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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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Desktop Software Still Alive
3 weeks, 1 day ago
As I’ve said before, developers are the lifeblood of an operating system. Without them, an operating system would be lifeless and not that exciting. -
Step by step: using Samba to join a Windows domain
1 month, 1 week ago
"In this article, I give you the steps you need to use Samba to join to a Windows domain. The primary domain controller will serve as the password server for the domain .... " -
Hassle-Free PC
5 months, 1 week ago
Personal computers were supposed to make our lives easier. Instead, these beasts have turned us all into part-time IT administrators, our lives given over to downloading upgrades, installing patches and updates and drivers and antispyware, decrypting error messages and screaming at stalled applications. Enough! -
Xmonad 0.4 released
6 months, 4 weeks ago
Xmonad 0.4 has been released. "xmonad is a tiling window manager for X. Windows are arranged automatically to tile the screen without gaps or overlap, maximising screen use ... Window layouts are applied dynamically, and different layouts may be used on each workspace. Xinerama is fully supported, allowing windows to be tiled across several physical screens ...." -
Publishing high-quality documents with Kile
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"TeX and LaTeX produce impeccably laid-out documents, and are the only practical way to show some mathematical equations. This GUI tool acts as an "integrated development environment" for the command-line document preparation tools .... " -
I have lost my Wow
6 months, 4 weeks ago
"Last week, I mentioned that Mozilla is planning to give the Firefox browser a makeover. Alex Faaborg had mentioned that they plan to integrate the look of Firefox with Microsoft's Windows Vista and Apple's Mac OS X. The problem was Alex had failed to mention anything about the Linux operating system .... " -
13 reasons why Linux should be on your desktop
7 months ago
"A couple of years ago, the Linux desktop was a pimply adolescent with half-baked ideas. Today we see a handsome, well-dressed grown-up who handles a range of tasks with confidence and even performs fancy tricks. No longer need we make allowances for his dress sense or his strange habits ... " -
Firefox passes 400 million downloads
8 months, 1 week ago
Mozilla shares a new statistic for those of you who pay attention to the Web browser race. But when's the new Firefox beta due? -
Two document standards means continued interoperability gap
8 months, 2 weeks ago
"A recent News.com article by Martin LaMonica reports on the ODF vs OOXML war. The report mentions the arguments over one standard vs two competing standards. But shouldn't we be trying to solve - not prolong - the interoperability gap?" -
Rename multiple files to another extension in Linux
9 months ago
Let us say that you want to rename all of your “.php5″ files to “.php” files. You can use for loop. Full Story -
People Behind KDE: Summer of Code 2007 (1/4)
9 months, 2 weeks ago
"The People Behind KDE series takes a temporary break, as we talk to students who are working on KDE as part of the Google Summer of Code 2007 - in the first of four interview articles, meet Aleix Pol Gonzàlez, Piyush Verma, Mike Arthur and Nick Shaforostoff!" -
Firefox Lite: Old PCs can crush IE
9 months, 4 weeks ago
"While most of today's PCs boast gigabytes of RAM, the lesser technologically able, older machines suffer in quiet dark corners, brutally slave-whipped by modern applications demanding memory units in the thousands." -
Pleasant Diversions At Studio Dave
9 months, 4 weeks ago
"Judging by the number of hits tallied for Troubleshooting Linux Audio Part 1 it seems the topic is of interest to many readers. Alas, I must apologize to everyone waiting for the next parts of the series. Various events have kept me from completing it in short order, but you may rest assured that it will return in my next installment. Meanwhile, this week we'll look at two excellent applications that are coming into greater use here at Studio Dave, the LiVES video editor for Linux, and Reaper (yes, again), a native Windows audio/MIDI sequencer running under Wine." -
TechBase Hits 1,000,000
10 months ago
"KDE's new technical documentation library, TechBase, hit an important milestone today when it served up its one millionth page..." -
Pyro delivers Web apps to the Linux desktop
10 months ago
The Pyro project has launched its "Pyro Desktop," a new Linux application with the lofty goal of "true integration between the Web and modern desktop computing." Pyro offers an interesting new approach to deploying Web-based applications on the Linux desktop, reminiscent of Opera's and Vista's widgets. - More News
Linux.com : Desktop Software
It's time to retire "ready for the desktop"
Quite a few reviews of new Linux releases these days try to determine if a distribution is "ready for the desktop." I myself have probably been guilty of using that phrase, but I think it's time we officially retire this criterion.
Predictive text input with Soothsayer
Soothsayer is a predictive text input system. Many folks reading that sentence will think of the word completion offered by mobile phones. Soothsayer is different from such mobile phone systems in that it tries to use context and other statistical information to offer predictions instead of just presenting a list of words that might match the first few letters you type.
Linspire tightens CNR ties with Mint, Ubuntu
Linspire, the San Diego, Calif.-based Linux distributor, is continuing to build up its CNR (Click-N-Run) software installation system with partnerships with Ubuntu parent Canonical and the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint distribution. Linspire recently announced that its beta CNR service now supports the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron release and Linux Mint versions 4.0 and 5.
Tomboy note-taker keeps you organized
I use Tomboy, an open source notetaking app, to cull and organize the hundreds of bits of information I track, and to prioritize it on to-do lists on the fly. When we first reviewed Tomboy 0.3.5, it had some obvious flaws. The project has had a number of updates since then, and the newest version, 0.10.0, really makes the grade.
OfflineIMAP makes messages and attachments available locally
OfflineIMAP allows you to read your email while you are not connected to the Internet. This is great when you are traveling and really need an attachment from a message but cannot connect to the Internet.
YouTube tools for the Linux desktop
You can see YouTube videos everywhere nowadays: on blogs, Google search results, even some news sites. From time to time, you can even manage to find something interesting. This article will show you some Linux tools you can use to save and convert YouTube videos.
Getting started with Linux virtualization
With all the Linux distributions available, trying out more than one can be tempting. By installing a virtual environment, you can run several operating systems on your machine, keeping them completely isolated from each other in their own sandboxes. Here's a look at how get started with three popular virtualization environments: VMware, VirtualBox, and QEMU.
Six Twitter clients for the Linux desktop and one for the road
Twitter is a popular social networking utility that's gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Registered users can post messages -- also called Tweets -- via the Web interface, but many prefer to use desktop applications that offer additional functionality and move Tweeting out of the browser entirely.
Choosing a font manager
With libraries of thousands of fonts to handle, designers need a way to quickly locate fonts and organize them into meaningful categories -- such as by the project that requires them -- and to disable fonts when they are not in use so that they don't clog system memory. Although as recently as two years ago the GNU/Linux desktop lacked a font manager that met all these needs, it now has four that either meet them or are likely to.
Browsing the Web the old-fashioned way
Are you in the mood for some '90s-style Web browsing with no graphic elements? Or, more realistically, do you work with a Linux console and often need to check something on the Web? If so, get acquainted with text-based Web browsers such as w3m, Lynx, and the similarly named Links.
Three Linux HTML editors reviewed
Today's Web development tools offer capabilities that go beyond basic HTML editing. I compared three Web editors for Linux -- Screem 0.16.1, Bluefish 1.0.7, and Quanta Plus 3.5.7 -- to determine how well they handle today's Web editing needs.
Dragbox bridges command line and desktop
The GNU/Linux command line and desktop are both sophisticated interfaces, but they are mostly separate realities. You can drag text into a virtual terminal from the desktop, or use Edit -> Copy to move text in either direction, but by default moving files and directories between them is impossible -- a problem that often requires extra switching between them if you frequently work in both. Dragbox is designed to solve this problem and connect the two interfaces -- at least if one of them is GNOME -- through what might be described as a combination multiple clipboard and simple file manager.
Mounting archives with FUSE and archivemount
The archivemount FUSE filesystem lets you mount a possibly compressed tarball as a filesystem. Because FUSE exposes its filesystems through the Linux kernel, you can use any application to load and save files directly into such mounted archives. This lets you use your favourite text editor, image viewer, or music player on files that are still inside an archive file. Going one step further, because archivemount also supports write access for some archive formats, you can edit a text file directly from inside an archive too.
Run Windows and Linux without virtualization
Linux does everything that many users want it to, but some people have tasks that require Windows applications. You can dual-boot both operating systems, or run Windows in a virtualized environment on Linux. Alas, virtualization makes the guest OS almost useless for processor- and RAM-intensive tasks like editing videos and playing games. Now, a Ubuntu-based distro called andLinux takes cooperation with Windows to a whole new level.
Flock 1.1 offers nectar for social butterflies
When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.
Use Wubi to install Ubuntu without partitioning
You can install and run Ubuntu from within Windows without any risk of accidentally deleting your existing programs and files by using Wubi, an unofficial Ubuntu installer for Windows users. Unlike UNetbootin, which installs Linux on a hard disk partition, Wubi works by installing Ubuntu within a file stored on your Windows drive, and adding itself to the Windows boot.ini file to allow you to choose between Windows and Linux at boot time.
CLI Magic: Using GNOMEvfs to manipulate files
While KDE users get to boss KIO slaves for easier access to system and network resources, humble GNOME users can perform similar feats with its virtual file system, called GnomeVFS, which is an extension of the physical filesystem on a disk. Using GnomeVFS, users can work with non-local data that can come from unusual places, such as within compressed gzip archives.
Smart cards provide hurdles, opportunities for Free Software
Smart cards and digital signatures are presented as among the most important components of e-government in Europe, but they are still far from being an effective, Linux-friendly solution to reduce administrative and business costs. But the same tools may become a way to make the general public use or support Free Software.
Orca accessibility app makes a whale of an impact
Many people know that free and open source software (FOSS) plays a role in creating the technical infrastructure of developing nations and in preserving endangered languages. With the Orca screen reader, FOSS takes on the new role of providing access to computers and the Internet to people with disabilities. The project is quickly catching up with proprietary accessibility options, and is already being widely deployed as a low-cost alternative.
Language translation from the command line or clipboard
Web-based automatic translators such as translate.google.com are great for getting the gist of what a document is saying, but it can be cumbersome to have to open a new tab in your browser, load that URL, and copy and paste the text you want to translate into your browser. The twandgtw project allows you to get language translations directly from the Linux command line using either local dictionaries or online services.
