Around the time of the release of Ubuntu 7.10, I tried out the Gnash Flash player included in that release. Because Adobe’s Flash player can not be redistributed in the default Ubuntu installation, a choice of players are offered when you visit a page in Firefox with Flash content. There are three options in Ubuntu 8.04: Adobe Flash, Swfdec (new to this version), and Gnash.

You can see YouTube videos everywhere nowadays: on blogs, Google search results, even some news sites. From time to time, you can even manage to find something interesting. This article will show you some Linux tools you can use to save and convert YouTube videos.

One of the many perks of being a Linux user is that you have plenty of excellent software to choose from. This is especially true if you are in search for an essential application like a media player because there are definitely loads of options. However, this could sometimes be a disadvantage particularly to new-to-Linux users for the reason that they could get overwhelmed with the many choices they have.

With all the Linux distributions available, trying out more than one can be tempting. By installing a virtual environment, you can run several operating systems on your machine, keeping them completely isolated from each other in their own sandboxes. Here's a look at how get started with three popular virtualization environments: VMware, VirtualBox, and QEMU.

With libraries of thousands of fonts to handle, designers need a way to quickly locate fonts and organize them into meaningful categories -- such as by the project that requires them -- and to disable fonts when they are not in use so that they don't clog system memory. Although as recently as two years ago the GNU/Linux desktop lacked a font manager that met all these needs, it now has four that either meet them or are likely to.

Twitter is a popular social networking utility that's gaining popularity as a micro-blogging tool. Registered users can post messages -- also called Tweets -- via the Web interface, but many prefer to use desktop applications that offer additional functionality and move Tweeting out of the browser entirely.

Ubuntu offers a number of open source alternatives for users migrating from Mac OS X who use Apple’s iLife suite.

I let the dust settle a bit after Ubuntu 8.04's initial release last week before making any decision about upgrading europa. Europa was running Ubuntu 7.10, but Sunday I went on ahead and upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04. I did this not because I've changed my mind about Ubuntu, so much as I had a morbid curiosity about how it would work after an upgrade.

I've been working with Ubuntu 8.04 in my spare time over the past weekend, and I'm definitely going to be reviewing it sometime soon. (I don't know how or why I let so much time slip by, but the last time I reviewed an Ubuntu distribution was almost three years ago [!!!] with version 5.04.)

In Q4'07 we had looked at Ubuntu's power consumption with all of their Linux releases going back to Ubuntu 5.04. While Linux has improved in recent years when it comes to power efficiency and optimizations, more processes running on the desktop had canceled out any real power improvements.

I'm not going to rave about 8.04, the latest Ubuntu release. There are already plenty of reviews around (here and here and here) even though the final version only hit the servers last Thursday. Rather, I'm going to go through my post-install routine and show you how I tweak things to set them the way I prefer.

A Linux Ubuntu 8.04 virgin no longer, I popped my own cherry last night, installing Hardy Heron for the first time, with some odd installation experiences I can only hope aren’t the ‘norm’. So, what happened?

Sonata is a GTK+ music player, written in Python. Actually, it is an MPD client, which is it’s most important advantage. MPD is a daemon that plays your music at background (maybe on a different computer). It can use different front ends, you can use it even from command-line and it continues playing even if your client or X is crashes. Sonata takes advantage of MPD and serves it in a clean and user-friendly interface.

The much-awaited 8.04 version of the Ubuntu Desktop named ‘Hardy Heron’ was released yesterday. I downloaded the 699 MB ISO and managed to install it today. There have been really worthy improvements. We can only hope that this latest version brings a lot of users into the Linux World.

Thoughts on a fresh upgrade to the new Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron

Generally speaking, I have been quite happy using Nautilus with a little help from Tracker from time to time. Nautilus is a no nonsense file manager that allows most users to get the most out of their files and the way they choose to manage them.

One of the perqs of being a journalist is that I often hear about software and events before most people. A case in point is Writer's Tools, an extension for OpenOffice.org Writer being developed by my fellow journalist Dimitri Popov, whose articles about macros have taught me most of what I know on the subject.As the name suggests, Writer's Tools is a collection of various utilities that might be useful for writers.

Today's Web development tools offer capabilities that go beyond basic HTML editing. I compared three Web editors for Linux -- Screem 0.16.1, Bluefish 1.0.7, and Quanta Plus 3.5.7 -- to determine how well they handle today's Web editing needs.

Good systems administrators know that implementing a robust backup procedure is one of their most important duties. Unfortunately, it's also one of the most complex and least fun. When the phone rings and there's a panic-stricken user on the other end who has just lost a crucial document, you need to be confident that you can promptly recover his missing files. Failure to do so can bring about a speedy end to a promising career in systems administration. So what's a budding sysadmin to do? Download the latest release of Bacula and watch those backup woes disappear into the dark of night.

Around three years ago, when I began my adventure with ‘the penguin’, I had been looking for an application to catalog CDs. They were either ugly, or limited in functionality, or simply couldn’t handle all disk types (e.g. DVD)… some other apps were required for installation, and/or involved many “weird” libraries (which I didn’t know what to do about). I quickly gave up my research, realizing that nothing could match software like WhereIsIt?.