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There has been a recent trend of minimalist text editing applications like FocusWriter and WriteRoom. Even though they work as you expect them to, they don’t come with the sheer amount of features LibreOffice Writer provides. So, if you’re not willing to switch to another application yet, here’s a quick 3-step process to give the good old LibreOffice a minimalist makeover.

Hacking, learning, talking, walking and dining - The Linux Bier Wanderung (Linux Beer Hike) is all this and much more. Each summer around 50 Linux enthusiasts meet up for a week's holiday. This year the 13th annual event takes the penguin-friends to Austria, specifically to the small village of Lanersbach in the Tux valley [1].

...once again there are known security vulnerabilities in the now eight month old beta and no patches are available. In addition, the community forum page for discussing Flash Player "Square" has been deleted from the Adobe Labs website. If Adobe is continuing development on a 64-bit version of Flash Player they are not sharing any information with the public at this time. For the time being Adobe has effectively abandoned 64-bit Linux.

Robotics wizard and two-time Battlebots champion Christian Carlberg first achieved notoriety shredding competitors’ robots with Minion’s 14-inch saw blade on one of TV’s first reality shows. Now he’s all fired up to begin shipping what may prove to be the “world’s first open source flashlight.”

Novell's unrequited romance with Linux and free software is over. Having completed its $2.2 billion takeover, Attachmate is dividing the spoils. Novell and its legacy networking business will survive in Utah. NetIQ will inherit Novell's identity and security management solutions, and SUSE has been given autonomy and control of Novell's open source projects from its base in Nuremberg. Mono has been cast adrift, and the worst aspects of Novell's attempt to sell off a large part of its patent portfolio to a consortium led by Microsoft have been scuppered by the US Department of Justice and the German Federal Cartel Office. But there are still questions left to answer.

Most desktop distros include at least one music player, which many people won't even think about changing. But with Ubuntu 11.04 dropping its old Rhythmbox application and opting instead for Banshee, our curiosity was piqued: which are the best music players for Linux?

If you needed a demonstration that Oracle is not CentOS, then look no further than the fact that only two weeks after Red Hat announced its Enterprise Linux 6.1 update, software giant Oracle has kicked out its Linux 6.1 clone. This is despite Red Hat's attempts to slow down the RHEL cloners and others – such as Oracle and the former Novell – that offer technical support for RHEL distributions.

OSD Lyrics shows lyrics for currently playing song in Karaoke style on your desktop and is compatible with various media players. OSD Lyrics can download lyrics from the network automatically and saves them for any future playbacks.

Sabayon is not for users who want to get system which "just works" out of the box. It requires long and detailed fine tuning. Which is fine for others.

VideoLAN and the VLC development team present VLC 1.1.10, a minor release of the 1.1 branch. This release brings a rewritten pulseaudio output, an important vlc-logonumber of small Mac OS X fixes, the removal of the font-cache building for the freetype module on Windows and updates of codecs.

The following tutorial will teach Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) users how to customize the new interface developed by Canonical for the Ubuntu operating system, Unity.

Although there may be many ways of managing installed packages on most Debian machines DPKG might be the right tool for you. The DPKG package management tool has many uses including installing, removing, updating, or just finding packages on your system.

So now, there's a whole lot of .NET developers out there who are wondering what they are going to do with all their experience. If I were a smart aleck, I would suggest they come to the Dark Side of Linux and work on Mono (and yes, we also have cookies). True, that is indeed my standard mode of operation, but in this case I must suppress my natural smart-assery because I am not sure where Mono stands with Linux.

Gnome 3 is radically different from previous releases. It's got a polished user interface that's been tuned for usability and a slicker code base to please application developers.

The world of LibreOffice and OpenOffice(.org) has been heating up recently with several exciting and, at times, bewildering developments. The Document Foundation remains very active as is LibreOffice development, but Oracle has given up on OpenOffice and slapped LibreOffice in the face by giving it to Apache. Perhaps the most important announcement was the release of LibreOffice 3.4.0.

The case for VDI grows stronger with each passing billing cycle. It’s time to gain control of your desktop infrastructure and save some money.

When Linux User & Developer asked me to be the guest editor for its 100th issue, I was really honoured to participate. In today’s media environment, 100 issues is an eternity. But the magazine’s milestone represents both its own success and the ongoing market demand for news and information about Linux…

LXer Feature: 06-Jun-2011

Ubuntu and Canonical attract a lot of praise and a lot of criticism, and are characterized as angels and devils and everything in between. Love 'em or loathe 'em, Ubuntu has been an energizer all across the Linux world, especially desktop Linux.

With the introduction of Software Center, Ubuntu made it easier for desktop neophytes to install and remove different applications. However, when you’re moving to a new desktop after a quick format, installing your quintessential set of applications could be quite a bummer. Here are 3 alternate ways in which you can install multiple applications at once on Ubuntu without breaking a sweat.

Helena The 3rd is a new fun action platformer for Linux inspired by good old NES game, Blaster Master. The game innovatively combines 2D and 3D environments where you control a high-tech tank blasting your way through challenging levels and hordes of enemies. The core gameplay is very similar to blaster master and those who have played the original NES version will quickly notice its resemblance to the classic. However, Helena The 3rd takes you to a neatly designed 3D world with its own new gameplay elements.