There's a nice little extension for OpenOffice.org that lets you quickly upload your document to your googledocs account. Click here to get it.

Amarok is a wonderful application for managing and playing your music collection, but the default settings aren't optimized for speed when it comes to large collections of music. The problems are especially noticeable while trying to use the search box.

Many people are giving up blogging to try their hand at podcasting -- creating a downloadable audio file that will play on any standard MP3 player. Recording, editing, and packaging a session isn't very difficult but, until recently not very many tools existed to help you get the job done. Now Linux-friendly applications are starting to pop up everywhere.

I usually use in my Desktop at home Debian Etch (Stable), but as I also like Mandriva since I tested it, I wanted to install a dual boot system, with both Mandriva and Debian Etch, but I also wanted to have access to both file systems with the same permissions and even have the same /home partition for the two operating systems, so for this I needed to be sure to have the same user with the same UID and GUID in both systems.

I usually carry my laptop everywhere and do work on it, but I do also need to work at my desktop PC, so I need to synchronize the files on the two machines. I have used several sync tools in the past, ranging from simple commands like scp and rsync to utilities like Krusader, which includes a way to synchronize directories on different machines. Recently I started using Unison.

If you want the old-time GNU/Linux experience, try configuring a Web camera. Unlike most peripherals, webcams are generally not configured during installation. Moreover, where printers have the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) and its interfaces, with webcams you are generally thrown back on whatever resources you can find on the Internet and your own knowledge of kernel modules and drivers.

While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into ODT (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents. Using odtwriter, you can generate ODF files on machines that don't have ODF-compatible word processors installed, such as those running lightweight Linux distros, or simply compose documents in a text editor and leave the task of properly formatting them to odtwriter.

Here is another article of our “GIMP tricks” series. This time you are going to learn a simple trick: how to make your teeth look really white on a photograph. By the way, perhaps it’s the right time to visit a dentist?

GnuCash is a personal finance and accounting application created to keep you crazy organized. It can do simple things like recording expenses and take care of register transactions, but it can also handle tracking bank accounts, income, and a slew of financial instruments and derivatives.

Because the traditional System V init daemon (SysVinit) does not deal well with modern hardware, including hotplug devices, USB hard and flash drives, and network-mounted filesystems, Ubuntu replaced it with the Upstart init daemon.

This article is excerpted from the recently published book A Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux.

Several other replacements for SysVinit are also available. One of the most prominent, initng, is available for Debian and runs on Ubuntu. Solaris uses SMF (Service Management Facility) and Mac OS uses launchd. Over time, Ubuntu will likely come to incorporate features of each of these systems into Upstart.

f you want to keep always the latest available copy of Skype on your computer, not having to check the skype home page every time, you may want to use the skype repository for Debian, which also works for Ubuntu, Check this How to

First add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list

When planning a project, whether it's an essay or software, there's a tendency to try to capture ideas in a linear fashion, organizing them as you draw them forth from your mind. The classic example of this is attempting to write an orderly outline as the first step of composing an essay.

Want to add some fonts you downloaded to your Ubuntu system? The Nautilus file manager includes an interface for adding fonts. Using Nautilus is the easiest way to add fonts to Ubuntu.

There are literally dozens of plugins and extensions for Nautilus, the default file manager on the GNOME desktop environment, but there is just one that allows you to customize the Nautilus context menu items. The Nautilus-actions extension enables you to add customized entries to the context menu such that, when you right-click a file, the context menu will show options specific to that file.

From Techthrob.com:

Virtualization is the technique of running a "guest" operating system inside an already-running OS; for example, Windows inside Linux, or visa-versa. This week Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, announced a partnership with Parallels, maker of the Virtualization products Parallels Workstation and Parallels Desktop for Mac. This article compares four virtualization products available for Ubuntu Linux: the free, open source Qemu; the closed-but-free versions of VirtualBox and VMware-Server, and the newly-available, commercial Parallels.

Read More at Techthrob.com

Today I would like to introduce you to the world of TeX, specifically LaTeX. As LaTeX is complex, I have divided this document into these parts:

Ubuntu Tweak is a utility created to make it easier for users to configure and change a variety of system settings. You can use it to quickly adjust settings for GNOME Panel, Compiz, and Nautilus, along with some more advanced security settings.

I’m going to outline today how to setup seamless window integration with Ubuntu and Virtualbox. If you missed yesterday’s post you might want to take a look at the seamless integration screenshot. No, that is not Photoshop’d, its really my desktop. I’ll also outline how to setup a shared folder between the two systems so that the icons and folders available on your XP desktop are available on your Ubuntu dekstop. So lets go ahead and dive in.

This tells you how to create MP3 files from your text files, using Festival and LAME. Great to convert e-books to listen to on the road.

I use this tool a lot as I have lots of ISOs in my Hard Disk, you maybe know it, but for those of you who don't here it is:

One of the things that has annoyed me most about GNOME as I've played with it lately is the lack of a clipboard manager comparable to Klipper on KDE. However, as I was looking for a package in Synaptic, I managed to come across a program that does the job quite well: Glipper.

If you have a Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse here is the procedure to follow howto setup in Ubuntu?

This tutorial will explain how to create a self-signed certificate that you will be able to use with apache in order to provide ssl support.

GLPI stands for “Gestionnaire libre de parc informatique”, GLPI is the Information Resource Manager with an additional Administration- Interface. You can use it to build up a database with an inventory for your company (computer, software, printers…). It has enhanced functions to make the daily life for the administrators easier, like a job tracking system with mail-notification and methods to build a database with basic information about your network-topology.

We all know that when you simply delete a file, it's possible to recover it later. Sometimes this is useful, if you accidentally delete something important; but usually this is a problem, and you really want that file gone forever. This howto will explain how to delete a file in linux securely and permanently, so it can never be recovered. Hard drives store data magnetically; when you delete a file in Linux (on the ext3 filesystem), that area of the hard drive (the "inode") is overwritten with zeros (this isn't the case with the older ext2 filesystem, or with the Windows filesystems; see the section below on "passes and filesystems"), but the magnetic traces of that section's previous contents remain lingering until it is overwritten many times. These tools work by writing lots of random data and zeros over your old file[s], making sure that even the most advanced recovery methods aren't able to read what was once stored in that part of the hard disk.