For Linux users, scripting user installation is fairly simple. It's possible, but not quite as simple with OS X. Thanks to Per Olofsson, it's possible to distribute user accounts as installable packages that are as simple as a double-click to install.

This is the last article in a four-part series on the current state of 3D printing. In the first part, I gave an overall introduction to differences in 3D printing since I wrote my original articles on 3D printing three years ago. The second piece focused on advances in 3D printing hardware, and the third column covered 3D printing software.

For many of us, our introduction to computing is being placed in front of a machine where the only challenge is figuring out the Windows user experience paradigm. Getting started with Linux, on the other hand, requires a bit more effort, a fair amount of trial and error, and perhaps some colorful language along the way.

I recently had a problem trying to install the NVIDIA driver for my machine. It seemed the latest driver had stopped supporting my graphics card, and after updating my kernel, I was out of a driver. The question, obviously, was "which card did I have?" But, I didn't remember.

I'm apparently in a silly-game mood this month, because I stumbled across an open-source project I couldn't keep all to myself: Snk. If you remember the classic game of snake, Snk is the same concept, but smaller, harder and with music.

This article is the third part of a four-part series that examines some of the changes in 3D printing that have occurred in the past three years since my first articles on the subject. Because this is Linux Journal, instead of discussing the entire 3D printing world, I'm focusing on the sections of the topic most relevant to open source and open hardware.

The single largest group of users on high-performance computing clusters has to be the chemists. Their CPU-year count is definitely at the very top of the list. Because of this heavy use, several different packages have become standard tools that most computational chemistry researchers use.

If you're anything like me, the holiday season is spent fixing Wi-Fi and removing spyware. Occasionally, I get to install Linux for a relative who is ready to give up Windows or needs something that will run on a circa-Windows 2000 computer (Xubuntu is usually my choice).

I'm just starting out in the world of development, and many of the projects I'm interested in exploring are written in Node.js. If you're an old hand at such things, you already know that which version of Node you use on a particular application is vitally important.

Previously in this space, I have covered software packages like Maxima that can be used to solve symbolic mathematics problems. Several packages are available that can do those types of calculations. In this article, I discuss Xcas/Giac. Xcas is the GUI interface to the system.