The first release candidate of KDE 4.3, the next major version of KDE4, was put out on July 1st and comes with new features and a lot of Plasma improvements and bug fixes.

We already presented the best screenshot application for Linux (for me at least): XFCE4 Screenshooter 1.6.0 (the article also explains how to make it the default screenshot tool in Ubuntu). But At the time I wrote the post, there was no .deb package available for Ubuntu so you had to compile it.

At first glance, Canonical is an operating system company — built around Ubuntu Linux. But take a closer look at Canonical’s moves during the first half of 2009, and you’ll find the company has increasingly bet its revenue stream on cloud, online and consulting/support services. Here’s some perspective.

When you want to launch a virtual machine in VirtualBox, you must first run VirtualBox and then start the VM. Here is how to create shortcuts to launch virtual machines in VirtualBox without opening the main program window:

Krusader is a twin-panel file manager for KDE which has been around for around seven years and was always a good alternative to Konqueror since KDE3 days. Its interface resembles the one of the popular file manager Midnight Commander for the console.

Canonical has launched Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Services, an effort to help customers build and support private clouds. The announcement, leveraging Ubuntu Server Edition, caught The VAR Guy’s attention for two key reasons.

The Firefox version which comes in Ubuntu has Pango enabled by default. Pango is a font smoothing library which decreases Firefox speed by up to 45%.

VirtualBox 3.0 has been in beta for less than a month, but Sun Microsystems decided to officially release it today.

A while ago I put up this article, reviewing 5 so-called 'essential' add-ons for Firefox. To continue in the same manner in this second part, here are 5 add-ons updated for Firefox 3.5 which can prove useful. Maybe not the most popular, but they definitely deserve a try.

CNet's Matt Asay beat The VAR Guy to the punch — writing a blog about potential Oracle-Ubuntu Linux synergies. Still, the potential Oracle-Ubuntu partnership gets a little sexier when you throw OpenOffice into the mix. Not even Jack, Janet and Chrissy looked this good together in their prime. Here's why.

If you want to use Ubuntu Linux servers, and the idea of saving money by running your servers on a cloud sounds interesting, boy does Canonical have a deal for you.

Banshee is one of the popular audio players for GNOME, and maybe the first alternative to Rhythmbox, the default player coming with this desktop environment. Banshee has made some amazing things in the last year, especially since 1.0 came out. Each new release brings something new, it get more stable and new features are added.

Firefox 3.5 comes with several great new features, like the private browsing mode or the support for open video integration (full review here).

It seems today is a day full of releases. VirtualBox 3.0 has been in beta for less than a month, but Sun Microsystems decided to officially release it today.

Oracle doesn't want to own Linux. Oracle just wants Linux to be cheap. That's the insight an analyst shared with me the other day as we discussed why Oracle hasn't made a move to acquire Red Hat (recently, anyway).

Firefox 3.5 was released just a couple of hours ago and it comes with great new features and a new version of Gecko, the rendering engine. Firefox is currently the most popular browser on the Linux platform and the top choice on Windows after Internet Explorer (although there are statistics showing it beats IE in terms of popularity in some countries).

To install the latest Firefox 3.5 (final) or Firefox 3.6 in Ubuntu, open a terminal and:

The recent Kubuntu Tutorials Day featured five of free software's finest speakers spreading their knowledge to a large audience. There were talks on Kubuntu, artwork, packaging, as well as an introduction to Ruby. There was also a special guest speaker from Amarok who gave a well received tutorial on scripting Amarok with QtScript.

In case you don't know, GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present on your desktop or the web, and perform useful actions on those items.

New in Gnome Do 0.8.2:

Arista Transcoder is an easy to use multimedia transcoder for the GNOME Desktop.

A while ago I wrote an article called 13 Terminal Emulators for Linux, where I briefly reviewed all those popular shell-like applications and a few flavours of xterm or rxvt.

GIMP, despite it's interface, is the best open-source image editor. But often all you want to do is simply resize a picture or a similar minor task and for that you could use an application such as mtPaint which has a lot of great features such as: