Did you ever get to struggle against your text editor’s random format feature while trying to write a document? Open Office may be a great project, but when you want to focus on the content, it can be annoying to have your editor format or unformat your text, seemingly at random.

I couldn't find any Ubuntu logo GIMP brushes on the Ubuntu Wiki Artwork/Official page, so I've created some. The brushes are quite large, but now that GIMP supports scalable brushes they can be easily scaled down in size.

AMOR stands for Automatic Machine Object Recognition. It is a toolbox built upon Orange which allows end-users as well as computer vision scientist to do object recognition. It features most of the standard object recognition algorithms (SIFT, SVM…).It provides several different characters who prance around your X screen doing tricks and giving you tips.

Many customers, particularly those who are security conscious or those who have public terminals like to display a legal notice before users can login.

Today, I thought I'd go over a simple shell script that runs on both Linux and Unix (hopefully, pretty much any flavor) to wrap a popular password cracking program called John The Ripper, JTR from here on out, which you can download directly from this page, if you're not already using it.

Just as easy to add and remove applications or programs icons and descriptions from Windows Start menu, customizing Ubuntu Gnome menu bar panel is a snap for ex-Windows users.

To continue my look at how non-profits and the free software community can engage, I’ve decided to look at some popular free software products and see how well they fit the need of an average charity—namely my employer. I’ll start with OpenOffice.org.

Lots of open source tools can help you transfer photos and videos from your cameras to a Linux computer and burn them on to a DVD. But before you mail them to your uncles, aunts, and cousins, wouldn't it be great if you could add a customized case cover to your disks? Koverartist is a KDE application you can use to quickly put together an artistic cover for a CD case.

While the /tmp folder is not a place to store files long-term, occasionally you want to keep things a little longer than the next time you reboot, which is the default on Ubuntu systems. I know a time or two I’ve downloaded something to /tmp during testing, rebooted after making changes and then lost the original data again. This can be changed if you’d like to keep your /tmp files a little bit longer.  The default on Redhat systems, for example, is to keep files roughly ten-days.

For all the hype about the relative security of the two most popular browsers, is Firefox really any more secure than Internet Explorer? For that matter, is it even possible, as a British company with a “zero-footprint” browser claims, to develop a truly secure browser?

Setting up a file server doesn't need to be complicated. With three desktop machines (Kubuntu, Win XP and a testbed, which is currently running ReactOS) and a laptop (Xubuntu) in use at home, our IT is reaching small office proportions, and like many small offices, we run into file sharing problems.

TV. We all watch it. Chances are you might have a DVR hooked up to your TV so you can watch it at any time. If you pay for cable or satellite access, you are probably getting a little tired of those bills as well. If you’re into the ‘net, get rid of those bills and get Miro.

The Metasploit Project is an open source computer security project which provides information about security vulnerabilities and aids in penetration testing and IDS signature development. Its most well-known sub-project is the Metasploit Framework, a tool for developing and executing exploit code against a remote target machine. Other important sub-projects include the Opcode Database, shellcode archive, and security research. (Wikipedia).

Choices abound for reading Usenet messages in Linux. Many email clients can deliver news. Several standalone clients are also around, including Knode/Kontact, Pan, and several text-based choices. Some require you to be online when accessing news, others permit offline reading. Of course, there's also gnus for Emacs.

With the new year in full swing, I’d like to take a few minutes to promote the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, and call on the community to help us with translations. We currently produce the newsletter in English, and due to some great loco team help, have translations into French and Italian.

EA has donated the original SimCity source code to the One Laptop per Child project to port it to Linux and include on the laptops. It’s now called Micropolis, and can be played on any Linux system.

As a (relatively) long time Ubuntu user, occasional bug reporter and support analyst, I often deal with bug reporting and I feel your pain about bug reporting, Matt. This happens in many other free software projects, but I think Ubuntu’s popularity gives its problems more exposure, an opportunity to refine the process and maybe inspire others to learn from its mistakes and success.

Curtis Knight, Isak Savo, and Taj Morton are the lead maintainers and developers of autopackage, a set of tools designed to let developers build and distribute distribution-neutral installation packages. In this interview, they share their vision of the project and where Linux packaging in general is going.

We all know the right way to sort photos is to do them right after you take them. We also know that doing a disk backup before your drive fails is the right way to do backups. But, we don't always do things the right way. Enter my situation. I have close to 10,000 photos takes with my digital camera over the last seven years.

AVCHD capable cameras are fast becoming the most popular way to record your video — the size to quality ratio is leaps and bounds above other formats. Unfortunately video editing software hasn't necessarily caught up with the latest trend in cameras, which can make editing your AVCHD videos something of pain.

The way we use the internet is changing. As well as using the web to buy books, clothes and CDs, download music, auction junk on eBay, book a holiday, and find out what's going on in the world, we're increasingly using it to form networks and connections and share our thoughts and media with the rest of the world.

Last year, Linspire announced that it was opening its software distribution service, CNR (short for Click 'n' Run), to users of the Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu distributions. A month ago, it announced a beta version of CNR that includes support for Ubuntu 7.04 and 7.10 (the two most recent versions), with versions for the other systems on the way. Alas, after trying it on my Ubuntu system, I think it needs work.

In my list of ten tips for KDE 4.0, number 10 was a workaround for the fact that launching an application from the menu that needs to be run as root would cause KDE to refuse your password.

The evolution of computing is characterized by a vertiginous acceleration of speed and capacity. As we install sophisticated applications and make use of computers in more creative ways, storage needs are pushed even further. You can improve your disk performance by using a RAID-enabled desktop system running common OSS applications.

Have you ever wanted to attend a webinar but quickly discovered that the web-conference service doesn't even support your operating system? This has happened to me several times and it irks me greatly! I always make sure to tell the company that they should switch their web-conferencing service to one that supports multiple platforms including Linux.