Linux User & Developer, Issue 106

This month’s Linux User & Developer magazine includes two pieces of mine: a review of the latest version of the media streaming VortexBox distribution and a group test covering multi-language integrated development environments (IDEs.)

Aimed at the magazine’s developer readership rather than newcomers to Linux, the group test takes four of the most popular development environments – Komodo, Netbeans, Geany and Eclipse – and puts them head-to-head to see which emerges victorious.

While it’s easy to just look at a list of features, care was taken to ensure that the scoring metrics used were useful: how fast each is, the facilities on offer, the languages supported were all included, but perhaps the most important metric of all – and one not normally seen in a group test – was a look at the availability of commercial support.

The review looked at the latest release of VortexBox, a handy media streaming distribution which can turn unused hardware into a Universal Plug ‘n Play (UPnP) server. As with the majority of distribution tests – except where hardware support or 3D acceleration functionality is on trial – the software was installed into a virtual machine running under Oracle’s VirtualBox.

More information is available on the Linux User & Developer website.