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For some reason, mouse gestures have never fully caught on with desktop users. Movements of the mouse that launch a command or simulate a combination of keys are ideal for those who prefer not to move their hands constantly between the mouse and the keyboard, or who have trouble typing because of some physical challenge. Yet many users have never heard of mouse gestures, and they are apparently so little in demand that, nine months after the KDE 4 releases began, KDE has yet to implement any of the software or settings that enabled mouse gestures in earlier versions of the desktop.

fsniper lets you monitor specified directories and execute scripts on any new files that are created in them. Because fsniper uses inotify to monitor its directories, the actions you define are executed as soon as filesystem changes happen. This makes fsniper both more immediate than an hourly cron job and more efficient. One possibility that suggests itself when you think about automatically processing files as they are placed in a directory is to have some sort of classification of files that you download from the Web. In fact, this is the first example that the fsniper Web site gives.

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.

FDupes uses md5sums and then a byte by byte comparison to find duplicate files within a set of directories. It has several useful options including recursion.

Learn how to use JavaScript and the Imager Perl module to interface with a Firefox extension for rotating image tiles in Google Maps. Most online mapping applications assume that the desired view is always north at the top of the image. This article presents tools and code that show how to replace the map image with an inverted copy, where south is at the top. Using a Firefox extension and the Imager Perl module, each tile that comprises the full image is extracted, rotated, and placed back in the image at the appropriate spot.

Regular readers of this column will know that I’m a fan of education and positive experience as an advocacy tool in place of shouting from rooftops. Winning the mindset of an average computer user — particularly home users — is never going to be a quick process but a recent experience showed me we still have some old and familiar hills to climb. How do we combat legacy reputations of GNU/Linux that are no longer valid? Ryan Cartwright explores how to combat the legacy reputations in GNU/Linux by way of a telling tale about Debian, Windows and his friend's printer. Read the whole article at Freesoftware Magazine.

Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux developer at Novell, suggests a new naming scheme for the Kernel releases on the Kernel mailing list. The four-digit year would be included in the name.

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.

How to Install Apache2 webserver with PHP,CGI and Perl Support in Ubuntu Server. The Apache HTTP Server Project is an effort to develop and maintain an open-source HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows NT. The goal of this project is to provide a secure, efficient and extensible server that provides HTTP services in sync with the current HTTP standards.Apache v2 is the next generation of the omnipresent Apache web server. This version - a total rewrite - introduces many new improvements, such as threading, a new API, IPv6 support, request/response filtering, and more.

Microsoft delivers the beta of a download manager and packaged open-source applications to make it easier for Web developers to install Web products. The move follows Microsoft's support for an Eclipse Foundation project related to Silverlight and precedes sponsorship of the Government Open Source Conference. GOSCON will take place in Portland, Ore. Meanwhile, OpenLogic announces a slew of professional services to help companies interested in trying open-source software during the economic downturn.

This document will guide you through the necessary steps to configure a Drupal driven mail server. It provides the following features: Drupal managed email accounts, support for virtual domains, automatic forwarding, Postfix quota support, silent BCC monitoring, anti-spam, anti-virus.

What does Microsoft do when someone says: No, sorry, we do not want to use your software any more. If that someone is a small business operating in an increasingly cut-throat world, a great deal of pressure can be brought to bear on them to fall into line. But what if that someone is a whole nation, and that whole nation happens to be a world superpower with the resources and will to forge its own, alternative route to technological competitiveness? This is what has happened to Microsoft in Russia, and it all started with a school teacher. Back in 2007, Aleksandr Ponosov (pictured below right), the headmaster of a village school in Sepych, in the Perm region of Russia, was arrested for running unlicensed copies of Microsoft software on his school's computers.

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.

Some months ago I wrote What's on Your Bookshelf?. Readers chimed in with their own favorite reads: the Iliad, Odyssey, Art of War, the original un-sanitized Grimm's Fairy Tales, Kipling, Divine Comedy, and other cool books. I was pleased to see so much fiction mentioned, as a lot of my friends only read what they have to for work. Which seems like a great way to fossilize the brain and nurture a sour outlook on life.

Open source software is often an unsung hero in the online gaming universe. Game engines are complex applications with core functionalities provided by numerous modules. These include a rendering engine for 2-D or 3-D graphics and a physics engine or collision detection and response calculator.

Ubuntu has taken some heat over the years for its relationship with upstream projects, but the distribution seems determined to change that impression. To that end, Ubuntu has started by looking at bugs and bug reporting between the distribution and upstream projects. The visible result is the beta release of the Ubuntu Upstream Report, which displays the progress of getting bugs upstream. Users of Ubuntu report lots of bugs in the software they use but, for the most part, those bugs aren't in any way specific to Ubuntu; they tend to also exist in the upstream project.

Yesterday we reported on Canonical shipping an unreleased ATI Catalyst driver with the forthcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10. This driver labeled fglrx 8.54.3 adds support for X Server 1.5 / X.Org 7.4 and the Linux 2.6.27 kernel. Later in the day then, AMD did go ahead and release Catalyst 8.10. However, this isn't the same driver as what's found in Ubuntu.

During last year's Give One Get One, the lead OLPC reporter for Laptop Magazine, a beautiful Joanna Stern, asked me about starting a OLPC pilot in Mali. Laughing at the complexity of such an adventure, I told her it would be possible, but surely a voyage of discovery for her and Laptop Magazine.

Animation is one of the less-known features in OpenOffice.org Impress. Its most obvious uses are for transitions for individual objects on a slide (rather than for the entire slide), or for dramatic emphasis and calling attention to objects. But it can also be used for more serious purposes, such as illustrating a procedure that is clearer if you can see it in motion -- for instance, one of the most effective animations I saw showed was on a Society for Creative Anachronism site that explained how the links in chain mail fitted together.

One of the big problems of making a bootable USB is file size. Almost all of the how-to's out there that allow to pass kernel commands during the boot process require the use of syslinux, which uses FAT16/FAT32 formated partitions. This comes with the drawback of limiting your maximum file size to 2 Gigabyte if using FAT32. A DVD release has it's main file, livecd.squashfs it can run up to nearly 4 Gigabyte, twice the maximum allowable size. In other words, Epic Fail.