If you live in a Microsoft Windows environment, you may have to work with remote Windows servers. One feature that Microsoft Windows provides for Windows clients is the Terminal Services Client application. The Terminal Services Client application allows remote Windows clients to connect to a Windows server and interact with the server desktop as if they were on the server console. This feature allows clients to run applications on the server without having to physically be at the server. This is a great way to share server applications for clients, as well as give system administrators easy access to remote Windows servers.

Believe it or not, Ubuntu also contains software that allows you to connect as a client to a Microsoft Windows terminal server. The Terminal Server Client package works just like the Windows version, allowing you to connect to Windows servers and interact with the server desktop.

Click Applications -> Internet -> Terminal Server Client to see the Settings window. In the Settings window you can start a new session by following these steps:

1. Enter the address of the remote Windows server. This can be a host address if you’re on a Windows network, or the IP address of the server.

2. Select the protocol to use. Terminal Server uses the remote desktop protocol (RDP) to connect to Microsoft Windows servers. There are two common versions, RDP 4.0 (which is called RDP) supported in Windows NT servers and later, and RDP 5.0 (called RDP5) used in Windows 2000 servers and later. The RDP5 protocol provides additional features, so use it if possible. The Terminal Server Client also supports the X Windows display manager protocol (XDMCP), the virtual network computing (VNC) protocol, and the independent computing architecture (ICA) protocols if they’re installed on your system. These protocols allow you to connect to remote UNIX, Linux, and Citrix servers.

3. Enter the username to log in with. This can be either a domain name if the server is in a Windows domain or a local username for the server.

4. Enter the password for the username.

5. Optionally, enter the domain. If the server is part of a domain and you’re using a domain user account to log in with, you’ll need to notify the server which domain to use.

6. Optionally, enter a client hostname. If you want to emulate accessing the server from a specific client hostname, enter it here. Otherwise, leave this field blank.

7. Select a protocol file, if available. The protocol file allows you to save settings related to the connection for use in later connections.

8. Save the connection settings. You can save the connection settings by clicking the Save As button, then recall them for another session using the Open button.

9. Click the Connect button to start the session.

The Terminal Server Client software attempts to establish a connection with the remote Windows server, then logs in with the login information you provided. When the login is complete, the server desktop appears in a window.

The entire desktop window for the server session appears within the Terminal Server Client window. You have full control of the session on the desktop. You can move the mouse to launch applications and type on the keyboard to enter commands. When you close the session, log out from the server but do not shut it down. The remote session works as if you were logged in from the server console. Selecting the shutdown menu item will indeed shut down the server!

Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets

Instant messaging (IM) has become the new killer app for the younger generation. America Online (AOL) provided one of the first popular instant messaging services, named AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM. Others include ICQ, MSN, Yahoo!, and Google. A wide variety of computer operating systems, including Linux, support these various services. Ubuntu uses the Pidgin instant messenger client software. Pidgin allows you to connect to a host of instant messaging services to interact in your favorite IM environment.

Not that long ago, the Pidgin application was called GAIM, but copyright litigation forced the GAIM Open Source project to change its name, and they came up with Pidgin. You may still find documentation on the Internet and in books referring to the GAIM package. Don’t get confused by the name change; they’re the same product.



Using the Pidgin Instant Messenger
To start Pidgin, choose Applications -> Internet -> Pidgin Instant Messenger. The first time you start Pidgin it detects that there are no accounts configured, so the Accounts Management dialog box appears. To configure a new IM account in Pidgin, follow these steps:
1. Click the Add button in the Accounts dialog box. The Add Account dialog box appears.

2. In the Protocol drop-down list box, select the IM network you want to use. Your options are AIM, bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, GroupWise, ICQ, IRC, MSN, MySpaceIM, QQ, Simple, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo, and Zephyr.

3. In the Screen Name textbox, enter the login name for your IM account.

4. In the Password textbox, enter your IM password for this account.

5. In the Local Alias textbox, enter the name you actually want to show in people’s IM clients, unless you want to use your screen name. Often people prefer to appear as alias names rather than use their login name in IM sessions.

6. Check the Remember Password check box so that you don’t have to enter your password every time you connect to this IM service. Remember to log out or use the Lock Screen option if you walk away from your computer, just in case someone gets it into his or her head to go play a trick and send messages to people by using your IM client.

7. If you get email through the selected IM service and want to know when new mail has arrived, check the New Mail Notifications check box. If mail arrives while Pidgin is running, you’ll get a notification about the new mail.

8. If you want to use a tiny picture as a buddy icon, click the Open button next to the Buddy Icon label and navigate to the picture you want to use. If you don’t assign a picture for the buddy icon, Pidgin will use a blank image icon.

9. If you want access to the more advanced options for this IM service, click the Advanced tab. This tab provides additional options depending on your IM service, such as alternative servers and TCP ports.

10. When you finish entering your information, click Save to add this IM account to your accounts list.

Go through this process for each IM account you want to use with Pidgin (Pidgin can monitor multiple IM accounts). When you finish, the Accounts dialog box shows all of the IM accounts you’ve configured, and the Buddy List window appears.

In the Accounts dialog box, click the box in the Enabled column for the accounts you want
to automatically log into when Pidgin starts. You can modify the account settings at any time by selecting the account in the Accounts dialog box and clicking the Modify button. After you start a session, the Buddy List window displays your active connections. If you close the Buddy List window, the Pidgin icon appears on your panel as the program runs in background. You can open the Buddy List window by right-clicking this icon.



Pidgin Preferences
You can customize several features in Pidgin. Access the Pidgin Preferences dialog box by starting Pidgin from the Panel menu, then right-clicking the Pidgin icon in the Panel System area and selecting Preferences. The Preferences dialog box contains seven tabbed pages of settings you can customize:

• Interface: Select how Pidgin interfaces with the desktop by specifying when the Panel icon should appear, how new IM conversation windows appear, and whether to use tabbed windows or separate windows for multiple conversations.

• Conversations: Set features for your conversations, such as formatting, fonts, and notifying buddies when you start typing a message.

Smiley Themes: Manage multiple themes for inserting smiley icons in your messages.

• Sounds: Configure how you want Pidgin to notify you of conversation events, such as when buddies log in or log out, when you’re offered a new message, and when others talk.

• Network: Set additional TCP properties for a specific network, along with any specialized settings for network proxy servers you may need to go through.

• Logging: Select whether you want Pidgin to log your IM conversations and, if so, how to log them.

• Status/Idle: Configure how Pidgin detects when you’re away from the workstation and change your IM status.

Make your IM life easier by taking a few minutes to customize how you want Pidgin to work in your particular environment.

Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets

The world of Internet phone service has exploded with the popularity of broadband Internet connectivity in the home. Being able to reliably place and receive phone calls to anywhere around the world from your Internet connection is pretty cool and can save you some money. Ubuntu includes the Ekiga Internet phone software to turn your Ubuntu workstation into a telephone that can reach the world! The default Ekiga Internet phone software is a redesign of the old GNOME GnomeMeeting package for Internet voice and video conferencing applications. Ekiga was expanded to provide the same basic functions as the more popular Skype software, along with compatibility with Microsoft NetMeeting. This compatibility allows you to join in conferences with your Microsoft friends.

To start Ekiga, click on Applications -> Internet -> Ekiga Softphone. The first time you

start Ekiga, you get a series of configuration windows to help you set up your system. Follow these steps to configure your Ekiga software:

1. Click Forward to start the wizard.
The Ekiga wizard may skip to step 3 automatically if it detects your full username in your Ubuntu username configuration.

2. If prompted, type the name you want to be identified by on the network. Other Ekiga users see you listed by the name you enter here.

3. Click Forward to continue. The wizard proceeds to the Ekiga Account page.

4. Type your Ekiga account username and password where prompted. If you don’t have an account yet, click the button to go to the Ekiga web site (www.ekiga.net) and register for a free account. If you prefer, you can use the Ekiga Softphone with other Internet phone providers and skip this step. After installing Ekiga you’ll need to refer to your specific provider’s instructions for configuring the software.

5. Click Forward to continue.

6. In the resulting Connection Type window, select the type of Internet connection
your system uses, then click Forward.
The configuration wizard goes through a series of windows to automatically determine
hardware and software specifics of your system.

7. For each subsequent window, click Forward after the relevant determination or
detection is completed.
The series of windows includes the following:

• NAT Type: Determines whether a network address translation (NAT) server
is in place between your system and the Internet. Remote Ekiga users who
want to call to you must be able to access your system from the Internet. If you
use a NAT for Internet connectivity, your network address is the address of
the NAT, not your system. You’ll need to connect to a remote server for them
to access you directly. Ekiga takes care of this for you.

• Audio Manager: Detects the software that controls your audio applications.
For Ubuntu, this software is called ALSA.

• Audio Devices: Detect the audio input and output devices on your system.
The Ekiga software will most likely succeed in detecting these devices with
no intervention on your part. If you have more than one audio input or output
device, you can select which one to use for Ekiga.

• Video Manager: Detects the video manager software on your system. For
most Ubuntu, this software is Video4Linux (V4L2).

• Video Devices: Determines whether a video input device (webcam) is connected
to your system.

8. Click the Apply button to accept the settings and start Ekiga.

After finishing the configuration, the main Ekiga window appears, listening for incoming calls and waiting for you to place a call.

When you don’t want the Ekiga window on your desktop, you can close it and keep Ekiga running in the background. It appears on your desktop panel as an icon, indicating that it’s still running. Click the icon for the main Ekiga window to appear. Right-clicking the icon allows you to perform several functions, such as place a new call, set your availability status, or look up a phone number in your phone book. When a new call comes in, the icon will light up and you’ll hear a sound.



After you’re registered you can participate via four communication types: Softphone-to-Softphone: Communicate with remote SIP users via their SIP address—even with users on different SIP servers. The Ekiga SIP server will forward SIP calls to the remote server and accept calls from remote SIP servers. You can make and receive SIP calls at no cost with your Ekiga account.

• Softphone-to-Real Phone: Place calls to regular telephone numbers using your Ekiga Softphone. You must register a separate account at the Ekiga website and pay any relevant charges you accrue for your calls.

• Real Phone-to-Softphone: Receive calls from regular telephones using a phone number you purchase from Ekiga. The phone number can be located in any country! When the number receives an incoming call, Ekiga will route the call to your SIP connection.

• Text messaging: Send instant messages to any SIP address on any SIP server via the Chat window in the Ekiga Softphone.

Source of Information : Wiley Ubuntu Linux Secrets

Using FreeBoo, you can restore and boot different operating systems across a network and replace proprietary solutions such as Rembo.

Administrating large installations of computer desktops requires many tedious system reparations due to software updates, hardware fixes, user mistakes and viruses. To reduce costs, some enterprises adopt restrictive IT politics. But, if your business cannot afford a highly secure and restrictive environment, and you want to provide your many users with dual-boot capacity, desktop administration privileges and the possibility to execute a large amount of different software, you probably are using Rembo.

This article presents FreeBoo, an open architecture that provides you with a dual-boot system of secure desktop images. FreeBoo is based on network boot, provides image restoration and allows hot boot. With FreeBoo, any malicious software installation done on a desktop by a previous user can be overwritten seamlessly.



Image Restoring and Dual Boot
Many IT departments’ efforts are dedicated to the time-consuming task of repairing end-user desktops. For this task, most IT systems use open-source imaging systems that exist today, such as SystemImager, partimage, FileZilla, clonezilla, Frisbee, rsync, rdiff-backup, ADIOS and so on, or their commercial equivalents, including Norton Ghost, Active, True Image and Image. All these tools create a compressed image of a client’s hard drive data and save it in case a future data recovery is necessary. An image is the complete copy of a filesystem, and it usually is stored on a backup server. When image changes are small, incremental backup is used to improve performance.

Imaging systems use well-known IETF protocols to transfer data from client to server or vice versa. They also include many functionalities for image management, with easy-to-use GUIs. IT departments in charge of large installations also use them to clone OS images onto several identical computers and to update systems with new patches. In general, this software requires a high level of expertise, works basically on-demand and runs with a client program. This last feature is very important, because it assumes that the client computer is executing with specific conditions. Typically, this means the client always executes the same operating system.

At our university, computer labs can boot either MS Windows or Linux operating systems, and students select the desired partition using Rembo. Other PC-compatible dual-boot options include Norton BootMagic, OSL2000 or the MSTBOOT commercial systems and the GRUB open-source software solution. But, none of these tools can dual boot from the network. Rembo is the only existing tool that provides the option of restoring any of the computer’s saved images. And, very important, once the image is recovered, the computer boots it directly. Rembo is a commercial evolution of the open source BP Batch Project, recently integrated into the IBM Tivoli suite. Rembo introduces local disk caches for fast image restoration, is able to use multicast messages and can be programmed using the Rembo-C scripting language.



FreeBoo Architecture
FreeBoo is proposed as an open-source, alternative solution to Rembo. Instead of open-source software, FreeBoo is an architecture built from many existing open-source programs. In fact, the number of new lines of code is insignificant. We have written only eight simple scripts and have used the urldecoder script authored by Heiner Steven. The open protocols used include TFTP, DHCP, HTTP and NFS. And, the open-source code, running either on the server or client includes PXELinux, rsync, partimage, Apache, Netcat, links2 and gensplash.

To illustrate the use of FreeBoo, let’s assume the following scenario: ten or more desktops connected by LAN with a remote, non-accessible server room, using a PXE-compliant NIC. The desktops boot in three phases. The first phase is similar to a thin-client boot. In the second phase, the user selects a boot option, and the necessary image data is sent to the client. Finally, in the third phase, the client computer boots the user-selected OS.



Thin-Client Boot Phase
To build a FreeBoo system, you first need to configure your client’s BIOS to boot from the network and to dedicate a server for PXE. You must start the DHCP and TFTP dæmons on your server and use the Pxelinux.0 file as the PXE primary bootstrap.

The main consideration regarding your thin-client configuration is the actual image properties. Because it is only a temporary image, let’s configure a small embedded Gentoo Linux with generic drivers (less than 6Mb). We will add the FUSE drivers, the kexec system call introduced in the 2.6 kernel and NFS, rsync and partimage client utilities. FUSE is required, because we need write access to the NTFS partition during image restoration. kexec is used for the hot boot. The thin client uses an NFS root filesystem to avoid the initial RAM filesystem transfer done by most thin-client solutions. The NFS option is slower for individual access but faster for an initial deployment (more on using rsync and partimage in the next section).

To get a nice user interface, we also add the framebuffer driver, Gensplash (Gentoo’s bootsplash software) and the Links2 browser compiled with direct framebuffer support. The Links2 text browser and Gensplash text images for framebuffer let you avoid the cost of the X Window System and its configuration problems, while achieving some graphical capacities.



Image Selection and Restoration Phase
The second phase consists of presenting a boot menu to the end user and (if required) executing the image restoration. This FreeBoo phase starts when the client PC is running the Linux thin client. You should configure it to execute the Links2 text Web browser initially. Simply add this init.d file to your thin-client filesystem (located in the server’s drive and accessed via NFS):

#/etc/init.d/freeboo
depends () {
after gpm
after local
depends local
}
start() {
/scripts/freeboostart.sh
eend 0
}

The freeboostart.sh script executes the Web browser:

#!/bin/sh
# Part of the /scripts/freeboostart.sh file
links2 -g server_IP
# ...

The Apache Web server responds with an HTML file that contains the end-user menu. The user can choose to boot a given OS directly or to restore its saved copy. If the user selects a direct boot, FreeBoo skips directly to phase three. Otherwise, FreeBoo proceeds first to transfer the OS image to the client.

The menu provides two image restoring policies: complete (or full) restoring and partial (or fast) restoring. Complete restoring transfers all of the image to the client computer using partimage. Partial restoring transfers only the modified data using rsync. Depending on the differences with the current image, one solution is faster than the other. We have found that for partial restoring, the checksum computation was especially time consuming for large files. But, both solutions achieve the same goal—to deploy a clean and secure OS image on the client.

In addition to configuring Apache and setting the boot menu page as the user’s initial page, you also need to start the rsyncd and the partimaged dæmons on the server. rsyncd, for partial restoring, uses virtual names for the OS images. Its configuration file (/etc/rsyncd.conf) assigns each virtual name to a path in the filesystem. You should create a disk partition for each OS image, because rsync is filesystem-sensitive. Specifically, you need an NTFS filesystem and the FUSE ntfs-3g mount command for writing the MS Windows image on the client. We recommend excluding the big and unneeded MS Windows virtual memory file (pagefile.sys) and the hibernate file in the rsync recovery command (flag --exclude-from). We also recommend deleting any user-created files on the client (flag --delete). Additionally, add the flags -a (maintain permissions, ownership and timestamps), -r (recursive) and -v (verbose). Below is the code for the syncroLinux.sh and syncroWindows.sh scripts. They differ only in the mount command and image and partition names:

#!/bin/sh
# /script/syncroWindows.sh and /script/syncroLinux.sh
# FreeBoo scripts for partial image restoring
#
# INSERT the correct mount command
# for Linux: mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/linux
# for MS-Windows: ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -o force
ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows -o force
# INSERT the correct rsync command
# rsync -avr --delete --exclude-from=.rsync/exclude \
# SERVER_IP::SYNC_NAME DEST_FOLDER
rsync -avr --delete --exclude-from=.rsync/exclude \
192.168.1.1::windows /mnt/windows
# ... continues with kexec commands ...



Full Image Restoring
For full image restoration, we use partimage. partimage is much simpler than rsync, because it is not filesystem-dependent. You simply need to create a directory on the server to store the partimage chunk files. Chunks are just data that can be stored in any ext3 filesystem. Because the client gives the full path to the image chunks, you don’t need any special configuration for partimaged. The flags to add are -f3 (quit when finished), -b (batch mode) and, for performance issues, -z# (level of compression). Below is the code that restores full images (the restoreLinux.sh and restoreWindows.sh scripts):

#!/bin/sh
# /scripts/restoreLinux.sh and /scripts/restoreWindows.sh
# FreeBoo scripts for full image restoring
#
# INSERT the correct partimage command
# partimage -f3 -b -s SERVER_IP restore DEST_DEVICE IMAGE
partimage -f3 -b -s 192.168.1.1 \
restore /dev/hda2 /root/fileImage/linux
# ...continues with kexec commands ...



Hot Boot Phase
The third, and most challenging, FreeBoo phase is the image hot boot. When we started working on FreeBoo, our first idea was to enter into the Linux kernel code to write the hot boot function. But while examining the code, we discovered the kexec system call and its related shell commands. The following two scripts are able to hot boot an OS image installed on a local drive. Linux hot boot script:

#!/bin/sh
# /scripts/startLinux.sh
# FreeBoo script for Linux hot boot
#
mount /dev/hda2 /mnt/images/linux
kexec -l /mnt/images/linux/vmlinuz \
--append="root=/dev/hda2 ro quiet splash" \
--initrd="/mnt/images/linux/boot/initrd.img-2.6.15-23-386"
kexec -e

MS Windows hot boot script:

#!/bin/sh
# /scripts/startWindows.sh
# FreeBoo script for Windows hot boot
#
ntfs-3g /dev/hda1 /mnt/images/windows -o nonempty
kexec -l /mnt/images/windows/grub.exe
kexec -e

Both scripts first mount the partition of the OS image, then they execute kexec -l, and finally, they execute the new OS kernel with kexec -e. The OS kernel must be an ELF executable. For Linux, this is the kernel file directly, but for MS Windows, we use the GRUB bootloader (you should replace the NTLR default bootloader with the GRUB bootloader before saving the client MS Windows image on the server). Finally, you need a GRUB bootloader, such as Grub4dos, with built-in BIOS disk emulation and an ATAPI CD-ROM driver. This is needed because the thin-client execution overwrites the BIOS and most MS Windows versions still rely on some BIOS interrupts for video, timers and disk-related hardware I/O.



Script Execution
The final consideration to get FreeBoo working is in respect to the execution of the script files. We have one script file for each of the six alternatives in the user’s menu. These files are located on the server, but we need them to execute on the client. In the menu’s HTML code, the links to the scripts are localhost references—for example, a href="http://localhost/scritps/startLinux.sh">, so the Web browser will try to connect to a local Web server. But, we have not installed any Web server on the client image, because we wanted a light and fast kernel. Instead, we have included two additional scripts in FreeBoo to provide a local Web server. Both scripts are initiated by /etc/init.d/freeboo. Below are the complete freeboostart.sh and the new mini_webapp_s.sh scripts. Initial freeboostart.sh script:

#!/bin/sh
# /scripts/freeboostart.sh
# FreeBoo script that starts a very simple http
# server with script execution capacity
# in parallel with a web browser
#
mini_webapp_s.sh &
links2 -g YOUR_SERVER_IP

The mini_webapp_s.sh script:

#!/bin/sh
# /scripts/mini_webapp_s.sh
# FreeBoo script that parsers the incoming browser
# request, gets the script path name and
# executes it locally
#
torun=`nc -l -p 80 -s 127.0.0.1 | \
awk '/HTTP/{print $2; exit}' | \
urldecoder.sh`
($torun)

The first script starts the links2 Web browser mentioned previously. But, it also starts the mini_webapp_s.sh script in parallel to act as a very simple Web server with application execution capacities. This second script executes the output of a pipeline command composed of netcat, awk and urldecoder, which extracts the filename of the script to execute. Netcat (nc) is a very simple command. Like the traditional cat command, netcat simply copies data from an input stream to an output stream; the only difference is that these streams can be network data. The -l flag (listen mode) specifies that netcat’s input comes from the network. The -p 80 and –s 127.0.0.1 options indicate that the input will come on port 80 (the HTTP default port) from IP address 127.0.0.1 (localhost). Netcat’s function is to redirect any HTTP request, like the one below, to the awk filter:

GET /scripts/syncroWindows.sh HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: ...etc...

The awk command extracts the script filename found on the HTTP GET line and passes it to the urldecoder.sh script through a second pipe. urldecoder.sh is a well-known script used to convert a URL with special characters, such as blank spaces, to a valid filename. The parser pipeline finishes when the HTTP of the GET line is found. Then, the variable $torun is set with its output and immediately executed. In the example above, the user has selected the MS Windows fast restore, and the HTTP request contains the /scripts/syncroWindows.sh filename. The pipeline extracts this name, and the next line executes it on the client. The links2 browser, which is executing in parallel, is waiting for the HTTP response from our local Web server. Because we don’t need any more interaction with the user, instead of sending back a response, we have included a line to kill the links2 process in each of the six menu scripts:

'# first line of {start | syncro | restore}{Linux | Windows}.sh scripts
killall links2



Conclusion
The BP Batch Project, started at the Geneve University by Marc V. Stuckelberg and David Clerc, became a popular open implementation of the thin client. This approach evolved into the commercial Rembo suite, which is used in many labs with a significant licensing cost. FreeBoo uses a combination of existing open-source technologies, including BP Batch, to provide the main features of Rembo. The hardware requirements for installing FreeBoo are just a dedicated server connected to client desktops by a LAN. Desktops need to have only boot-on-LAN capacities and local disk drives. All the software used is open source. Future extensions of FreeBoo include the use of this technology for server software deployment; the development of a Web-based interface for easy administration of images, including database management; evaluation of the performance of the OS restoration process to improve it and to select the best option automatically (instead of having the user decide between the fast or full options); the insertion of multicast image recovery; and finally, the use of Wake-on-LAN capabilities to deploy secure images to desktops at preprogrammed times. FreeBoo is only the initial step in building an open-source boot environment for system administrators that allows you to fix, deploy and execute OS images on large installations of desktops. The scripts and other files related to FreeBoo can be found at ftp.linuxjournal.com/pub/lj/listings/issue180/10203.tgz._

Source of Information : Linux Journal Issue 180 April 2009

www.moonlight3d.eu
This last project looks really cool and impressed me, but I’m afraid documentation is nonexistent, so hopefully some of you folks at home can help these guys out. According to the Freshmeat page:

Moonlight|3D is a modeling and animation tool for three-dimensional art. It currently supports mesh-based modeling. It’s a redesign of Moonlight Atelier, formed after Moonlight Atelier/Creator died in 1999/2000. Rendering is done through pluggable back ends. It currently supports Sunflow, with support for RenderMan and others in planning.

The Web site sheds further light on the project, which states one of its goals as: “In order to speed up the progress of our development efforts, we open up the project to the general public, and we hope to attract the support of many developers and users, bringing the project forward faster.”

Installation. In terms of requirements requirements, the only thing I needed to install to get Moonlight running was Java, so thankfully, the dependencies are fairly minimal. As for choices of packages at the Web site, there’s a nightly build available as a binary or the latest source code (I ran with the binary). Grab the latest, extract it to a local folder, and open a terminal in the new folder. Then, enter the command:

$ ./moonlight.sh

Provided you have everything installed, it now should start. Once you’re inside, I’m sorry, I really can’t be of much help. There are the usual windows in a 3-D editor for height, width, depth and a 3-D view, and on the left are quick selection panes for objects, such as boxes, cones, spheres and so on (actually, the pane on the left has access to just about everything you need—it’s pretty cool). Scouting about, a number of cool functions really jumped out at me, like multiple preview modes; changeable light, camera sources and positions; and most important, the ability to make your own animations. If only I could find a way to use them.

This project really does look pretty cool, and it seems to be a decent alternative to programs like Blender, but there honestly is no documentation. All links to documentation lead to a page saying the documentation doesn’t exist yet and provides a link to the on-line forums. The forums also happen to have very little that’s of use to someone without any prior knowledge of the interface, and I assume all those already on the forum are users of the original Moonlight Atelier. Nevertheless, the project does look interesting and seems to be quite stable. I look forward to seeing what happens with this project once some documentation is in place.

Source of Information : Linux Journal Issue 181 May 2009

If you’re a Linux fan, there’s a bit of a tendency to think that Linux and open source are two ways of saying the same thing. However, plenty of FOSS projects exist that don’t have anything to do with Linux, and plenty of projects originated on Linux that now are available on other systems. Because a fair share of our readers also use one of those other operating systems, willingly or unwillingly, we thought we’d highlight here in the coming months some of the FOSS projects that fall into the above categories. We probably all know about our BSD brethren: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and so on, but how many of us know about ReactOS? ReactOS is an open-source replacement for Windows XP/2003. Don’t confuse this with something like Wine, which allows you to run Windows programs on Linux. ReactOS is a full-up replacement for Windows XP/2003. Assuming you consider that good news (a FOSS replacement for Windows), the bad news is that it’s still only alpha software. However, the further good news is that it still is under active development; the most recent release at the time of this writing is 0.3.8, dated February 4, 2009. For more information, visit www.reactos.org.