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With all the phones, tablets, netbooks, and other devices running around, the desktop is starting to decline. Many people do some or all of their work on a mobile device. Everyone has their own system, and its not up to me or anyone else to tell you that it's right or wrong. However, those little phone screens and buttons just don't work for me. I have a laptop and I love it for the freedom and mobility it gives me, but after struggling with that touchpad and fumbling with those tiny Home/End/Delete buttons, I want to come back home to my ultimate productivity place. Here is the recipe:

"You were good to me at first, we had plenty of laughs you and I. You introduced me to a lot of people. We were good together. But then you started ditching me all the time. Only co-operating when it suited your mood, getting angry at me a lot, telling me what I was and wasn’t allowed to do. Cutting me off when I was in the middle of something, or getting rid of my stuff without permission. That’s not cool."

Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman and Linux creator Linus Torvalds share their thoughts on the first 20 years of Linux and what the future holds at LinuxCon 2011 Japan.

The KDE desktop is about to take a major step forward, with the announcement today of the roadmap for KDE Frameworks 5.0. Most eyes in the Linux desktop world are on the Berlin Desktop Summit this week, as members of the GNOME and KDE camps come together for a joint technical conference running from August 6-12 at Humboldt University in Berlin. Currently, KDE seems to be making the most strides in the joint event, with the surprise announcement of the KDE 5.0 roadmap, which was revealed by KDE developer Aaron Seigo in his blog Sunday.

Sharing files between two different computers on a network is something that I feel is often harder than it should be. Maybe it is just my bad luck or some poor configuration settings on the various networks I connect to, but Samba shares seem to almost never work for me. In the past year I've taken to using sFTP to transfer files back and forth between my various devices. sFTP is nice because it works over the internet and with any Unix devices that support ssh (including the N900)

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....