For students like me, it may be a busy time for studying at the end of January. I was interesting in trying out some flash-cards for memorizing question and answer format material, but without using lots of small paper cards. It turns out there’s a great flash-card application in the Ubuntu repositories.

The Amarok developers have announced the availability of an Amarok 2 technical preview, an early pre-release that demonstrates new features that are planned for the next major release the popular open-source media player. Amarok 2 leverages many of the underlying frameworks provided by KDE 4, including the Phonon audio abstraction layer, Solid hardware interface, and Plasma widget library.

Almost any Linux enthusiast would say that you can get things done twice as quick using the command line versus any GUI, especially if you know your way around. The Linux Bash shell is very flexible and allows for much tweaking.

Hard-working KDE Input/Output (KIO) slaves perform much of KDE's functionality. KIO slaves provide consistent access to different resources, such as filesystems, network protocols, and search functions, making them accessible to all KDE applications in a standard way. For example, you can open a remote FTP session and copy, move, rename, or delete files as if they're on your own box, or connect via Secure Shell (SSH) and use remote files as if they were local. Even browsing the Web uses a KIO slave.

GNU/Linux inherits a tradition of small programs that do one thing very well. A modern example of this tradition is Alexandria, a dedicated book cataloger for GNOME. Although a few workarounds would make it almost as useful as KDE's Tellico for other collections, especially music, Alexandria's focus remains squarely on books and their organization by library, status, and ratings. Perhaps its closest analogy is the online LibraryThing, although Alexandria actually predates LibraryThing and is designed for private, desktop use.

Many people want to customize their login screens.  Where I work we customize the Novell Login screens and put a default Legal Notice for all the users.  It would be nice to customize the login and shutdown screens for UBUNTU to display custom graphics. Here are the instructions on how to customize the GNOME login screen to display legal notices before users can.

If you are like me, you have a ton of passwords you have to remember. I have different login names and passwords for bank accounts, forums, blogs, email, and other stuff. How do you deal with it all? How can a person possibly remember them all, especially the ones that only get used once every month or two, or just a couple of times in a year?

The earth is orbited by many satellites, and every year, many more are sent up into space. Considering the amount of satellites, there is an enormous risk that one of those artificials moons suddenly decides to take a stroll and crashes into your home. I think you’ll agree with me that this would be disastrous - all your precious data would be lost! Your holiday pictures, important documents for school/work and your music collection - all gone!

Unlike GNOME’s panels and panel applets, KDE 4.0’s plasma widgets don’t have to be placed in a panel. In fact, you don’t need to have a panel at all. Here’s how to remove the bottom panel in KDE 4.0:

1. Browse to ~/.kde4/share/config/ and make a backup copy of of the plasma-appletsrc file. This is the file you will need to edit. You can use the backup to restore the panel and your widgets to their previous configuration.
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or many like me IRC is the de-facto chat medium to share information about things we love. Be either Hacking, linux, Ubuntu, games, whatever; there are always channels with like minded people to talk to. With wide variety of IRC Channels comes a wide variety of IRC clients. This is such a list of IRC clients for Linux.

Since we've began offering Ubuntu on some consumer systems, two clear areas of feedback from the IdeaStorm community and Direct2Dell readers have been:  offer Ubuntu on more hardware, and offer it worldwide.  This Ubuntu-related post is still the third most commented post in Direct2Dell's history-many  of the 654 comments are asking for it in more countries.

Have you ever noticed that sometimes Firefox isn't very responsive while loading a page? As a frequent StumbleUpon user, this behavior grates on my nerves so I went looking for a solution.

When Firefox is loading a page it uses one of two modes: There's a high priority mode that doesn't pay as much attention to your mouse and keyboard, but loads the page faster. There's also a lower priority mode that interrupts the parser more often to respond to input events. It's even documented at Mozillazine.

Problem: one have a printer shared for networks printing and connected to a windows machine. From the other side, there is Linux-powered machine with CUPS installed and we want to print on windows shared printer.

Whether by wind, vibration, or shaky hand, we have all taken blurry photos. But in the digital era, there is no need to despair -- you can remove shake and blur from your pictures after the fact. Several Linux-friendly utilities can help you.

Brightside is a small utility for extending the functionality of Metacity, the default window manager for the GNOME desktop. Now at version 1.4.0, it currently offers two mutually exclusive functions: corner actions that are activated when the mouse cursor moves to one of the desktop's corners, and scrolling with the mouse between desktops.

I run the latest Ubuntu live-CDs inside a VirtualBox virtual machine to test them and run the graphical installer. Without this keyboard shortcut, using the installer would be nearly impossible because its window is larger than the 800×600 pixel resolution that VirtualBox uses.

If you’ve ever wanted to completely clone your Ubuntu install, with all of the tweaks, files you’ve downloaded and changes you’ve made to it, there’s a fairly simple way to do this. This is great if you want a complete backup, or if you’re looking to move your system to a newer (read: bigger, faster, stronger) hard drive or even just to clone your install to other machines with the same hardware.

A good news about Ubuntu Tweak: it finally has been added to the Launchpad PPA repository! From now on, you can always follow the newest version of Ubuntu Tweak if you added the source. And another good news is: I’m now in holiday, the development is start again! Here comes the Ubuntu Tweak 0.2.5, just a bug fixed release.

The Ubuntu team is proud to announce the release of Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS, the second maintenance release of “Dapper Drake”. This release includes updated Server installation CDs for the i386 and amd64 architectures.

A dissertation is composed of two elements: the content and the form. The author is certainly the person best qualified to speak about the content. We, however, will focus on the form. We are going to see how to get a fine composition with low time expenditure using LaTeX.

Why waste your money on expensive commercial games when you can play for free, and, if you're so inclined, dive into the code and modify the game to suit your exacting requirements? Apcmag.com presents its selection of the most addictive, fun and refined Open Source games for January 2008.

KDE 4.0 was officially released last week after extensive development. The long-awaited 4.0 release ushers in a new era for the popular open-source desktop environment and adds many intriguing new features and technologies. Unfortunately, the release comes with almost as many new bugs as it does features, and there is much work to be done before it sparkles like the 3.5.x series.

The DARPA’s Urban Challenge is an engineering competition to develop an autonomous vehicle capable of navigating urban streets safely while obeying traffic regulations and covering the 60 mile course in 6 hours or less. The goal is to develop vehicles that can one day self navigate through dangerous urban environments.

I know there are plenty of articles and posts for setting up a development server. Yet I still find the need to write up the exact commands and process for my later self to refer to, especially since I haven’t found a clone function in VMware Fusion like the linux version has. A pet “when-I-have-time” project would be to turn these steps into a bash script.

I'm starting to wonder if anything about Linux is going to be easy. But I remain undaunted in my efforts to use Ubuntu 7.10, or Gutsy Gibbon, to accomplish the same computing tasks I use Windows for. Now that I've got Flash and Quicktime working in Ubuntu, I feel like I'm nearly there.