OStatic

The Audacity audio editor is a great program. Take that as you will: It's truly functional software. It's a great illustration of the power and versatility of open source. Audacity has been an active project for some time. But because it provides an esoteric service, it was only recently I had reason to sit down and use it.

Due to microphone-support issues in Linux, and a Windows machine that has trouble with its own weight, never mind throwing sizable files in the mix, I've used Audacity 1.3.5 on two of the three supported platforms. There are differences in feature set-up, not function. After a learning curve of two hours came weeks of declaring my undying love for the project to anyone who'd listen.

In what may be one of the longest development and testing processes in the history of programming (15 years, actually), Wine 1.0 is now available for free download at the project's Web site. Commonly used to play Windows-only games on computers with a Linux operating system, thousands of other applications and tools also work under Wine, including such notables as Photoshop CS2 and WinRAR.

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has released the first beta of KDE 4.1, which is targeted to fully replace KDE 3, when it goes final in July. Like other desktop open source projects focused on Linux and open source users, including GNOME and OpenOffice.org, KDE presents a graphical desktop interface designed for usability. The new version has many improvements to the desktop shell and is much more configurable than version 3, as described in the release notes. The KDE Personal Information Management suite is also now ported to the new version, along with quite a few other applications. Here's a look under the hood.