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Yes, it's true. I hate touchpads and so I always plug in an external mouse. Unfortunately, the touchpad wasn't recognized as a touchpad, making it impossible to turn off via desktop tools. Here's how I exterminated it using the Linux shell.

Gestures in KDE Plasma aren't just tied to the browser, but pretty much anything in the desktop environment. With a few flicks of the mouse, you can make magic happen across your desktop.

This little bit of Linux nonsense could land you a dream job. Or not.

Are you using Firefox? Excellent. Here's how to make it do lots of cool and wonderful things by using your mouse and a few handy gestures.

If you've been following my posts on artificial intelligence (or AI, if you prefer), you may have already spent some time playing with Eliza and consulting with the Emacs Doctor. I hope so because I'm going to take this one step further. For a more credible machine intelligence, you'll soon run into something called AIML, or Artificial Intelligence Markup Language. Log in to your Linux system and let's get going . . .

For some of us, our original exposure to AI, or artificial intelligence, goes back to an old program called Eliza. Eliza was a kind of computerized psychiatrist written in the 1960s by Professor Joseph Weizenbaum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eliza (named after the character in George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion") was an exercise in human response and natural language communication with so-called machine intelligence. The version I played with all those years ago was a DOS program running on a TRS-80. Ah, nostalgia. Eliza may not have been a great doctor, but it was a fun and fascinating program, a kind of whimsical promise of the future of AI.

If you are into such things, and you place your faith on those distro popularity numbers over on DistroWatch, you'll see that Ubuntu has dropped from its number one position, a position now held by Linux Mint. Heavens, no! Surely the universe is about to implode! And isn't even 2012 yet!

"Has Linux dropped off the face of the Earth?" The answer is obviously no. Linux is still around, stronger than ever, but the desktop OS does seem to be disappearing. Of course this is true of Windows and Mac OS, at least from the average user's perspective. Desktop Linux is strong with those who use it; those who have been using it, but the buzz seems to be gone.

A step by step guide to creating a virtual machine using the Virtual Machine Manager.

In your own private cloud, there are a number of ways to work with virtual machines. There's always the command line, but there's also a nice graphical program called virt-manager that I'm rather fond of; literally the 'Virtual Machine Manager'.

As a free software, open standards kind of guy, I believe in having the ability to choose what I want to run and how I want to run it. I believe in being able to select what to run on my computers. I believe in open standards and a level playing field for business large and small. I believe that vendor lock-in hurts consumers and stifles innovation.

It starts with a press release or an announcement from an organization like the Free Software Foundation or the Linux Foundation. It ends with remarks about someone's smelly underpands. The discussion goes something like this . . .

What if you could get a Linux server running in 5 minutes or less and have it cost you no more than a couple of cents per hour? You can, and I'll tell you how.

Still bummed about Microsoft buying Skype? Yeah, me too. Looking for a credible open source alternative. Yeah, me too.

Over the course of the next few posts, I'm going to teach you a thing or two about cloud computing [ insert appropriate smiley here ]. Seriously, I plan on giving you the basics, introducing you to various tools, frameworks, and technologies with the intention of turning you into a cloud computing guru.

Unknown dark forces penetrated Sony's Playstation network security, exposing the personal and financial information of millions, including myself. Sony apologizes, of course, But how about this for an apology . . . stop trying to punish people who have the know-how to instally a truly secure operating system on their PlayStation 3 consoles.

Microsoft announced that it would purchase open source ReactOS for an unprecedented $12.3 billion US making it the largest open source acquisition to date. ReactOS is a small software organization that has been working to produce an open source replacement for Microsoft Windows.

Seriously, dudes, I actually want to live La Vida Canonical. I am your perfect customer, ready and willing to spend my money. I'm a huge supporter of Canonical's work to promote the consumer Linux desktop. Trust me. But you've got to make it worthwhile, and you've got to make it easy.

Should free software advocates join with pirates as comrades? Some suggest that the culture of free software and the culture of piracy are naturally connected. Is there a connection?

See the difference? A few days ago, Mark Shuttleworth took some time to address critics who scoff at Canonical's contributions to GNOME and the Linux kernel itself by sharing his thoughts on the subject in his personal blog. The post, titled "Reflections on Ubuntu, Canonical and the march to free software adoption", reflecting on Canonical and Ubuntu's contributions to the world of free and open source software. There are a couple of interesting stories, some obvious rationalization, some genuine insights, and more than a few nods to the various forces that come together to create a Linux distribution.