If you’ve ever got the feeling that the GIMP is too complicated for casual image editing, then you would have looked for alternatives and found apps like Paint.NET. However, Paint.NET isn’t cross-platform, so you can’t run it on Linux or Mac.

Pinta, however, is an open source, cross-platform image editor that is inspired by Paint.NET.

Pinta – A Great Alternative to GIMP and Paint.NET

Pinta is aimed at casual users who find GIMP a bit too complicated for daily editing needs. It’s modeled after Paint.NET – which is also aimed at casual users.

The latest release (Pinta 0.2) has a few general improvements over the last one:

• Command Line Open - Passing an image name at the command line will now automatically open the image in Pinta.  [Jonathan Pobst]
• Multithreaded Adjustments/Effects - Adjustments and Effects will now use all available cpus/cores to allow for faster processing. The default is one thread per cpu/core. This can be toggled from the command line with -rt=X, where X is desired number of threads.  [Jonathan Pobst]
• Layer Properties Live Preview - Changing values in the Layer Properties dialog will be immediately reflected on the canvas.  [Greg Lowe]
• Translucent Colors - The color picker widget now allows for setting the desired opacity of a color.  [Joe Hillenbrand]
• OS X Integration - When running Pinta on OS X, Pinta will now use the global menu bar.  [Juergen Obernolte]
• Various Bug Fixes

Also, Pinta 0.2 also has a few new tools added to the toolbar:

	Zoom  [Olivier Dufour]
	Paint Bucket  [Jonathan Pobst]
	Color Replacer  [Jonathan Pobst]
	Line  [Jonathan Pobst]
	Pan  [Jonathan Pobst]

You can read about these and a whole host of new features in Pinta’s release notes.

Downloading Pinta

Pinta is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. Installation on Linux is as simple as grabbing the pre-built package (for Ubuntu or SuSE) from the download section of the website and installing it via the package manager.

For Windows,
First install GTK# for Windows, and then use the installer from the download section.

For OSX,
You’ll need to install Mono for OSX before you use the installer in the download section.

Pinta is released under the MIT X11 open source license.

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Hexxeh has released the latest ChromiumOS build that’s he’s come up with – codenamed Flow.
The notable changes this version are the Nvidia support, customisable app menus and auto updater.

New Features in Flow

Flow boasts quite a number of cool features:

• User-customisable menus (rearrange, add, delete apps on your own menu)
• Automatic updates via the Velocity engine (with an all new interface from what you saw in the BETA, it’s now been integrated into the browser)
• nVidia GPU support (this includes ION, and it’s fully hardware accelerated)
• Realtek RTL8187SE support (RTL8192E is coming as an update soon)
• Audio fix
• Flash fix
• Bookmark Sync fix
• Power indicator fix (as long as it worked in Cherry)
• Battery life improvements
• Increased image size to 2GB (1GB was becoming too restrictive, needed to do this to add more hardware support, sorry!)
• Webcam support (to test this, right click on a YouTube video and then click settings)

Download and Installation

Hexxeh’s ChromiumOS runs right off a USB flash drive. To install Flow, you will require a 2GB flash drive (minimum), but the download size is only 327MB.
You can download the USB image right from here.

Find out how to write usb images to your USB drive here.

Ever wanted a nice, easy application to create cute avatars for yourself online?

MeMaker is a small Linux app that lets you create your own customized avatar for yourself.

MeMaker – the Free Avatar Making App

MeMaker is an extremely easy and fun to use app for creating your own avatar.

In MeMaker, you can change your avatar’s head, hair, eyes, mouth, ears, glasses, nose, eyebrows, hat, accessories, and beard in one easy to use interface. Once you’ve created your own avatar, you can save it on your computer.

Where do I use my Avatar?

Once created and saved, you can use your new avatar wherever your want. Use it as your

• Login picture
• Messenger display pic
• Email signature
• Facebook profile photo

…the options are endless.
You could even print it out and stick it on your door!

Download MeMaker

You can find out more about MeMaker from it’s website.

If you’re using Ubuntu, just Click here to install MeMaker.

Optionally, you can grab the source code available on the website and build it yourself on your computer.

Did you like MeMaker? Let us know about it in the comments (you can show us your avatar, too )

A while ago, we looked at an amazingly tiny Linux distribution – TinyCore Linux. At just 11MB, the stuff it managed to pack in was quite something.

Now we have something EVEN smaller for you – the 1.44MB KolibriOS – a full blown operating system written in assembly.

How the Hell did they make it that small??

KolibriOS is written completely in assembly – absolutely no high-level programming languages like C or Python. This means (apart from being hideously difficult to write), it’s ridiculously small and amazingly fast.

KolibriOS forked off MenuetOS, another hobby OS written in assembly in 2004.
(Menuet is still going strong, but is a little big at 22MB )

Is Kolibri a full-fledged OS?

Yes, KolibriOS is a full operating system with a GUI. It even packs in more features that TinyCore, which is nearly ten times it’s size.
This is what the desktop looks like:

And believe it or not, it’s got ATI video drivers!

Wireless? Network drivers? Sound?

You can forget about wireless, though there apparently is support for SoundBlaster cards and some network cards.
But hey, you shouldn’t be complaining – it’s 1.44 megabytes.

But when it does work, it works like a charm. Have an old 100MHz pentium you want to resurrect? This will run faster on it than anything else runs on your new Quad Core box. Believe it.

More information, Downloads

You can find out more about KolibriOS from it’s website. The Wiki is a good place to start.

You can download a copy of KolibriOS from here.
Note that there is an English and a Russian version – choose the correct one.

The latest version of one of the most popular Ubuntu-tweaking tools is out. Ubuntu Tweak has reached version 0.5.

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5 is a Major Release with Many New Features

Ubuntu Tweak has been a must-download tool for all Ubuntu users for quite a while now.
It does it’s job well – exposing hidden options and revealing features that are difficult to find through the GUI.

The latest version, 0.5, adds a ton of new features and brings in some notable changes: [From the official Ubuntu Tweak site]

Major changes:

• Drop the support of Ubuntu 9.04 and before
• Use native icons in the UI
• Migrate from policykit to policykit-1, no C code any more
• Support dynamic-modules, only load supported modules
• Redesign the sidebar and titlebar

New features:

• Application Center: improved from Add/Remove, supports online data sync
• Source Center: improved from Third-Party Source, supports online data sync
• Update Manager: a simple but more human-readable update manager
• Improve the computer page, add “Change Hostname” feature
• Add indicator-session dialog control
• Add the menu and button icon options to gnomesettings
• Add the show desktop icon again
• Add the option to disable user list in gdm

Download Ubuntu Tweak 0.5

Ubuntu Tweak 0.5 can be downloaded by following the instructions here.

Find out more from the website, and tell us what you tweaked in the comments section below!

Usually, when one says “desktop search”, they mean searching your hard drive for file names.
But what if you want to search your computer for a document that contains a particular term?

If you ‘re the kind of person who stores your docs on your computer, then Docfetcher is your best bet yet…

DocFetcher Searches Inside your Docs, Far and Wide

DocFetcher is an application that’s built to scan the insides of documents on your hard drive for a search term, enabling you to find old/lost documents by content rather than by filename (while is very often cryptic and non-descriptive).

DocFetcher can first create a permanent index for large quantities of documents that don’t change often, or a temporary index for small folders with a few documents.
Once the index is created, DocFetcher takes about a minute to search through 200 documents.

It comes with a small daemon that runs in the background, watching folders for new versions of documents, and updating the index each time you open DocFetcher.

Portable Version that you can Carry Around

DocFetcher also has a portable version, that contains both Linux and Windows binaries. So one can dump all their documents into a single folder along with DocFetcher and carry it around on a CD/DVD/USB stick.

DocFetcher has a number of other features, including:

• Regular expression based exclusion of files from indexing.
• Various file operations on the document repository can be performed through DocFetcher’s interface (e.g. creating folders, inserting new files).
• Preview panel with search-term highlighting and a simple built-in web browser.
• Search results can be sorted and filtered by different criteria (filetype, filesize, path, etc.).
• Global hotkey to bring DocFetcher to the front.

Supported Formats

DocFetcher supports a wide variety of formats:

• HTML and plain text (both customizable)
• Portable Document Format (pdf)
• Microsoft Office (doc, xls, ppt)
• Microsoft Office 2007 (docx, xlsx, pptx)
• OpenOffice.org Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress (odt, ods, odg, odp)
• Rich Text Format (rtf)
• AbiWord (abw, abw.gz, zabw)
• Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (chm)
• Microsoft Visio (vsd)
• Scalable Vector Graphics (svg)

Download

You can download this great app from here.
It runs on both Linux and Windows.

Be sure to tell us about it in the comments!

The Mozilla project has released the latest version of their ever popular open-source web browser – Firefox 3.6.

Boasting a whole lot of new features, this version of Firefox has been cooking for a while now, and we’re happy to say the final release is finally available for download.

New Features

Firefox 3.6 has a number of small enhancements and bug fixes, as well as some major new features:

• 70+ languages are supported
• Quick-themes. Change your Firefox theme without a restart with Personas
• Protection from outdated plugins – Firefox warns you when you’re using outdated versions of plugins that could cause a security risk.
• Support for full screen open native video. This means when Youtube finally decides to support OGG video streaming through HTML5′s <video> tag, Firefox is ready.
• Web developers can now indicate that scripts are to be run asynchronously – boosting performance greatly
• Support for new CSS attributes – Gradients, Background sizing, pointer events
• Support for new DOM and HTML5 specifications including the Drag & Drop API and the File API, which allow for more interactive web pages.
• Component directory is now locked down – third party applications are now less likely to crash Firefox

Download

Firefox 3.6 is available for free download from here.
You can also check out Mozilla’s release notes here for more details.