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NewsVac: News from around the Web
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GUADEC breaking new ground, starting from Istanbul
1 hour, 5 minutes ago
The ninth European GUADEC conference in Istanbul earlier this month not only set the direction for GNOME 3.0, the next major release of the Unix and Linux desktop, there was also plenty of action on the GNOME Mobile front. -
Lighten up your desktop with LXDE
2 hours, 5 minutes ago
LXDE is a new project to provide a lightweight and fast desktop environment. It's designed to keep resource usage low and leave all components independent. It looks good too. -
Ah Another Opportunity for Desktop Linux
3 weeks, 1 day ago
My colleague Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols recently wrote a piece on his fine Practical Technology blog called Dear Microsoft, Thanks for the help, Linux in which he argues that Microsoft’s ill-timed decision to cut off easy access to XP tomorrow (June 30th) combined with its announcement it would be releasing the next version of Windows in January, 2010 effectively lends a death blow to Vista and creates a huge opportunity for desktop Linux. With all due respect to my esteemed colleague, this is not the first time I’ve heard such a prediction. -
Top 10 Linux financial tools
3 weeks, 2 days ago
"Many people don't realize the wealth of applications that are available for Linux. I am asked all the time about X and/or Y application on Windows and whether there's an equivalent on Linux. Most of the time the answer is yes .... " -
Apple vs. Google vs. Linux vs. Microsoft: the fight for the desktop is on!
1 month, 3 weeks ago
" ... Linux is beginning to get some actual traction, showing up on a number of low cost 'Netbook' offerings and MID (Mobile Internet Devices); it is starting to look like even this platform may have some legs .... " -
Five ways the end-user desktop will look different in five years
1 month, 3 weeks ago
"eWeek's Debra Donston has penned down five ways the end user desktop in enterprises will look different in five years. While some of her ideas and predictions make a low of sense, there are a few things which are slightly debatable. Mostly, the reliance on virtualization and web applications." -
Desktop Software Still Alive
3 months 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
3 months, 2 weeks 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
7 months, 2 weeks 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
9 months 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
9 months 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
9 months 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
9 months, 1 week 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
10 months, 2 weeks 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
10 months, 3 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?" - More News
Linux.com : Desktop Software
Why not learn a little language while you work, Amigo?
Books, CDs, flashcards, classes -- there are a lot of tools to help you learn a foreign language. If you spend much of your time near a computer, software may be one of the better options. Ian McIntosh's Amigo is a friendly language utility for the Linux user, notable for how well it integrates into the desktop.
Linux tools to convert file formats
Life would be a lot easier if we could live in a Linux-only world and if applications never required data from other sources. However, the need to get data from Windows, MS-DOS, or old Macintosh systems is all too common. This kind of import process requires some conversions to solve file format differences; otherwise, it would be impossible to share data, or file contents would be imported incorrectly. The easiest way to transfer data between systems is by using plain text files or common formats like comma-separated value (CSV) files. However, converting such files from Windows or Mac OS results in formatting differences for the newline characters and character encoding. This article explains why we have these problems and shows ways to solve them.
Sweet Home 3D: simple interior design
Remodeling? Like free software? If you answer "yes" to both questions, try taking Sweet Home 3D for a spin. The open source, cross-platform 3-D interior design application is simple to use and simple to learn. You don't create individual objects in Sweet Home 3D like you do in a modeling app like Blender; instead you focus on the layout and design of the rooms themselves.
Nifty tools for your Asus Eee PC
It didn't take the enterprising community of Asus Eee PC users long to come up with some great tweaking tools for this Linux-based ultra-low-cost laptop. Just a few weeks after the official launch of Eee PC, the first tweaking utilities started to appear on the EeeUser forums. Today, you can choose from a wide selection of tools that can help you to customize your tiny laptop and make your work on it more efficient.
What went wrong with the KDE 4 release?
When KDE 4.0 was released in January, it was supposed to be the foundation for a new era of desktop development. But as 4.x versions began finding their way into distributions, negative reactions began to obscure other ones. With the upcoming 4.1 release due at the end of this month, it's hard to avoid wondering: what happened?
For those "oops" moments: ext3undel
The rm command can be a powerful tool for deleting data -- until you delete the wrong files or directories. Thankfully, the ext3undel utility can recover accidently removed data on ext3 filesystems. Users can recover a specific file by name, or they can restore all files marked as deleted (though the filenames won't be recovers, so they will have to look at the contents of the files to identify them).
Fast, powerful Geany editor offers IDE features
Geany is a lightweight text editor for Linux based on the GTK2 toolkit. Geany supports internal and external plugins, and it excels as a source code editor, since it includes basic integrated development environment (IDE) functionality. Here's an introduction to using Geany's built-in features, including the IDE and built-in development capabilities.
Expert tip: Print booklets in Scribus
Scribus, a free, open source desktop publishing application, offers a wide range of page layout features, but one thing it lacks is the ability to print booklets. Fortunately, I've come across a simple procedure that lets you work around this issue. Here's how to do it in Linux; Windows users should be able to follow along too.
Win4Lin 5.0 makes big improvements
There is no dearth of software that can help you run that indispensable Windows app over Linux. Win4Lin has managed to survive through the years as an inexpensive tool for people who like to pay for support. The recently released Win4Lin 5, available for $30 a pop, has shrugged off the shortcomings of its predecessor and delivers on its "near native-performance" promise.
Don't forget the text editor
Text editors are important for many tasks, from editing configuration files, nudging cron jobs, and manipulating XML files to quickly pushing out a README. Luckily, there are a number of interesting editors available. Here's a brief introduction to nine intriguing choices. While some may be better suited to certain tasks, it's no one tool is better than another for all tasks. Try them all and use the ones you like best.
How to scan and OCR like a pro with open source tools
With optical character recognition (OCR), you can scan the contents of a document into a single file of editable text. This article, which focuses on scanning books, describes the steps you need to take to prepare pages for optimal OCR results, and compares various free OCR tools to determine which is the best at extracting the text.
Gedit plugins for everyone
If you drift between distributions, one of the first things you might notice is that Gedit, GNOME's text editor, is not always the same on each system. For instance, in Debian, Gedit is a relatively simple text edit, while in Ubuntu, it sprouts features that Debian users may never have seen. The difference is the plugins that each distribution packages with Gedit and enables by default. Many of these plugins make only small alterations by themselves, but enable a dozen or more and you'll find Gedit transformed almost out of recognition, regardless of whether you are using it to write code or plain text.
Starting SSH connections simply with SSHMenu
SSHMenu adds a button to your GNOME panel that displays a configurable drop-down list of hosts that you have might like to connect to with SSH.
A virtual appliance primer
Virtual machines are virtually taking over the world. By itself a virtual machine is just a container that describes various resources such as memory, disk space, processor, and network card, and allocates them from a physical machine. As with a physical machine, it's the software bits (the operating system and applications) that make a virtual machine usable. When you mix a virtual machine with real software you get a virtual appliance. Some complete Linux distributions as well as specialized apps are available as virtual appliances. Thanks to the ease in packaging one, there's no shortage of virtual appliances around, if you know where to look.
Finally, it's time for Wine
Fifteen years in the making, everyone's favorite software to run Windows programs on Linux and Unix, Wine, is almost ready for its 1.0 release.
Testing ebook readers for Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg (PG) collects and maintains a library of public domain books in electronic text format, in an assortment of languages. That's all well and good, but potential readers still need a method to access PG's collection. I recently sat down to test a handful of e-text readers that offer integration with the 24,000 PG titles.
Beesoft Commander: An old school file manager on the modern desktop
Although the last release of Norton Commander, the famous file manager for DOS, was a decade ago, its legacy lives on in dozens of clones on every operating system imaginable. On GNU/Linux, one of the most popular clones is Beesoft Commander (BSC). Although designed for the desktop and built with a recent version of the Qt libraries, BSC, like Norton Commander, remains a file manager built mainly for the keyboard. As a centralized tool for file operations, it offers a degree of convenience that makes it worth learning, especially if most of your work involves source code, HTML, or other plain text files.
StorYBook gets in the way of plotting fiction
Some people imagine that they could write a novel if only they had the right tool. StorYBook aims to be that tool, but falls short. The problem is not that StorYBook is poorly organized, or that its timeline and reports don't come in handy. Rather, the problem is that StorYBook has such a rigid structure that it is likely to fit only a minority of writers' plotting needs. For others, living with the rigidity and searching for ways around it is only likely to distract from planning and make it a chore rather than a creative thrill.
Screenlets add customized functionality to the desktop
If free software development goes by trends, then the current era might be called the Age of Extensions. In the last few years, every application from the Mozilla family to OpenOffice.org to Gedit has created frameworks in which developers can add their own small bits of functionality to an application. In the last 10 months or so, a community has taken this trend directly to the desktop with what it calls "screenlets" -- small applications that are added directly to the desktop. The result is dozens of tools, some new and many old, that are in most cases not only themable, but also heavily customizable.
Taking note of Basket
Note-taking applications are far from scarce on GNU/Linux desktops. If your needs are simple, you can use KNotes in KDE or Sticky Notes in GNOME. If you want integration with address books and email, you may prefer Evolution's built-in Memos pane. For those who need more than basic notes, the increasingly sophisticated Tomboy may be a solution, assuming they have no objection to running an application built using Mono. However, by far the most versatile note-taking application is KDE's Basket, a tool so flexible and complete that you might prefer to think of it as a personal wiki, a producer of scrapbooks, or even a creator of temporary desktops. The future of Basket as a project is uncertain at the moment, but that doesn't mean that you can't take advantage of its power.
