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

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:

Most Linux/Unix veterans use cron to schedule tasks on their machines and it is a very powerful utility for what it does.

The problem with cron is that it's way to hard and cryptic to use for the newbies / average Linux user. For them, there is an easier alternative to get things done.

By default, PulseAudio in Ubuntu up to Jaunty is set to work with 2 speakers (front channels). This tutorial will explain how to enable multiple sound channels (5.1, 7.1, etc) in Pulseaudio.

htop - Undoubtedly the most famous of the top-like tools. It implements some extra options to the "top" command, like colors, ability to scroll horizontally and vertically, and a better interaction with the processes listed.

nethogs - network information, but instead of displaying the traffic by protocol, nethogs shows the bandwidth usage by process. Very interesting.

If you set your language to English (US), Gnome Calendar applet starts the week with Sunday, which is ok for USA but not for the rest of us and unfortunately there is no option in the applet to change this.

If you don't know what Emerald is and how to install these themes, see here.

Inkscape 0.47 pre-release is now available for download. In case you do not know, Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Sometimes it’s hard to guess what is eating up our bandwidth the most - on a home computer with an xDSL connection, for example. We can run a lot of programs simultaneously while they can eat as much bandwidth as they want independently of their CPU usage.

Normally, Gimp panels are de-attached from the main window, so you practically have 3 windows:

1. Show/purge unused linux kernel images and modules:

dpkg -l 'linux-*' | sed '/^ii/!d;/'"$(uname -r | sed "s/\(.*\)-\([^0-9]\+\)/\1/")"'/d;s/^[^ ]* [^ ]* \([^ ]*\).*/\1/;/[0-9]/!d'

2. Rip audio from a video file:

If you've ever wondered what is thrashing your hard drive but can't figure out which process it is, you can use the iotop utility to help.

Mac4Lin is a complete UI for GTK based desktops that uses a script which takes care of absolutely everything needed to make Gnome or Xfce look like Mac. The dock, the GTK theme, Emerald theme (window borders), new icons, new wallpapers, taskbar image, GDM themes, cursors, themes for Pidgin, Firefox, several players and even the system sounds will seem to be like running a Mac.

This Nautilus script can convert between a variety of audio, video, image, text and create iso from another image format. It can also convert video to audio and video or pdf to individual frames. And finally, it can convert a txt file to image or .wav.

CenterIM is a lightweight IM client for Linux. Actually, CenterIM is very but very lightweight because it runs in a terminal, but still it has almost all the features you may want in a instant messaging client. It supports all the major protocols such as MSN, Yahoo, AIM, IRC, Jabber, etc. and also it has a built-in RSS feed reader.

This script notifies you when a contact comes online, goes offline, sends you a message, when they have a birthday soon or when a file transfer is completed.

Mobile Media Converter [Windows / Linux] is a great application which allows you, thanks to ffmpeg, to convert between a variety of formats including: MP3, WMA , Ogg, Wav, MPEG, AVI, WMV, FLV, 3GP video and AMR audio and even MP4 which is very useful if you have an iPhone / iPod.

After a two-week delay, the Fedora Project team finally announced the release of Fedora 11, also known as Leonidas. The multitude of new features and improvements in this new version made the waiting time seem even longer, especially for dedicated fans. Well, at least the buzz from Ubuntu and Mandriva is slowly fading away, so Linux users can concentrate better on Fedora 11.

Byzanz is a Linux program that lets you capture your screen but not in a video but in an animated GIF image. This is very useful for tutorial or presentations and you will definitely explain better using an image than in words when describing an action. You can use it to capture a whole your desktop, a window or a region you select.

SynchroRep is an intuitive applications which allows you to easily synchronize two folders. This is usefull principaly for nomads who work with a laptop or usb key but may interest also users who want making differencial backup to gain time.