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I have become a big fan of drop down terminal windows, modeled after the Quake console, instead of having a terminal window sitting in the background that I have to switch to for every command that I want to run. You just press a keyboard shortcut, run your command, and hide the window again. There is no mucking around with virtual desktops, and you don't have to try and find a terminal window buried beneath all you other applications.

Remain blissfully ignorant, or experience nirvana today with this powerful, lightweight, and highly customizable release from PCLinuxOS. Zen Mini provides a useful LiveCD and a minimal list of applications making this an ideal distribution for people looking to manufacture their own environment.

In the half-year since the launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, these very fast processors with rather good integrated graphics (using an open-source driver) have been benchmarked every which way under Linux on Phoronix. Phoronix benchmarks have shown broken kernels, AVX compiler performance, and even comparison results to Windows and Mac OS X, among other original Intel SNB articles. What hasn't been tested up to this point though is the BSD operating system support for Intel Sandy Bridge hardware...

Today (Aug. 12) was the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM PC. You probably heard that already -- but here's why the decline of the personal computer could be a threat to democracy....

Last month when testing the AMD Radeon HD 6550D graphics as found on the AMD Fusion A8-3850 APU I mentioned the latest Git code (Linux kernel / Mesa / DDX) was broken for this Llano-generation APU while the proprietary Catalyst driver had "just worked" under Linux. Here's an update where the open-source driver support is now at today...

It's a song we've heard before: all the apps will live in the browser, so who cares what the OS will be? Observers of Linux--including me--have raised this up as the one big chance to capture desktop share, because Linux will have the same access to apps as all the other operating systems. OEMs, the sales pitch will go, why pay Microsoft all that money when you can just load up Linux to give your customers what they need! But increasingly I have some doubts that any Linux distribution is going to be able to get its collective act together in time.

Anyone who runs Linux regularly will know the sudo or su commands well. The first will let you run commands and applications with root privileges, while still retaining the more common environment variables like $HOME. The benefit of sudo is that you only need to supply your own password, and not the root password. The su command does much the same thing, except that it requires the root password. The su – command will drop you into shell that has all of roots environment variable set.

These commands are great, but they have to be run from the terminal. So what if you want to run a file browser or something similar with root permissions? Traditionally the gksu application provided a GUI front end to su, but a decision was made quite some time ago not to include this with Fedora.

Here is some information, useful for whoever is doing or considering homeschool, straight from parents who actually did or are still homeschooling with, and just thanks to, Free Software

In my last post, I reported that a Gnome2 fork, Mate, was available. I use Arch Linux so I followed the instructions here to add the custom repository. There is also source code available and packages are being built for Debian/Ubuntu, Fedora and Gentoo.

This guide will be based around the latest versions of Ubuntu and Couch Potato with all updates installed. If you're using Linux Mint, or an alternative desktop environment (Xfce, Gnome, LXDE, KDE, etc), there will be a bit of adaptation that will be needed. However, both Linux Mint's mintMenu and Ubuntu's Home button have search functions that make navigation much the same so it should be easy to use this for either. If you get stuck feel free to ask me a question below in the comments or to shoot me an email as I'd be happy to help get you unstuck if at all possible.

Internet radio is an audio service delivered over the internet. This type of service can offer personalized streams of music and is often seen as a promising medium for promoting recorded music.

LXer Feature: 13-Aug-2011

For everybody who understands less about the current Apple/ Samsung battle in EU than I do, here is my attempt to share the few things I understand with you. I'll briefly discuss the situation in both Germany and the Netherlands. The article should be especially suited for those who cannot read Dutch / German and are not up to date with what has been happening the last few days.

Second Beta release of Adobe Flash player 11 has been released, Adobe Flash player 11 Beta 2 provides better performance and more stability in Linux platform.

Besides the exciting news last week that KDE has drawn up plans for Wayland in 2012, there's more good news in the land of this next-generation display server: the Google Chrome/Chromium web-browser is being ported to run on Wayland...

Ibase Technology announced an ATX motherboard that supports Intel's 2011 Core i3, i5, and i7 processors and accepts 16GB of RAM. The MB960 includes six SATA ports, two USB 3.0 ports, seven expansion slots, and three video outputs, according to the company....

Acer, Asus, and Leonvo will roll out & Ultrabook& portable computers for under $1000 in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a DigiTimes report. Resembling Windows versions of the successful Apple MacBook Air, the devices will be less than 0.8 inches thick, use Intel Core processors, and employ SSD (solid state disk) storage....

For those that missed it, this week Adobe released a second beta of their forthcoming Flash 11 platform for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows users. The first Adobe Flash 11 beta was christened by mainline 64-bit support after the earlier x86_64 Flash "Square" beta had fallen months out of date, but there's also other features to the 11.0 release...

Native Client in the chute With its latest Chrome beta, Google has turned on Native Client, its rather bold effort to securely run native applications inside the browser.…Free Whitepaper: Implementing Energy Efficient Data Centers

Khan Academy, a non-profit organization that provides free online education to anyone, anywhere in the word. Khan academy was started by Salman Khan (No Bollywood Connections), who quits his job to start online teaching. “Its our mission to accelerate learning for students of all ages.” – thats the slogan of Khan Academy. Khan teaches on an electronic blackboard with his voice in the background explaining all the concepts. He never appears in the videos. Initially he started teaching maths, now his lectures covers Physics, Chemistry, Finance, History, Computer Science and much more. Khan Academy also provides online exercises, to practice what a student has learned. You can login using Google or Facebook , and the website will track your progress

Acer announced a seven-inch tablet that runs Android 3.2 (& Honeycomb& ) on a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. The $330 Iconia Tab A100 offers 1024 x 600-pixel resolution, 8GB or 16GB of flash storage, dual cameras, plus a microSD slot as well as micro-HDMI and micro-USB ports....