QGRUBEditor is a system tool to view and edit the GRUB boot loader. It offers many features and it is the perfect solution for those who want to change the way GRUB works, without messing with GRUB’s configuration files.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 82 for the weeks March 9th - March 15th, 2008 is now available. In this issue we cover the Ubuntu 8.04 beta freeze, Ubuntu Classroom team, the return of Ubuntustats.com, LoCo projects from the Jordanian, New Mexico, and UK teams, Ubuntu Studio at Sheffield University, and, as always, much, much more!

Please switch this site to make use of full feeds.

That would make it much more useful. Please also include vote link in the feed, so we can vote from the rss reader (and you can drive some more traffic to your site :))

Also: the "contact us" page doesn't work :/ (gives forbidden)

It has been nearly four months since Unreal Tournament 3 first shipped for the PC, while the Linux client is still missing in action due to software legal issues. At the same time, Linux Game Publishing is running late on delivering their Linux ports of both Bandits: Phoenix Rising and X3: Reunion. Over the past couple of quarters it's definitely been an unpleasant time for the Linux commercial gaming scene, but this week there is good news coming out of Finland and that is two games -- both relatively new to the marketplace -- being ported to Linux.

A word processor, as you may all know, is a computer application that is used for the production (including composition, editing, formatting, and possibly printing) of any sort 0f printable material. It is considered as one of the earliest applications for the personal computer in office productivity.

This article deals with lost or missing bookmarks, recovery methods and prevention. If changes you make to your bookmarks are not being saved or if you can't add new bookmarks, see the article Bookmarks not saved. If you got a message that your profile was already in use, created a new profile and now your bookmarks and other data are missing, read the article Profile in use.

Phatch is a simple to use cross-platform GUI Photo Batch Processor which handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, rename, … and more in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually. Phatch will also support a console version in the future to batch photos on webservers.

Amarok is a very intuitive and user friendly music player, it makes playing music on your PC even more fun. It has tons of options that would put any other player to shame. Right out of the box it can fetch lyrics, album covers from Amazon, and artist bios from Wikipedia!

I just installed a fresh copy of Kubuntu kde4 Hardy Heron on my laptop. Actually, it’s semi-fresh… I installed Ubuntu 7.10 Server Edition, modified the repositories to Hardy Heron, the next release, and performed an upgrade. Then, I installed the “kubuntu-kde4-desktop” package. After an installation of Firefox, Amarok, and KOffice 2, I am ready to go.

Pygame is a cross-platform set of Python modules designed for writing video games. It includes computer graphics and sound libraries designed to be used with the Python programming language. It is built over the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library, with the intention of allowing real-time computer game development without the restraints and low-level mechanics of the C programming language and its derivatives.

It is perhaps a sign of advancement of Linux as a platform that people are starting to seriously ask the question: "Where are the Linux gamers?" Just recently, I've seen Mad Penguin ask it, followed by this indie-game developer's blog. The question also got batted around on Slashdot.

Once you have CUPS installed properly, you can easily print from both Unix and Windows clients.  On Windows (at least Windows XP), open up the Printers list from the Control Panel and click on Add New Printer.  Windows will ask whether it is a local printer or a networked printer.

When the next version of Ubuntu Linux ships in April, there’s a reasonable chance that server vendors could start jumping on the Ubuntu bandwagon by May or so. Here’s the scoop.

One thing you hear often about Linux is that there’s no software for it. This is simply not true. There may not be much proprietary software for it, but there is some, and there are plenty of free alternatives to what most offices use every day.

When my girlfriend visits me, she has to work on a mini PC while I use my laptop to finish whatever I postponed at the office. Her PC has a 1GHz VIA processor and 128 MB of RAM and runs Ubuntu. You can imagine how slowly it boots, even with Linux installed, and GNOME runs so slowly that it's quite irritating. I didn't want to reformat and install a lightweight Linux distribution like Fluxbuntu because the mini PC doesn't have a CD-ROM drive, and I already had 10GB of data that would have taken a long time to back up. Instead, I found and installed some lightweight software to improve her computing experience.

Chainloading an operating system allows grub to boot an opearating system's boot loader. This is commonly used to boot Windows for instance. I personnaly use it to be able to have my "production" system's grub on the MBR, and address other distros'grub install on their root partition. The advantage is that kernel updates are real easy to handle. Each testing distro modifying their own grub won't interfere with my main OS bootloader.

So just before the first beta I finally updated my production machine to Hardy after feeling bad about not giving enough effort in testing for the last weeks. In one short sentence: It worked! In a longer sentence: It worked quite well, but…

In my last post I mentioned Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). Many people don’t know what FLOSS is, but it’s really quite simple. FLOSS is software that anybody can see and that they are free to change to suit their needs. FLOSS is programs that that don’t cost an arm and a leg and a first born son. Examples are Linux, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Apache Web Server, MySQL, and many more.

If you’re a Linux enthusiast like me, you’ve probably tried to convert a few people over to Linux from another operating system. Even though you succeed many times, there are always a few ‘geniuses’ out there who need some real persuading to switch over to Linux. So here are some quick and simple things about Linux you can point out to your potential convert.

Facter is a cross-platform Ruby library for retrieving facts from operating systems. It supports multiple resolution mechanisms, any of which can be restricted to working only on certain operating systems or environments. Facter is especially useful for retrieving things like operating system names, IP addresses, MAC addresses, and SSH keys. It is easy to extend Facter to include your own custom facts or to include additional mechanisms for retrieving facts.

It seems we always need to update our PC hardware at one point or another, to keep abreast of the increasing demands that current software makes of our computers. If like me, you hate to lose the use of older PC’s, you may store them away for “later” projects.

Having multiple computers can be a blessing when trying to multi-task, but trying to control them all at once can take a lot of room. Hardware options are available. They are called KVMs, which is short for keyboard, video, and mouse switches. However these hardware options require a constant hardware connection. This makes it impractical for laptops, or when substituting the KVM for the real keyboard/mouse/screen set up is not desired.

There's no dearth of Web feed readers for Linux that allow you to keep tabs on new postings on a Web site. But what if the Web site or page you're interested in doesn't provide a feed? Specto is a nifty little Python application that lets you monitor changes to static or dynamic pages. You can configure Specto to monitor changes to wiki pages, blog posts, forum threads, your email inbox, and even files and folders on your own system. An unobtrusive pop-up from its system tray icon informs you of all changes, so you don't have to hop around looking for updates.

Last month the TrueCrypt Foundation released TrueCrypt 5.0, which finally introduces a Linux GUI for the cross-platform encryption application. TrueCrypt 5.0's numerous other enhancements include a Mac OS X port, XTS operation mode, the ability to encrypt a system partition or drive under Windows, and the addition of the SHA-512 hash algorithm.

Firefox 3.0 Beta 4 users are reporting that Mozilla's new browser is dramatically faster than its predecessor – as well as faster than the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.