DockBarX 0.40 has been released last night, bringing the following changes:

-The default theme has changed. The new default theme DBX is made by BigRZA. It's made to look good with Radiance and Ambiance. (The old default theme is still included under the name Old.)

-Another theme by BigRZA, Sunny Colors is also included by default

If you're using Pidgin with MSN, you probably got lots of "omega.contacts.msn.com" certificate errors today. Here is how to fix it.

Phoronix recently published an article regarding a ~200 lines Linux Kernel patch that improves responsiveness under system strain. Well, Lennart Poettering, a RedHat developer replied to Linus Torvalds on a maling list with an alternative to this patch that does the same thing yet all you have to do is run 2 commands and paste 4 lines in your ~/.bashrc file.

VLC 1.1.5 has been released yesterday, introducing some small features and bug fixes.

One of the most interesting new features in VLC 1.1.5 is the addition of 1000 Web-shows listing integrated inside VLC's playlist, provided by Channels.com. These can be accessed by going to View > Playlist > Internet:

Because there are many Twitter clients out there, we asked you to nominate the best Twitter client in a comment on a post last week. Today, you all get to vote for the best Linux Twitter client based on your nominations (top 5 nominations).

Compiz 0.9.x has been re-written and should now be a lot faster. Also, it comes with many enhancements such as minimized windows previews, per window compositing and more. Read on for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat installation instructions!

Compiz 0.8.x has some very cool plugins which are marked as "experimental" and thus are not available in the Ubuntu repositories. Johnnyg posted instructions about installing these plugins @ Gnome Look - I gave it a try and everything seems to be working (though I've only tested 3-4 plugins so far).

Your favourite music player is not supported by the new Ubuntu 10.10 sound menu or not using Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat yet?

Nautilus Easy Union is a Nautilus extension (comes as a stand-alone application too, but it requires Nautilus anyway) that allows you to create a "union point" which is basically a folder that displays the contents of other (multiple) directories. You can use it for easily accessing all your pictures, music, videos or other files from a single location.

An update to the Avant Window Navigator trunk PPA from a few days ago brought per dock/panel Intellihide to AWN (taskmanager).

The remastered "Ubuntu after a week of customizations" Pinguy OS 10.10 beta 2 has just been released. For those of you who are not familiar with Pinguy: it's an Ubuntu remaster with a lot of useful default applications "built to have eye candy (Gloobus Preview, GNOME Do, Docky, Elementary*) and for every part of it to be user-friendly".

WatchVideo is a QT application (but also comes with a command-line version) to play, download, rip or convert (to Ogg) videos from Bliptv, Break, CaracolTV, CineGratis24h, CollegeHumor, Current, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Sapovideos, TheOnion, Vimeo, YouTube, and others.

Pinta is a simplified image editor based on Paint.NET (and thus it uses Mono), designed to serve as an alternative to GIMP for casual users.

Neembuu Uploader is a batch uploader that allows you to easily upload multiple files (simultaneously) to 6 file sharing hosts: easy-share.com, filedropper.com, filedude.com, hotfile.com, ifile.it and uploadmb.com.

Realtime Sunlight Wallpaper is an application which sets your wallpaper to an image of the Earth's sunglight/darkness - updated every 30 minutes. The wallpaper also displays clouds which are updated every 3 hours with the current weather satellite imagery.

What this script does is check a folder for new images and when you add a new image, it is instantly uploaded to your PicasaWeb account (in an album you set in the script). Note that the script will not upload any images that already exist in that folder.

Gnome Subtitles is a subtitle editor for the GNOME desktop. It supports the most common text-based subtitle formats and allows for subtitle editing, translation and synchronization.