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Today I was not in the mood for testing applications and making some review, and although the new Flock 2.0 would deserve my attention, I think I'll cover it tomorrow. So instead of a review or a tutorial, I decided to write something more like a lecture, so you won't need any technical knowledge to read it. Surfing on the web got me an idea: how about an article to pick up a Linux distribution? And, to be more precise, what about an article to explain why Ubuntu or Debian? Since these are also the only two distributions I'm familiar with, here I am, writing this.

Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux was released on Oct 15, 2008. You can install it by either using their DEB package or by downloading the .tar.gz for Linux compressed file from here. After the download is finished issue these commands to install it for Iceweasel and Konqueror:

I must say that I think Opera is doing a great job supporting its browser on Linux. Even though it's closed-source, it's still one of the most powerful web browsers out there, and each release comes with packages for every major distribution out there.

Dillo, the famous little browser used in small, lightweight distributions like Damn Small Linux (DSL), reached version 2.0 on October 14, 2008. The last stable Dillo release was 0.8.6, which was around for over two years (April 26, 2006), and this new version brings tons of new improvements, changes and features, the biggest of them being tabbed browsing. Yes, Dillo allows now browsing using tabs, which is a must-have functionality for any desktop browser, no matter how small it is. The changelog is huge. This release is also the first one written in FLTK, as the application was ported from GTK.

This is a review of three of the most popular notes-taking applications for Linux: BasKet, Tomboy and KNotes. I included the screenshots below the reviews, at the end of the article.

Google Chrome is an open-source web browser from Google, currently available only for the Windows platform. It aims to have a minimal and easy to use interface. Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine, which was developed from KHTML, and it is used in various browsers like Konqueror on KDE4 or Safari (on Mac OS X).

Below are screenshots I took after I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Beta on a separate partition of 10 GB, on an my Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz PC with 1 GB DDRAM2. I took all the screenshots leaving default appearance and settings in applications, including the wallpaper, after I installed the nVIDIA restricted drivers and enabled Normal effects in System -> Preferences -> Appearance. Resolution is 1280x1024. I also performed a full apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade and restarted the computer before taking the screenshots, so the installation is more recent than the actual beta release.

AcetoneISO is a graphical application written in Qt4 which lets you mount CD/DVD images easily. The formats supported are ISO, NRG, MDF, BIN and IMG. It does not come in Debian's repositories, but I will show you how to easily install, run and start to use it.

I'll start with a quote from the official Songbird homepage, which goes like 'Songbird promises to be the Firefox of media players'. Although not (yet) as popular in the audio players world as Firefox is in the one of web browsers, Songbird looks and offers an interface which integrates both powerful browsing features and music collection management.

A few annoyances, and I really hope this will be fun. I wrote it last night. Some things which don't work as they are supposed to, or some things which may be annoying - Linux forever, I love it, but sometimes it's not so funny fun as it should be.

For those who prefer to edit C, Bash, PHP or other source files using Nano instead of an advanced IDE like Emacs or Vim, enabling syntax highlighting is probably a must-have. To enable highlighting in Nano for various programming languages, you will first need to edit (or create if it doesn't exist) the file ~/.nanorc, where ~ is your home directory and put in it lines like this:

In this article I'll briefly review ten of my favourite CLI (command-line interface), not necessarily the most popular or most powerful of them. So if you don't find your personal favourite, (e.g. Midnight Commander or mp3blaster), it's because the article includes the tools I use more often. So here it goes:

13 terminal emulators for Linux: Konsole, GNOME-Terminal, Yakuake, Tilda, ROXTerm, xterm, Eterm, xvt, rxvt, mrxvt, rxvt-unicode, aterm, wterm.

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial showing how to compile Wine 1.1.4 from source in Ubuntu 8.04 and how to install it. In the meantime, version 1.1.5 was released on September 19, and since the compile from source and install procedure has not changed, I will explain here how to install the last Wine release using the official WineHQ APT repository. What follows are a few easy to do steps for getting the last Wine release up and running on your Ubuntu Hardy system:

One of the many questions users who switch from Windows to Linux have is how to compile C/C++ sources and what IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) Linux has to offer. Most of them study C or C++ at school or home and are usually used from Windows with an IDE like Dev-C++ or Code::Blocks.

A while ago I reviewed 6 GUI clients for IRC, so today I'll continue with the second part with this review of 5 CLI (Command Line Interface) clients.

Not only Firefox became in a relatively short amount of time the most popular web browser on Linux, but it also turned out to be the most powerful competitor to Internet Explorer on Windows, proving itself faster, more stable, more flexible and secure. Some would say Firefox is one of the most important proofs that open-source can and is actually better than closed, proprietary software. Firefox was heavily advertised by the Mozilla corporation, many Linux fans owning blogs or personal web pages put a link to the official Firefox website, initiatives like SpreadFirefox.com or the Firefox Download Day, they all contributed in making Firefox so popular.

Firefox is the most popular browser on Linux, being the browser of choice for over 70% of the Linux users. I this article I explained 5 of the most useful and used tips in Firefox, together with screenshots where I considered necessary. Most of them are related with the about:config variables, but I also provided a graphical way of doing things where it was possible.

I was a Windows user for several years when I decided to switch to Linux, late 2005 or early 2006, I can't recall exactly. I remember that on Windows I was always looking for freeware alternatives to all the paid applications. At the time, I was not aware of the terms 'open-source' or 'free software', and I definitely had no idea about the concepts behind them. On Windows I considered myself a 'power user', I knew my way around and could complete almost any task in Windows XP easily. I kept searching until I bumped into Linux and decided to give it a try.

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with Wine 0.9.59, which is already pretty old. In the meantime, the latest development version of Wine is 1.1.4, which was released on September 5, 2008. In order to compile Wine from source and install it on Ubuntu, you will only need to follow several easy steps I list below: