Showing headlines posted by mcasperson

For all its flaws, Flash (or on of its incarnations like AIR or Flex) is still one of the few ways to create fully fledged desktop style applications that can be run in a web browser, mobile device, or as a traditional desktop application. By simply changing the target device when compiling, your code base can be used by almost any modern personal computing device without any significant changes. The exception however, as announced by Adobe recently, is the Linux desktop.

Gnome 3 includes support for themes, but does not include a convenient way to select them. The Gnome Shell Theme Selector Extension by Finnbarr P. Murphy provides a simple way to change themes from the Activities screen.

Even though I never really warmed to Unity, I did like the way Ubuntu integrated controls for music players right into the interface. And now, thanks to a Gnome Extension from ycDref, you can have this functionality inside Gnome 3 too.

One of the controversial decisions made by the Gnome 3 developers was to do away with applets. For the most part I agree that applets were not very useful, but one applet I did use was the system monitor. To be able to see at a glance if the cpu or memory was being overloaded was a great convenience, and one that is sorely missed in Gnome 3. The good news is that this new system monitor extension from paradoxxxzero brings back most of the functionality of the old Gnome 2 system monitor applet.

The ability to use Flickr images as a background was a much advertised Gnome 3 feature that unfortunately just doesn't work in most distributions. But with a few simple hacks, it is possible to have your Gnome 3 desktop displaying Flickr images.

ike most office workers, my day is generally split up into two phases. The second phase, where I spend 90% of my time, is spent switching between the 3 or 4 primary applications I need to use to get my work done. For this kind of activity Linux (and indeed any GUI based OS created in the last decade) works well, because the focus of desktop operating systems is on allowing you simultaneously to run a small number of monolithic applications that perform a specific job. On the other hand the first phase of my day is where I get warmed up for the mental triathlon to come. I read my emails, check my news feeds, browse my calendar and review my task list. In this phase I am a consumer of information, with the possible exception of composing a few short emails.

Every so often I stray from the default Gnome desktop to see what else my Linux machine is capable of. And withing a day or two I usually switch back. So is the latest release of KDE good enough to earn a permanent place on my desktop?

Canonical have an interesting trial service available where you can get a version of Ubuntu 10.10 up and running withing the Amazon EC2 environment to play with for an hour or so. Obviously it's not enough time to do anything serious, but I thought I would try it out to see if I could actually get a fully functional cloud based desktop. Even with an hour it is possible to see just how well a remote desktop can be when hosted on the Amazon infrastructure.

Avant Window Navigator is an application for Linux that emulates the newer task bars included in Windows and MacOS. It can be freely downloaded from the Ubuntu repositories.

With version 10.60, Opera allows widgets to be run as standalone applications. Opera is free and available for all major Linux desktop distributions, including 64 bit versions. There is a central database for Opera widgets, and you can find plenty of "top ten" type opera widget lists. Out of the box though Opera Widgets are not really designed to replace more traditional desktop widget engines. While Opera widgets can be run as stand alone applications, there is a bit of fiddling you need to do to get them to start up when you boot into Linux. Fortunately though it is not too difficult to do, as we will see.

The Amiga was one of the most powerful PC's of it's time, easily trumping the emerging IBM PC's in the 80's. You can relive this classic PC on your Linux desktop thanks to a number of emulators that are available.

FB4Linux is an Eclipse plugin that provides Flash development capabilities in Linux. Getting it installed can be tricky though, as there are a few undocumented steps you'll have to complete. This article takes a look at how FB4Linux can be installed in Eclipse 3.5.2.

Do you want to relive your youth with some of those classic SNES games of yesteryear? In this article we take a look at some of the Super Nintendo emulators that are available in Ubuntu.

Amarok is a popular and powerful media player that is built on top of KDE libraries. This doesn't mean Ubuntu users are left out though - this article will show you how to make Amarok play nice in a Ubuntu environment.

Microsofts ISA proxy server is popular in many corporations. Unfortunately support for NTLM authentication is spotty in Linux at best. This article will show you how to connect to the internet via an ISA proxy when NTLM is not supported.

KDE Plasmoids provide a powerful platform to create desktop widgets and applications. In this tutorial we will look at how to get a simple Plasmoid created using Python.

With hundreds of online radio stations to choose from, Shoutcast is one the best ways to get music onto your PC. In this article we will take a look at how you can get access to Shoutcast in Ubuntu 10.04.

Ubuntu Netbook Edition (formally netbook remix) is a collection of applications that make Ubuntu more usable on smaller screens. But you don't have to be running a netbook to benefit. This article looks at how to use the best netbook remix features in a standard Ubuntu 10.04 install.

Is Linux Mint 7 good enough to replace your current Windows installation?