Last night I took a quick look at the Fluxbuntu 7.10 release candidate. As the name suggests, Fluxbuntu is an Ubuntu derivative offering the lightweight Fluxbox window manager.

OpenOffice is the darling of the FOSS office suites, and it is a nice suite. It's cross-platform, and OpenOffice Writer is a first-rate word processor with a lot of advanced features. But it's not the only good option for Linux users: Abiword and KWord are excellent lightweight word processors with good feature sets, and both are licensed under the GPL. All three are wonderful. In this two-part series we're going to dig into KWord 1.6, and mine some of its hidden jewels.

CNR (Click’N'Run) is Linspire’s website and client software that provides an easy way to discover and install free and commercial Linux software. Linspire just released the beta with support for their own distributions as well as Ubuntu. Does it make installing software in Ubuntu easier?

VirtualBox is a piece of software that uses virtualisation to simulate a PC. With it you can run Windows, Open BSD or even Linux from your Debian system. Since it also runs on Windows and Mac OS, you can use it to run Debian from that other non-free OS. Note however that it only works on x86 and x86_64 hosts.

It may be a brave opinion but I predict that Ubuntu Linux and Windows Vista are going to be the two operating systems that will take over the largest chunk of the desktop OS market during the next couple of years. This comparison is based on my experience with both systems during the last couple of weeks on two different computers.

Welcome to part 6 of our series. Today we'll be bringing you Rythmbox, Songbird, Totem and one of our previously missed media players, Aqualung. Now, on a subject of interest to our readers, I'd like to address a question that was thrown at me not too long back as to why I only cover four media players at a time.

Even if you work only in Linux, you'll likely have to use Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files at one time or another. Several open source projects use this common format, including Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, and PHP.

Well, I'm kind of disappointed. I was all set to whine and moan about Edubuntu screwing things up on my LTSP in the outside lab and how it made me reinstall the entire OS again but then a funny thing happened. After I reinstalled the OS I noticed that it not only worked exactly as it should, but it also had solved one of the most annoying changes from Feisty to Gutsy. So now I guess this is going to be more of a fanboy post than I originally planned to do. Oh well.

gOS, the hot new Linux distribution, has been generating a lot of buzz because it comes with the Everex Green PC, sold at Wal-Mart for $200. Linux reviewers are totally in love with it, and are praising it to the skies. Naturally, I had to find out if it lives up to the hype.

Many of us wonder, why is there so much excitement over Skype when, at its core, Ekiga is a more robust application with even more maturity behind it? The answer to that is rather simple - provide a compelling reason to use something besides Skype. Honestly, I believe Ekiga blows Skype out of the water with mature features (video calls) and it's open source heritage, which means that nothing 'weird' is going on without you knowing about it. Yet many Linux users by the truckload will still migrate over to Skype because they 'know' about this application from other platforms.

The first alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04 (codenamed Hardy Heron) was scheduled to be released today, but the official release has been pushed back until tomorrow. However, a preliminary CD image of this first alpha release for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has surfaced today on the Internet. While there is still seven more Ubuntu 8.04 test releases (five alphas, one beta, and one RC) planned before the final release of Hardy Heron in April, we have already started exploring this first Hardy Heron LiveCD.

Welcome to part 5 of our Linux Media Player Roundup! Today we'll be going over several more media players for you to consider. But first, I wanted to let everyone know that I've done a little cleanup on part 1 of this article series.

This blog mostly writes about Linux related stuff. However, we occasionally mention the shortcomings of Linux operating system compared to Windows and Mac. Our most recent article, Linux is not so simple, got a bit popular among users of both sides of the world. I mentioned things like Ubuntu takes longer to start up and wireless is a pain to get working and even use properly. That was Feisty Fawn (7.04).

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! I know that I enjoyed the days off of school, and thankfully having nothing better to do than finally install the latest Ubuntu: 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon." So onwards now, lets see how it fared:

So you work in a scientific environment and wonder how to organize bibliographic data, downloaded articles/preprints and links to online papers in such a way that…:

Ubuntu is highly regarded as the most human-friendly, idiot-proof, and easy-to-use Linux desktop operating system ever. Its straightforward installation and maintenance, paired with its outstanding reliability and hardware support made it popular among new-to-Linux users as well as experts. But has Ubuntu really succeeded in winning the hearts of mainstream audiences?

Skype recently released Skype 2.0 beta for Linux, which includes the ability to make video calls, a feature the Windows and Mac versions have had for some time. I tried the beta on two systems running Ubuntu 7.10 -- my desktop PC with a USB webcam and a MacBook Pro with its onboard iSight webcam -- with mixed results.

Today I've finished installations of two very different operating systems, Vista and Kubuntu. Both are essentially trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to provide desktop users a satisfying and relatively seemless desktop computing experience. Both succeed to a certain degree and both fail in some important areas. The question is why?

Over the past few years, like lots of Linux users, I have become increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox in Linux. Though I haven't been as vocal as others of the state of Firefox, it was clear that most of us were just sick and tired of Firefox being a "good Windows browser that happened to run in Linux."

Firefox 3 Beta 1 sports usability enhancements that make it a big step forward over previous versions. It's proven stable enough to use as a production browser -- on some machines. On other machines, it's a pig.