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LibreOffice only knows how to spell a few scientific names, and the more scientific names you use in a Writer document, the more your pages fill up with squiggly red underlining – indicating misspelled or unrecognised words (see main image). You can add scientific names to LibreOffice's spell checker using the application's spelling dialog box, but only one word at a time.

Is there an easier way? Yes. This article explains how you can save a lot of time and effort by adding hundreds of scientific names to the spell checker all at once.

If I see a color on my computer screen that I'd like to use somewhere else, I want to know that color's hexadecimal code. Conversely, if I see a color's hex code, I want to know what that coded color looks like on-screen. Some time back, I wanted an application that does both those jobs simply in Linux. The best tool I found was gcolor2, described below. It's great for finding hex codes, but it doesn't display colors in a large enough 'swatch' to suit me. To do that job I wrote a simple script, also described below.

I love Mozilla Thunderbird. I love using it with IMAP which lets me synchronize with GMail. To make the experience complete, I also like to view my RSS feeds. Setting them up is shamefully easy. There's no excuse not to try it, so let's do it.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

All desktops are created equal; however, some desktops are created more equal than others. LXDE, Gnome, Unity and KDE are brimming with menus but Fluxbox is Spartan by comparison. Great for speed on older, slower machines but I still use on my latest dual core, 3GB memory laptop. I want that speed but I also want a better choice of applications in the Fluxbox menus. In short, all the speed without sacrificing the power. That's the problem. Fluxbox Editor is the solution.

Think "installing software in distros like Debian and Ubuntu", and you think automatically of Synaptic, apt-get on the command line or the new kid on the block, Unbuntu Software Centre. Sometimes, you just overlook the obvious. Did you know that you can also install and remove software using the KDE System Settings Menu? Thought not. Me neither, until I accidentally stumbled upon it--and I wasn't even in the KDE desktop at the time. I was using the LXDE desktop when I spotted it in the Preferences section of the Start menu. Curious? Me too. Let's take a look.

Whenever the The Electornic Frontier Foundation (EFF) commends Ubuntu for "retrofitting operating systems to support privacy against local attackers" as a worthy objective, I'm inclined to sit up and take notice. Since Ubuntu Precise Pangolin (12.04) these privacy setting have been integrated out of the box as a feature in the System Settings menu. It's called Activity Log Manager (previously Zeitgeist Global Privacy), a GUI frontend to partially control Zeitgeist. It's what powers Ubuntu's Dash in the Unity desktop. Here's how to use it to control what the Gnome activity log is recording.

The most used graphic program in the free software jungle is Gimp. It is a hugely powerful piece of software, but when all you want to do is to crop a JPEG image without any loss of quality, it's positive overkill: that's when you need CropGUI. As the name suggests, CropGUI is a graphical front end for cropping images, written in Python. That's it. That's all it does. No bloat, no dense feature set. One piece of software, one function. It's not in the repositories or available as a third-party binary but installing it from the compressed tarball is, like CropGUI itself, simple.

In my entomological work I often need to compare two images of bugs side-by-side. Comparisons are surprisingly hard to do with either of the image viewers I normally use, namely Eye of Gnome and Ristretto. First I open two instances of the viewer and adjust their window sizes and positions for easy side-by-side comparison. I then open one image in one viewer window, and the other image in the other window. If I want to zoom in or out, or pan across the images, I have to do this independently in each viewer window. If I don't save this two-instance arrangement on a dedicated workspace using 'Save session on exit', I'll have to repeat the setting-up next time.

I like tea. Well, I'm British. I've just discovered a new brand that I've never seen before. You can't dunk it in a cup of boiling water but it has some powerful features. This article explores two of the best.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Terry Hancock and Rolasyn Hunter are crowd-funding for a pilot episode of their animated science-fiction series about first colonization of the moon. It will be a fully-dramatized story with many 3D modeled virtual sets and characters, and a cast of speaking roles (seven principals and a dozen or so supporting parts). Time to crowd-fund!

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

I recently wanted to export my email address book from Sylpheed email client and import it into my Gmail account. Unfortunately, Gmail wants to import contact lists as CSV files, and there isn't an export-address-book-to-csv feature in the otherwise wonderful Sylpheed. Worse, the Sylpheed address book is in XML format, and XML-to-CSV conversion isn't straightforward.

There's been a lot of noise on the internet recently about the fact that the Windows-based software being used in the remote control system of drones use by the American military has been hit by a virus and this has caused the Department of Defense (DOD) to use GNU/Linux which is a more secure option. This has, predictably, caused raised eyebrows and demands by some that any military organisation should be prevented from using GNU/Linux in offensive weapons systems. The use of Drones in Afghanistan is a highly controversial issue but it is not the purpose of this article to debate the morality and ethics of deploying drones in an area of asymetrical conflict but rather to explore if it is actually possible to use the terms of the GPL to legally prevent the deployment of software or operating systems by any government's military.

The GNU/Linux ecosystem is blessed with many tools to clone a hard drive image which can be used to reinstall your Debian-based distro in an emergency or duplicate on another machine, but sometimes you might want to do a clean install of Ubuntu on another machine and then add in the extra software you installed in the original distro. For that you need a combination of Synaptic, the GUI frontend for apt-get and a little command line magic.

There is no shortage of backup software in GNU/Linux. From full clones of hard drives to browser bookmarks there's something for everyone. However, sometimes you just need to be more selective about what you backup. If you want to backup your precious desktop settings, you should try Ubuntu Tweak: it is bundled with a host of really useful features, it's been around for a while and it's up to version seven. You might find a version in your distro's repositories but if you're out of luck, download it from the official site.

One of the first things that newcomers to GNU/Linux learn to do is to bypass big Start menus and blank screens (like Fluxbox) and use ALT+F2 to launch an application by simply typing in its name. Every desktop ecosystem has its own way of implementing this feature and I was pleasantly surprised, after a long absense from the KDE desktop, to see how it could be used to do some really clever things.

When you build or update a website, it's a good idea to check that all the links on your webpages are OK. An excellent tool for doing this under Linux is the aptly named linkchecker, a GPL-licensed, command-line program.

However, 'OK' has more than one meaning. While linkchecker can check the URL you specify to see if it's properly formed and not broken, it can't tell you if the link points to the wrong URL.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

Newcomers to Ubuntu will only really know about installing software via the Ubuntu Software Centre. Synaptic is no longer bundled by default (though still available) but all us, veterans and newbies alike, should also consider installing Deepin. It's similar to Ubuntu's tool but it has some really nifty and useful features.

read the Review at Free Software Magazine.

Okular is the PDF reader for the KDE desktop. You can run it under any other desktop environment too, but you can also get some more mileage out of it with these three simple tips.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

For my money Calibre is one of the most indispensible pieces of software in GNU/Linux. It can handle all your e-books in all the major formats, including PDF, EPUB and Mobi. It supports up to thirty e-reader devices but this article will tell you how to use Calibre to convert RSS feeds to EPUBs (which can then be read in Calibre's own E-reader or synced and transferred to your external reader of choice).

read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

Gwenview is the default image viewer for the KDE desktop. Out of the box it's good looking but nothing obviously exceptional. Except for two things: Phonon and plugins. That combination really does make Gwenview a pretty useful bit of kit. Let's see what it can do.