Skype 1.4 for Linux after five months of testing. Now that it's officially out of beta -- along with a slew of bug fixes and new features -- developers are calling it a recommended release.

As we close in on the release of Ubuntu 7.10, codenamed Gutsy Gibbon during the development cycle, we thought we would tell you a little bit about some of the new features and improvements that make the release exciting. So over the next ten days, we will talk about one rocking feature each day until the 18th of October, when Ubuntu 7.10 goes live.

So I’ve decided that Konqueror is just not the web browser that some people want it to be. Call me spoiled / ruined for having spent so much time on Firefox, but I just can’t use it to be as productive as I want to be so I’ve installed Firefox on my Kubuntu installation. For those of you that are in similar situations keep reading and find out how to manually install Firefox within KDE.

For anyone who ever loved and played the famous Worms PC game series, then Wormux is the game for you. Even if you weren't much of a fan (like myself) of the original Works series, you'll find Wormux none the less captivating and enjoyable, and even addictive in some respects.

Well I am a bit pleasantly surprised to say that I’m very much enjoying my time in KDE right now. There are some bugs, as is to be expected, but for the most part I’m continuing to be very productive and I’m learning a lot.

It’s time to give Dell a little credit, folks. By agreeing to offer Ubuntu on selected systems earlier this year, the company has opened itself up to a flood of ideas from passionate Linux users. In fact, the Dell IdeaStorm website remains flooded with thousands of Ubuntu-focused comments from the Linux community. And Dell itself continues to prepare for Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, the next major upgrade from Canonical.

For Firefox users who are constantly referring to multiple pages, tabbed browsing is not a feature, but a way of life. There are enough of us that the Firefox addon page lists more than 110 extensions related to tabs. These extensions feature everything from simple add-ons to various means of saving tab addresses and sessions to thumbnails and collections of functions, as well as one or two uncategorizable ideas.

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games.

I have just upgraded my new Dell computer that came with Ubuntu 7.04 to the pre-release version of Ubuntu 7.10 (Beta). Please read my initial review of this system.

After a large download and subsequent reboot, this computer came up in much better shape than it was in 7.04.

I’ve been wanting to review Ubuntu Christian Edition (CE) 3.3 with intentions of giving it a good review. After all, it is Ubuntu, with a little Praise Jesus on the side. I enjoy using Ubuntu, and if someone can put some Jesus in an operating system and I like it, surely it’s an operating system that is worth using.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #60 for the week September 30th - October 6th, 2007 is now available.. In this issue we cover the freeze of the Gutsy archive, a Gutsy countdown script for websites, Philipp Kern joining the MOTU Team, the release of UbuntuBolivia by the Bolivian LoCo Team, Ubuntu Forums interviews, and, as always, much much more!

I’ve been using Ubuntu Feisty and waiting to get Gutsy when the release comes out. However my curiosity got the better of me and I could not resist upgrading from the beta repositories. The first thing I noticed after upgrade was the amount of polish and attention to detail. Everything looks slick (thanks to Compiz).

 Travis Watkins recently became a MOTU after a long time in the Ubuntu community. He is best known for Alacarte, the Gnome menu editor. He also wrote a Bayesian content filter called willow-ng for Edubuntu and more recently has been working on 3D desktop with the Compiz community.

Do you need a Macintosh computer for high-quality, satisfying digital photo management? Macs include the excellent iPhoto for no extra cost, and if you want to spend money the Aperture photo-management application is first-rate. Naturally, everyone asks "How do they compare to Adobe Photoshop?" The answer is they don't. They are strictly for managing and editing digital photos; they're not full-blown desktop publishing suites. So what does Linux offer for the ace digital photographer who doesn't want to splurge on a Mac? How about a few goodies like:

Uruguay's government this week announced the results of a study indicating that XO computers from the One Laptop Per Child project were a better value for the nation's schoolchildren than Intel's similar offering, the Classmate PC. The next step is likely to be a purchase agreement between OLPC and Uruguay for at least 100,000 laptops. Though nothing has been finalized yet, when asked what needs to happen for formal agreement to occur, OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte simply says, "business closure."

This is a simple setup of Cacti, so that you don’t really need a "Linux" expert to maintain it. Please note that Cacti can also be installed on Windows and guides for both these installations are available on the net. This guide is just a repeat of how Cacti was set up here in Mumbai.

What is Cacti? You can check out that here http://cacti.net. What is Cacti being used for?

After reading a post from my friend Daniel about the new release of MonoDevelop, I decided to try and install it... which is when I realized that the installation from source is so painful I'd better figure it out and share it with everybody else.

So you’ve have been desperate for a podcast client that rivals the ease and efficiency of iTunes (but have found Linux clients wanting) then hpodder may be the answer to your quest. Having found other clients to be a little jack-of-all-trades for your needs or else, just plain buggy, hpodder is a breath of fresh air.

Well we’re into day two on using Kubuntu full-time and I’m getting most of my personal show stoppers worked out.  I want to thank everyone that left comments here giving me some suggestions.  Here are my continued thoughts on using it, and what I’ve worked out.

Has it been a while since you used FTP from the command line? While there are decent GUI-based FTP clients (such as gFTP), you can automate operations with the command-line version and handle file transfers with no user interaction at all.

The non-free codecs distributed by Medibuntu now come to a single metapackage: non-free-codecs. The proper package matching the architecture will be installed (please see the Launchpad bug report below).

As I mentioned a few days ago I have considered trying to use KDE again. Well yesterday I did a fresh install of Kubuntu 7.10 beta. Here are some of my initial thoughts:

As we’ve shown before, Opera is an extremely customizable browser, but it does so much that it can be difficult to remember it all. Then again you would have to know what it does in order to remember it.

Once upon a time, people lived in caves and hunted animals with spears. Then, they recorded things from the TV onto small black cartridges filled with magnetic tape. Finally, in 1999, the Digital Video Recorder was born and civilization was discovered. I may have missed out some minor details, but that's the short version.

I’ve been playing around with Compiz-Fusion on my Macbook over the past week or so and realize it could make a good topic for a tutorial.  The problem is that it took me *zero* configuration to get it going.  While this is good and a great boost for Desktop users everywhere I don’t really have much to share with the wide-world on setting it up.

What I do have to share however are the key shortcuts and settings that I like to use.