Over time, a filesystem accumulates a lot of useless items. FSlint is a nifty little tool that helps you clean your filesystem by pointing out junk in the form of empty directories, corrupt symlinks, files with bad names, duplicate and temp files, and more. However, its usefulness is marred by a virtually total lack of documentation and a GUI that takes some getting used to.

MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) are text-driven cooperative or competitive games that you can play either straight from your terminal using the Telnet protocol or through a separate application specially designed to play MUDs. The majority of MUDs are free to play. Here's how you can get started with them.

Creative Commons (CC) cares about licensing. It has drafted and shared its own suite of licenses for artistic works catering to a wide range of needs, advocated license awareness, and contributed to projects that make both finding and publishing CC-licensed works simpler. Now it is seeking to make licensing enlightenment an everyday part of desktop computer usage with liblicense.

Most streaming audio and video on the Internet is disseminated in proprietary formats such as RM, RAM, WMV, and ASF. Fortunately, the open source application MPlayer can play and even record streams in almost any format.

I've been using the XChat IRC client for many years. The only thing I find lacking in it is a list of favorite channels. The Uberscript plugin, written in Perl, adds a favorites list to XChat, and also allows you to do things like auto greet users when they join a channel and hide nick changes, quit, and join messages.

The New York Times likes open source -- so much so that, as it gradually moves more of its print operations online, it is nurturing a Web development team that has released two of its own open source projects.

When I attended my first ToorCon this month, I spoke with David "h1kari" Hulton, founder and chairman of the event, to learn more about its history and intent.

According to Wikipedia, Texas Hold'em is "the most popular poker variant played in casinos in the United States." With the GPL-licensed multiplatform (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X) PokerTH, you can play Texas Hold'em against up to six computer opponents on your desktop, or you can join an Internet server and play against other real players.

Vixta is a new Linux distribution, first released only last month, based on the not-yet-released Fedora 8. Its main objective is to emulate the visual aspects of Microsoft Vista. Version 095 contains the newest, and sometimes unstable, versions of software. The project's goals include being free in every sense, requiring absolutely no configuration, and being user-friendly, eye-catching, and familiar. Too bad the goals don't include feature-complete and stable.

Projity is a company that provides two alternatives to Microsoft's popular Project application. Project-On-Demand is software-as-a-service (SAAS) code that runs in any browser and is available via a monthly subscription. OpenProj is a desktop version of the application that is built on Java and is licensed with the Common Public Attribution License (CPAL). Though Projity only recently "open sourced" its project management application, CEO Marc O'Brien says that the company's plan "the entire time" was to eventually do just that.

The Free Software Foundation's (FSF) Free Software Licensing and Compliance Lab held a public question and answer session in an IRC meeting last night. The meeting was conducted by Brett Smith, the licensing compliance engineer at the FSF. Smith began by addressing some of the recent FUD surrounding the GPLv3 license, then moved on to answering some of the questions and misconceptions regarding it.

Canonical this month released Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon. Like the Feisty Fawn release before it, Gutsy is a bleeding-edge distribution with a focus on new features and the newest free software applications. It's a speedy operating system with great new features and only a few minor issues.

R2integrated (R2i) is a Microsoft shop that has discovered how well open source software and communities can build a solid business. Principal Chris Chodnicki says it was a customer request that turned the technology consultancy toward DotNetNuke (DNN), an open source Web application framework.

X/OS Linux is a distribution built from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources. Its developers claim it was created "to provide a hassle-free enterprise-class Linux operating system without usage terms tied to commercial services." I downloaded it expecting I might find all the refinement of Red Hat along with some improvements and the community one expects to find growing around free software. It seems I set my expectations too high.

GeoGebra, a GPL-licensed teaching and learning tool that integrates geometry, algebra, and calculus, benefits both teachers and students alike. Developed by Markus Hohenwarter at Florida Atlantic University, GeoGebra constructs geometrical figures and demonstrates the relationship between geometry and algebra. GeoGebra can help you create interactive demonstrations and precise images of geometric figures for inclusion in teaching and testing materials.

ToorCon 9, a hacker's convention, kicked off with registration and a reception Friday evening in the San Diego Convention Center. Keynotes and the talks were held Saturday and Sunday. This was my first time at ToorCon, and I learned why it is so highly regarded among the hacker community. It's good.

When it comes to managing processes, many people use old reliable commands such as ps, top, kill, and nice. These commands are handy, useful, and found in every Linux distribution. However, sometimes a GUI process manager can be useful, especially when you're trying to teach new Linux system administrators who aren't used to shell interfaces. Qps Visual Process Manager is a GUI ps substitute that lets you sort, manipulate, and manage processes.

Not all major software versions carry the same weight. Consider the last two releases of the Fedora distribution. Fedora 7 offered little that was obvious to desktop users, despite some behind-the-scenes improvements and the opening of the release process to public scrutiny. By contrast, if Test 3 of Fedora 8 is any indication, the upcoming release, scheduled for next month, returns to the distribution's tradition of introducing a variety of innovations. Some of these innovations, like the new firewall tool, are minor, if still welcome. Others, like the IcedTea version of Java and Codec Buddy, are flawed, but may eventually find their way into other distributions.

Dimdim calls itself the world's first free Web meeting service based on an open source platform. Users can share their desktops and files while chatting and videoconferencing with meeting participants. Dimdim was originally licensed under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), but the possibility of a big deal with a university made Dimdim executives eventually change to the GNU General Public License (GPL) instead. By changing the software's license from the MPL to the GPL, "we are making it easier for the community to use our product," says Dimdim founder DD Ganguly.