Imagine an application that combines the features of a wiki and a Web-based notebook. It may sound like an unusual mix, but Luminotes wiki notebook is living proof that this combination works rather well.

For many users, getting started with Linux is surprisingly easy. New, friendlier versions of the free operating system, such as Fedora and Ubuntu, feature straightforward menus and automated installations that make switching from Windows to Linux a relatively simple process.

Like many people nowadays, I use many different computers. You use your computer at work, home, school and in public places. Maybe you also got several computers at home? One thing that easy comes to annoyance is bookmarking. With different bookmarks on every computer, I’ve long searched for a good way to sync my bookmarks between browsers and operating systems.

I’ve been testing the latest release of Firefox since my last article, which discussed the areas Mozilla needed to work on. Overall, it looks and feels like the last release. Undoubtedly, there have been marked improvements made in the security and stability of the application. But to be honest, I was right about one prediction - a total lack of offering anything compelling over the previous release.

When it comes to desktop publishing, a lot of people might think of big organizations producing newsletters, or your local boy scouts producing a fund raising flier.  But the average person out there might not see where any kind of desktop publishing is really needed.  Honestly, if you really look deeply, you might be surprised.  There are a lot of great uses for desktop publishing.  A lot more than people realize. But what is desktop publishing?

In my next three articles I'll profile three native Linux software synthesizers (a.k.a. softsynths). I'll introduce their basic synthesis architectures and program operations, then I'll guide my readers briefly through the process of creating a new sound for each synth profiled. Our voyage begins with Nick Dowell's Analogue Modeling SYNTHesizer, better known as amSynth.

Previously I’ve written about Gimmie, a desktop organizer and panel for GNOME designed to allow easy interaction with the things you use on your computer. Some of it’s developers have forked the project, and created Mayanna. It’s a young project, so I had to compile from source to try it out. Here’s a look at Mayanna revision 23, read on to the end of the post if you are interested in compiling it yourself.

So you just bought an external hard drive for backups. Now, with what filesystem should you format it? Ext2? FAT32? No matter which one you choose, there are trade-offs to consider.

JWChat is a Jabber instant messaging client that is written using only HTML and JavaScript. This means that you need not install a Jabber instant messaging client in order to use Jabber, assuming you already have a Web browser installed. A Jabber client that runs in a Web browser could be just the ticket for such uses as providing instant messaging to visitors to your Web site.

What does education have to do with Linux, or free software in general, you ask? In this article, I am going to answer this question and describe available open source educational programs for your kids.

After three weeks of using KDE 4 on my laptop, I continue to find new features and changes. I am aware of the dictionary of special names that make up the back end of the new KDE -- Oxygen, Plasma, Phonon, and the rest -- but just as often as the major features, it's the little items that I find welcome as much as the large ones. Increasingly, I'm looking at KDE 4 as a statement about what a desktop should be, and contrasting it with my own ideas on the subject.

The free software community makes games, too. Among the more well-known ones is the Battle for Wesnoth — a turn-based strategy game with a fantasy setting. It doesn’t have shiny 3D graphics or cut-scenes, but it is an interesting and original game and is fun to play. This game is often simply called “Wesnoth”, and the package name is “wesnoth”.

I use BitTorrent for downloading music, movies and linux distro's. Back in the day bitTorrent didnt exist and I relied on bbs and ftp, these are two direct, centrally located ways that I shared files in the past. I also have played around with XDCC's on irc, gnutella, which most people know as limewire.

While changing to a great OS like Ubuntu , I had to make some sacrifices , one of them being : less gaming. I'm not seeing I ended my gamer " career" , buy i start to look for smaller web games , or testing the big LINUX games that everybody was talking about. ( Tremoulos,Quake Wars,Nexuiz,Battle For Wesnoth). But until recently my gaming experience was not fulfilled. The graphics was poor, the sounds were not even interesting and overall the games sucked big time.

Recently, we reviewed Ubuntu 8.04 beta. We received several complaints for cranky people in the comments, and so we decided to take a look at some newer code. Always in search of variety, however, we decided to spice things up a little bit by trying Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu. We downloaded the nightly build of the alternate installer, and took it for a spin.

While changing to a great OS like Ubuntu , I had to make some sacrifices , one of them being : less gaming. I'm not seeing I ended my gamer " career" , buy i start to look for smaller web games , or testing the big LINUX games that everybody was talking about. ( Tremoulos,Quake Wars,Nexuiz,Battle For Wesnoth).

When we looked at Flock 0.9 last year, the social Web browser showed a lot of potential. Now that it's over the 1.0 hump, the Flock team has made good on the application's promise. Maybe too good -- while Flock serves up a lot of content on a single page, you practically need super-powers to take it all in. Once you cut back on the sensory input a bit though, it's a pretty slick Firefox alternative for anyone with a ton of cyber friends.

We live in a cross-platform world. People work in front of their Windows PCs all day long, then go home to their Mac. Or they code at their Linux terminal then unwind with games on their Windows box. Unfortunately, for as many cross-platform people as there are, it doesn't always seem like there's a lot of software built to follow them from machine to machine. Much of the time, even when a piece of software is available for several operating systems, it doesn't ever work quite the same. Configuration options are different, keystrokes behave differently, and nothing looks quite right.

One exception is Pidgin, the Linux- and Windows-compatible, multi-network IM client built on libpurple, the open source library that started life as "gAIM," an AIM client for Linux users.

Back in December we looked at the initial Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 2 performance by comparing it to Ubuntu 7.10. In that article we had found the performance between the two releases to be roughly the same. Now that we're nearing an end in this development cycle as Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy Heron) will be released later this month, we've ran a new set of benchmarks comparing the latest Ubuntu 8.04 packages to the previous Gutsy Gibbon release.

In this age of multi-core processors and 3-D desktops, some people still get work done on old resource-strapped single-core machines, thanks to programs like the AbiWord word processor. The latest stable AbiWord 2.6.0 release was unveiled last month, two years after the software's last stable release. Feature-wise, the little cross-platform word processor has closed the gap with heavyweight OpenOffice.org Writer, but it suffers from the oldest Linux ill of all -- it's a pain to install.