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Mainstream Linux distro developers have to make decisions that affect thousands of potential users. Should they include or remove a particular package? Should they apply a patch that may break compatibility with older machines? These matters are discussed fiercely in forums where trolls growl, flames burn and project leaders defend their decisions against an onslaught of dissident. But as an individual you have none of these issues. You can install and remove packages as and when you want to, and you can choose whether to install free or non-free software on your system. Why should you have to live with community decisions when you can make Linux work your way?

LXer Feature: 30-Nov-2009

A team of Dell engineers has released a very unofficial version of Google's Chrome OS for use on the PC manufacturer's Mini 10v netbooks. Dell isn't on the official list of Chrome OS hardware partners. And the company's founder and CEO believes his netbooks go sour after 36 hours. But you now have ready access to an early open source incarnation of Google's browser-happy "operating system" that's been tweaked specifically for those 36-hour machines.

One of OpenOffice.org's greatest strengths is its emphasis on styles. Some users balk at styles, claiming they are restrictive, but no other feature repays a little organization with so much ease of use and saving of time. Yet even those who are used to styles in Writer tend to overlook the styles used in other applications. That is especially true of graphic styles. read more

And now, as promised and thanks to your donations, we have the 158 exhibits, attached to Novell's response [PDF] to Microsoft's cross motion for summary judgment in the WordPerfect antitrust litigation. This is the other side of that story.

GUADEC, the annual GNOME conference, will be held in The Hague, Netherlands from the 24th through the 30th of July 2010. The conference is expected to draw more than 500 attendees to discuss and direct the future of the GNOME Project. GUADEC will draw members of the GNOME development and user community, as well as many participants in the overall FLOSS community from local projects, organizations, and companies.

Current default for X servers as shipped in various distributions is to not enable the traditional Ctrl-Alt-Backspace key combination to kill the X server. If you would like to re-enable this feature, you may do so in your desktop's Keyboard Preferences application.

Creating a largish playlist for Android is no longer painful. Learn how to create those from the PC

There might be the situation, that your root filesystem runs out of space, so it has to be expanded. With filesystems other than the root filesystem this could easily be done for instance with gparted. With the root filesystem this is not possible, as gparted could only expand filesystems that are not mounted, which is impossible with the root filesystem. The only way to enlarge the root filesystem is to boot from a kind of rescuesystem, Live-CD or the like, and then to expand the root filesystem. The following tutorial describes, how this is achieved by using Systemrescue-CD.

In this article by Reynante Martinez, we will learn about photo compositing with The GIMP.

There was a time when Netscape’s internet suite was pretty popular. The Mozilla Foundation, which was born out of Netscape, originally released the Mozilla Suite. Now renamed SeaMonkey, the internet suite has recently hit version 1.x…

By the time Ubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" is released next April netbook users will have three Ubuntu variants customized for their smaller systems. Development versions of the forthcoming Kubuntu and Moblin variants were released simultaneously with Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" in September. This week we take a look at the Kubuntu Netbook Edition 9.10 Technology Preview. Since the name of the release is more than a mouthful I'll refer to it as KNE from here on.

In this article by Reynante Martinez, we will learn about photo compositing with The GIMP.

With the stable release of FreeBSD 8.0 arriving last week we finally were able to put it up on the test bench and give it a thorough look over with the Phoronix Test Suite. We compared the FreeBSD 8.0 performance between it and the earlier FreeBSD 7.2 release along with Fedora 12 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Linux side and then the OpenSolaris 2010.02 b127 snapshot on the Sun OS side.

System76, the Ubuntu PC maker, continues to offer special holiday pricing on selected systems through Monday evening, November 30. Here's a look at System76's Ubuntu PC and notebook discounts, which are part of an ongoing Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales promotion, reports WorksWithU.

New distros pop-up every day & try to be as FREE as possible, however when attempting to install a distribution on a new PC of a common next door user, you will probably find that you can’t avoid falling into these two proprietary sins..

There’ve been a lot of big releases in the Linux distro world lately, and none bigger than OpenSUSE 11.2, the latest offering from Novell. They can be a controversial company in some parts of the FOSS community, but whatever your personal view, you can’t deny they’re also contributing to progress in many ways. They employ a lot of important Linux kernel developers for example. The last time I did a really in-depth review of OpenSUSE was 2 years ago with 10.2, though I did do a quick review of version 11 for Linux Planet. I decided it was high time to take a look at how things are developing in the SUSE world. So here’s how I got on.

Early on in the lifetime of the KDE Community Forums, the staff launched regularly-held courses for people willing to help KDE called "Klassrooms". For each of these courses, a mentor (usually a KDE contributor, but not limited to them) guided a group of "students" towards a simple, definite goal that would improve KDE, for example fixing simple bugs in an application. However, the courses were not limited to coding: documentation, promo and other important areas were handled as well.

Kristian Høgsberg on the 6th of November had wrote a message on the DRI development list regarding the libdrm repository. With so much of the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) work going straight into the Linux kernel -- thanks in large part to all of the work on memory management and kernel mode-setting -- Kristian proposed that the DRM driver code be removed from the separate DRM Git tree. With this message, Kristian created a new DRM repository that dropped all of the linux-core, bsd-core, and shared-core code. Seems simple and straightforward, right? Well, three weeks later with dozens of replies, this change is continuing to cause debate.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Fedora 12 desktop (GNOME) that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.