2007 has come and gone, faster than any other year I think. Lot of stuff has happened, new releases, rumours and not to forget the OOXML saga that continues to amaze us. But it looks like 2008 is only going to get better.

Ever had something you wanted to leave running on your system, but needed to have it automatically shutdown at a certain time, yet it has no ability to do that on its own?  Enter the "auto kill" trick.  I've done this on several of my machines over the years, and it works quite well.

There’s no doubt that your browser stores a lot of important information that could leave you in quite a bind should it disappear all of a sudden. The Firefox users out there probably have a bunch of extensions installed and configured, settings tweaked just the way they like them, obscure passwords stored that no human could possibly memorize, and enough bookmarks saved to make even a hardcore geek nauseous.

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.

Here’s an easy prediction to make. In 2008 the media will gin up a “war” between Red Hat and Ubuntu for “control” of Linux. It’s already started. The latest distribution of Red Hat Fedora, Fedora 8, is called “an assault” on Ubuntu at MadPenguin.

The Linux desktop environment has made great strides in terms of usability in the past couple of years. In that light, I present Rhythmbox, an OpenSource music player ala iTunes for the Gnome desktop. Some of its features include an iTunes-style layout, search box, playlist management, podcast handling, and iPod integration. If you learned iTunes, using Rhythmbox will take only a slight adjustment, mostly involving a minimally different look-and-feel.

A new Linux interface to HandBrake called HandBrakeGTK can convert DVDs to H.264 for viewing on your iPhone or iPod Touch. It’s simple to use (no terminal commands), fast (especially with multi-core CPUs), and is easy to install in Ubuntu.

Everybody makes New Year's resolutions, and I wonder how many of you made the resolution to waste less time browsing the internet? If so, here's an easy way to track the amount of time you spend online.

Thanks to the OpenPrinting Database and the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), printer support on GNU/Linux is much easier than it was at the turn of the millennium. However, one area in which support still lags is in the detection of ink levels in inkjet printers.

Not long after Linux.com reviewed Roelof Temmingh's powerful online data mining tool Paterva Evolution a few months ago, Temmingh was forced to remove the application from the Paterva Web site because of complaints that some of the methods he used to harvest data were violating the terms of service (TOS) of the services from which the information was gathered.

I just shut down my dual boot by reformatting the Linux partition and running Ubuntu in a virtual machine instead. This is the walkthrough:

The Firefox Web browser community has created thousands of wonderful extensions that make surfing and working with the Internet fun and productive. While many extensions are homes runs, here are a few that just don't make it out of the ballpark.

Can’t get Flash Player working in Ubuntu? Ubuntu’s automatic installation of Adobe Flash Player was broken when Adobe released a new version. The installation will report to be successful, but expanding the terminal shows the problem:

I have seen a sudden resurgence in articles dealing with the subject of "converting" non-GNU/Linux users. While the general idea is laudable, I wonder if the end result is anything but benign. Of course getting everybody liberated and free to shape their computing environment seems like the best thing to do. Who doesn't want to be free?

This is a fairly useful (and simple, but not very innovative) trick for older machines using Ubuntu, when your network connection might be weak, or when you have a lot of software to install and don’t want to wait on an old CDROM.

We hope you enjoyed reading UbuntuHQ in 2007, and we'll try to improve it in 2008. May the spirit of Ubuntu be with you!

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is. And that means that Firefox must be a great browser. It's infinitely customizable, via editing a text file called userChrome.css, making changes via a command called about:config, and using free add-ons to extend the features of the browser.

This is a response to the “Has GNOME finally killed off KDE in the Ubuntu Interface.”

So I posted recently on how to get the camera working in Skype 2 Beta on the MacBook. One of the most common questions after that post was “But how do I get the microphone to work!?” So, I started toggling switches and trying stuff out until I could reproduce working microphone input. I did have this working in the past and I guess I must have lost the settings so I had to find them again…

Microphone on the Macbook

To get started right-click on the volume applet up near the clock and select the “Open Volume Control” option.

The Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue #71, for the weeks December 16th - December 29th, 2007 is now available. In this issue: Dell adds DVD playback, Ubuntu Live Conference proposals, Hardy Alpha 2, Ubuntu Desktop training course, Kubuntu 8.04 LTS status, Full Circle Magazine Issue #8, new Kubuntu members, IRSeek, a new Official Ubuntu Book, and much, much more!!

Things are not looking good for KDE, following the news that KDE will not be getting long term support (LTS) whereas GNOME will according to Canonical. The Hardy Heron will be assured of LTS status it seems, making Ubuntu 8.04 the second version of this Linux distro to get the Canonical commercial blessing.

The XO laptop I received last week as part of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) Project's "Give One Get One" (G1G1) promotion is unlike any other laptop I've ever used, both in appearance and functionality. It's smaller, for one thing. The XO weighs only 3.13 pounds, is 9 inches wide, and approximately an inch thick when closed. But there's a lot more difference between the XO and a normal laptop computer than size.

You've already seen them... links to tinyurl.com left in comments, on blog posts and especially on Twitter. But doesn't it make you slightly uneasy to click on a link without knowing where it's going to take you?

Know that problem? You are somewhere around and got special network settings like a wlan essid and static ip ressources. Your Gnome network manager which you really like as it finally brought easy wpa2/wpa/wep detection and setup to you prefers dhcp and skips around the networks like mad.

How do you like the sound of taking one machine, and having two people logged into it simultaneously? Sounds pretty neat to me – and it’s free too, which is always a tick in the right box.