Prism is a project by Mozilla to produce an application more geared towards web applications such as Google mail. It’s light doesn’t contain any buttons such as back/forward and allows you to concentrate on the application itself, providing better desktop-web integration to the user. If you would like more detail regarding Prism see Mozilla Labs.

When you customized your Ubuntu desktop to replace the brown theme, you may have overlooked the login window. GNOME’s login window, called GDM (GNOME Display Manager), can be easily customized by installing themes.

Compiz-Switch is a simple program to switch Compiz off and on easily. If you are looking for a simple yet effective way to switch between Compiz and the window manager of your desktop environment, then this is for you.

Have a burning urge to discover the UUID’s of your disk partitions? Run Ubuntu or some other Debian based distro like maybe Debian? Well have I got the article for you friend! Here it is, two easy steps to discovering your UUID - and the best part? For two steps I’ll give you two different ways to get that pesky UUID on your screen.

If there is a defining feature in Apple's Leopard, it's Time Machine. As cool as it may be, the fact is that we, as Linux users, are obviously not going to see much benefit from this is pitiful. So it's a good thing that open source developers have taken it upon themselves to create something similar, be it not a 'pretty' alternative.

By far the best and most fluid feature of Ubuntu 7.10 is the ability to read and write to NTFS drives. What does that mean?  It means that you can share resources and use both drives as one!  You can share documents and settings between windows seamlessly.  You have one bookmarks file, one addressbook, one Documents directory.  Here’s how to set it up.

Crypt manager is a compilation of tools which allow to easily encrypt, open, close and uncrypt folders in a desktop environment. It is written in Python, it uses cryptsetup and LUKS as backend. Crypt Manager is composed of three parts:

Most Web publishing systems on the market can automatically generate RSS feeds, but there are situations where you might want to have fine-grained control over your RSS feeds.

You can do a bunch of stuff with your laptop’s touch pad, all by installing a quick program and modifying your xorg.conf file.

Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances makes a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. If that sounds like you, try Buddi, probably the easiest to use personal finance manager out there.

If you're like me, your bosses actually expect you to work while on the job, and not sit listening to your favorite radio show like you might want to. In this instructable, I'll show how to record any audio stream automatically using mplayer, lame and cron to schedule the job.

If you program in a distributed environment, you surely are used to working with tools such as CVS or SVN, two version control systems that allow many users to work on a group of files. However, those tools don't provide for real-time updates, and if two programmers work on the same piece of code, they will need to reconcile their updates, which can be troublesome. Gobby provides group editing capability, so two or more people can edit the same document at the same time, in a collaborative fashion, with every participant getting to see all edits at the same time.

If you forgot you password for your ubuntu system you can recover using the following steps:

I like to back up the data on my laptop computer as often as possible, just in case I have trouble with it. I have some large files on the laptop that prevent me from scheduling an Internet backup to my home machine, so I have written a script that reminds me to periodically plug in an external USB drive; then upon clicking continue, the reminder script runs my custom backup script.

Use this guide to get MIDI sound working unless:

you have a soundcard with a linux-supported hardware synth
you are using external MIDI instruments

Most people need to setup MIDI sound using software synthesis.

I recently went looking for a way to rotate JPG images from within Nautilus, and found a nice way to do this and more. It’s not difficult to customize the right-click popup menu in Nautilus to perform custom actions on files. Here are some instructions and scripts to get you started.

Web applications, or web apps, have become very popular due to the ubiquity of web browsers and fast internet connections. The disadvantage of web apps is they run in a web browser, which means that they’re not integrated into your desktop. Web apps don’t look like normal offline apps, and the web browser’s interface can distract from the application running it it.

Installing Ubuntu [and most other Linux distros] isn't too difficult. In fact with the latest liveCD installs it has become easier than ever before. However, it is still possible for the installation process will go wrong and fail. This has happened to me on a couple of occasions and it has left me with a system that is incapable of booting.

The first time this happened there was a power outage mid-installation. On the second occasion the installation shut down after finding a hardware fault [the heatsink had pinged off my coprocessor!] Read about how I fixed my system here.

A question from Panosso:

Does any one can help-me…
…I have no idea how can I add a new language on OO dictionary.

You can manage most of today's multimedia applications easily with ReMoot, a universal remote control program. ReMoot even provides an esoteric way of controlling your PC remotely from your cell phone or PDA, earning it top geek points.

I spent some time this week figuring out the requirements for installing Ubuntu locally over the network. Ubuntu has netboot installers which are more than happy to go find a public repository mirror for you, but how about installing over the LAN using the contents of the CD as the repository? Well, if you’re interested in fast installations and no longer burning CDs this tutorial is for you.

My previous article, 10 things I hate about KDE 4 RC2, got a lot of unexpected attention. At Digg I was called a “damn fool”, “dumbass” (for some reason that guy thought I believed RC referred to Plasma) (?!) and an “idiot”. I apparently hurt developer feelings.

Whenever people discuss software that they would like to see ported to Linux, they mention desktop publishing (DTP) applications like Adobe InDesign and QuarkXpress. But Linux already supports an application aimed at DTP users. Scribus is an open-source page layout program that runs on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. Is it a viable alternative to proprietary products for professional production work?

This is the year I kiss Windows good-bye. Well, maybe not entirely, but the writing is on the wall for Microsoft's flagship operating system, and all other desktop bloatware: The future of PC software is open source. (I'll add that the future of PC applications is on the Web, which I'll cover once we've got Ubuntu in place.)

Ever found yourself in a public place, wanting to use the internet, but scared of privacy issues? well This is the solution.

If you have a home machine with Ubuntu (or pretty much any linux distro) you can download and install an SSH server which allows you to effectively "dial in" with a secure tunnel from another machine.