Category: Open Source

I’ve used tinf (tiny inflate) library for a while now for decompressing deflate stream in my program. It is considerably smaller than the full blown zlib which does both compression and decompression.

Tinf is suitable where space is largely taken into consideration. It is compact enough to include within your software project. The drawback is that tinf is slightly slower than it’s zlib inflate() counterpart. Of course this assumes that you are a C-coder and does lots of software development in C, in which you would benefit directly from tinf library.

Sources :

1. Download tinf library
2. zlib official website

Openoffice 2.0 Release Candidate has been released!

So without wasting any time, I download this amazing office suite from Openoffice.org.

Yeah it worked great! Every computer in my house only use Openoffice instead of Microsoft Office even in Windows-only computer, simply because it is smaller and contains most of the thing that my family (and I) ever need!

Easy, simple, no bloated feature, no clippit that hangs around wasting your CPU resources.

DOSBox 0.63 has been downloaded 1,000,000 times!

For the uninitiated, DOSBox is a DOS Emulator designed specifically to run your old DOS games. Yup, that’s right, old DOS games back in 1990s and late 1980s. Why play old DOS games? We got newer and latest games right here!

First of all, personal preference, some people like to play old games because they simply liked it! Though some of them require some extra reading in the games’ manual, there people who prefer the old dos games.

Second, Older games tends to bring sentimental feeling to it, as you can recall yourself in your younger days, how many are your remembered playing Prince of persia (the original one) and Dune II?

Finally, Old DOS games tends to put gameplay more than high-tech graphic representation than the latest games, well this is not a bad thing because the scene of PC gaming have changed and has been influence by popular gaming console, but there are some people who prefers one over another. For example, The Sims demonstrate that there are people who prefer gameplay factor rather than extensive graphics, and its popular until now.

The only problem is, to find a suitable environment to play your dos games, and I’m used to have the DOS 6.12 in my pc just to play DOS games (and my soundcard has DOS driver), but now with DOSBox, I can play those games right in my GNU/Linux box! Well, DOSBox is available in other operating system too, including MS Windows.

Using DOSBox is easy! you just run the DOSBox executables, and mount your games directory as one of the available DOS drive, pretty simple, and your game will be playable as if it in a real DOS environment.

Happy (DOS) gaming!

Do you miss the pleasure of viewing your friends’ webcam after you migrated to FOSS Operating System? Well, now you can try gaim-vv!

Gaim-vv is a fork of the multi-protocol messenger gaim project which support webcam and voice chat, which will eventually be backported to the main gaim project, when the functionality is complete.

Though currently only supports viewing webcam (no broadcasting support yet!) from Yahoo and MSN protocol, the main project of the Gaim-vv is to support full webcam and voice functionality of any IM protocol by developing a general framework to do that.

I’ve tried the latest release of gaim-vv, and i find it stable and useful enough to view my friends’ webcam. You can download gaim-vv and it’s depending library at gaim-vv website, make sure that you read the documentations first!

For those who are using Ubuntu and Debian, you can add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list file :

#gaim-vv
deb http://people.debian.org/~smimram/debian unstable main
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~smimram/debian unstable main

Joomla!, a content management system based on the popular Mambo Open Source is now available for download. This marks the first Joomla! release after a group of Mambo former developers decided to form a new project over a dispute with Miro International.

Overall, the current version of Joomla! (1.0) is not much different than Mambo 4.5.2, be it the installation, administraton, and the main content page. The most noticable changes is mainly to the name Mambo being replaced by Joomla! to reflect the new directons.

According to Joomla! website, Mambo modules, themes and database (except patches) can be use with Joomla! 1.0. However the Joomla! developers made no claim about its compatibility with Mambo in future releases, cited that both of the projects is heading different directions now.

Well, I don’t find appealing reasons for me to switch to Joomla! right now, hope the next version of Joomla will implement features that was held back in Mambo Open Source.

Here’s a link for those interested to download Joomla! 1.0