lightweight web servers. Hopefully there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to run a web server.
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5 Best Alternative Free Linux File Managers
The file manager is one of those essential applications for many users which is almost impossible to function without. Linux is blessed with a large range of file managers which help to make file management a breeze. Our File Manager Group Test identified mature, polished file managers. However, for this feature, we wanted to select alternative file managers which are definitely worth trying but may have been missed given that they receive little coverage in Linux publications, and are not included or installed by default in mainstream Linux distributions.
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24 Extra Hot Free Linux Games (Part 2 of 3)
This article is the second instalment in a three part series, identifying games that are worth giving a whirl. We have again tried to cover a wide range of game genres. Hopefully there will be something in this article which will be of interest to any type of gamer.
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