Passwords can be a headache to remember, especially good, long passwords. Well, luckily for us Tom Van Vleck agrees, so he wrote a program to make pronounceable passwords up to 99 characters long.

Miro (formerly Democracy Player) has reached 1.o! This is a fantastic, open source, online video/tv player that’s available for Linux, Windows or OSX. It uses the VLC engine and can play just about any format under the sun.

As I've mentioned in previous articles I currently have all the applications I need on my Ubuntu Linux desktop so I never need to use Windows. However, there are unfortunately still plenty of applications that some users need which are not available under Linux and have no equivalent. Adobe's Flash and Photoshop spring to mind, Turbotax is another that some miss, how about iTunes? Luckily for those users there are at least three options that will allow them to run the software they need while retaining Linux on their desktop. But which is the best one?

Ever wanted to contribute to KStars, but don't have programming skills? Now you can.

We'd like to have more images available in the Details window for objects in the sky. Right now, we have most of the Messier images, and Glenn Becker recently contributed about 40 additional images for NGC objects from the Herschel 400 list. We need a lot more! For example, we need images for all of the planets.

I spent the day teaching a class on Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 and in doing so got in the habit of using some Redhat specific commands. After class when I got back on my Ubuntu laptop I attempted to restart a service using “service network restart”. Instead of complaining about the service command not being found it instructed me that if I wanted that tool I would need to install the sysvconfig.

I asked this question over at the Ubuntu Forums, but I wanted to elaborate more on the subject here. In case you don’t know what Ubuntu is, it is one of the many distributions of Linux. Ubuntu, just like Linux, also has many flavors. There is Linux Mint (a distro aimed at noobs), Ubuntu Studio (a distro aimed at the arts), Mythbuntu, and more.

Wine is a free compatibility layer that allows some Windows programs to be used under Linux and other Unices. It is not perfect, but may work out of the box for some of those applications you need. As was revealed in the 2007 Desktop Linux survey at DesktopLinux.com, the majority of Linux users who run Windows programs on Linux use Wine. However, seeing as the default interface is primarily a CLI, it can be confusing to use to new Ubuntu users to use. Here we will simply install Wine and install K-Meleon 1.1 as an example.

Android is software stack for mobile devices from Google. It’s open source and based on the Linux kernel. 

The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications. Developers can create applications for the platform using the Android SDK. Applications are written using the Java programming language and run on Dalvik, a custom virtual machine designed for embedded use which runs on top of a Linux kernel.

This tutorial explains the installation of a Samba fileserver on Ubuntu 7.10 and how to configure it to share files over the SMB protocol as well as how to add users. Samba is configured as standalone server, not as a domain controller. For this setup, I will use the Ubuntu Server installation CD but the same installation procedure will work on an Ubuntu desktop as well.

If you are reading this article you are probably annoyed that every single time you add a bookmark in Firefox you have to click on the expand button to show the folder list before you can actually locate the folder to put the bookmark in.

PDF documents are at present the most popular form of distributing documents throughout the Internet and a presentation tool at the same time. They owe their popularity not only to well defined standard embracing text, pictures and hyperlinks, but foremost to the fact that once created they can be read under nearly every operating system and its underlying platform. Of course, to open a PDF document one has to have an appropriate application.

Pidgin is an instant messaging program for Windows, Linux, BSD, and other Unixes. Pidgin stores you passwords in plain text in ~/.purple/accounts.xml. Someone can easily boot into recovery mode while you are away and find your passwords in plain text.

Beginning today, anyone interested in getting an XO computer through the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program has a chance to grab one. The Give One, Get One (G1G1) program is open to US and Canadian residents who want to purchase one XO laptop for themselves for $399.

Cowsay is a useless but very fun text filter written in Perl. If you send some text into cowsay, you get an ASCII cow saying your text. For example, cowsay Hello, World! prints this:

Both Gobuntu and gNewSense fulfill the desires of the most exigent users when it is about respecting their freedoms. Almost identical at the software level, these two distributions differ in the relation they maintain with Ubuntu at the project level.

Better hardware support - this is something we would all like to see happen. And it seems that it could happen, thanks in part to a Dell supported project known as DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support).

Welcome to part 3 of our Linux Media Player Roundup. Today we'll be covering even more media players that are available for Linux, and even touching on a couple that do more than just play music, they also play your movies and dvd's.

Printing to PDF isn’t setup by default in Gutsy, but it’s easy to implement. Just follow this guide. You’ll need the cups-pdf package, so run this command to install it if you don’t have it:

Back in March we had compared the performance of Ubuntu and Fedora as we tested Ubuntu 6.10 and Fedora 6 along with development versions of Ubuntu 7.04 and Fedora 7. During those benchmarks, Ubuntu 7.04 Alpha 5 had a slight lead over Fedora but the race was extremely close. In August we compared Ubuntu and Fedora again along with Xubuntu, Mandriva, and SimplyMEPIS, but using older PC hardware. In these benchmarks, the results were also close but Mandriva was the leader. Now with the release of Fedora 8 last week, we have run a new set of benchmarks comparing it to the month-old Ubuntu 7.10.

Now, Linux enthusiast Jono Bacon and a team of writers have come out with a book to get the beginner started with Ubuntu. The second edition of The Official Ubuntu Book is a complete guide to using a system running Ubuntu Linux.

This isn't really an Earth-shattering technique, but I've lucked out with it enough times to warrant a tutorial. It actually fits with the popular art-school methods for drawing a figure on paper, especially for drawing superhero-type figures.

I’ve always wanted to try and take panoramic photographs using my dad’s Nikon Coolpix 5200. That day finally arrived when I finally have the free time to do so last week when I’ve to accompany my dad traveling to the countryside of my hometown. Using a tripod, I took 4 sets of photographs with the help of Nikon built-in panorama helper function. I was excited and about to use a Windows computer to stitch those photograph using software supplied with the camera when suddenly I thought of searching for a similar application on my trusty Ubuntu box.

Firefox includes an option for bookmarking all open tabs, but heavy users of tabs will find that this option is hardly enough. When you are researching a subject, the particular combination of tabs matters as much as the individual ones -- and, besides, selecting the tabs to open individually can be tedious if you are dealing with several dozen. And what happens if your session crashes before you have a chance to bookmark? You can address such concerns by installing Session Manager, a highly customizable add-on for preserving the state of the window after you close the browser.

I know that it might not seem like it at times, but I’m a big Ubuntu fan.  I haven’t fully figured out how and where it fits into my computing ecosystem yet, but I know that it does have a place there.  One aspect of Ubuntu that particularly impresses me is the clear development time-line that is published and adhered to.  You always know what’s coming and when to expect it.

The UbuntuWire project, created to get developer services to the community by community members, is the culmination of lots of hard work from Ubuntu Developers within the community outside Canonical. The aim is to provide hosting and support for the many community-developed tools that help to make Ubuntu run smoothly, particularly for those working on Ubuntu’s Universe and Multiverse.