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Do you see what I see? Maybe, if you have taken the time to tackle color management on your machine. The major desktop environments for Linux give 90 percent of users all the tools they need to see all of their images in device-independent accuracy. You don't even need to buy special hardware. This weekend, pull up a monitor and see what all the technicolor fuss is about.

Two of my friends transfered out NIU this semester, both of them are running various forms of GNU/Linux on their personal computers. One of them is not so technically inclined and he asked me to help him trouble shoot why his Ubuntu system could not get an internet connection...

One of the best and maybe worst things about Gnu/Linux-based operating systems (distros) is the insane amount of choice that one has about the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and which desktop environment/window manager you can use to interact with your system. There are hundreds of Linux distros available that cost nothing to download and use to run your computer with. And there are many choices of GUI managers you can use.

The openSUSE community is celebrating the end of January by releasing openSUSE 11.4 Milestone 6. This new development snapshot brings several prominent changes, including the final removal of HAL (the Hardware Abstraction Layer), the migration to systemd from SysVInit has been pushed back to the next openSUSE release, and it now incorporates support for Novell's WebYaST.

I've been reading a lot of good things about Bodhi Linux recently. It's a young (just a few months old) Ubuntu-based distribution that exclusively uses the Enlightenment E17 WM. (The name is appropriate because Prince Siddartha (later to be known as the Buddha) achieved enlightenment under a bodhi tree.)

Yes, I am one of those grumpy KDE 3.x fans who can't deal with KDE4. So I've been trying out different desktop environments and window managers to replace my beloved KDE, and it has been fun and enlightening.

The idea of one universal package format for all distributions has been batted around a few times over the years. One of the most notable was Ryan C. Gordon's idea of FatELF files. Reactions varied from supportive to skeptical to down right opposed. Well, it seems a new team from major distributions is coming together to implement a "common application installer API and infrastructure."

In Computer Science, emulation refers to the capability of a computer software or hardware to replicate the functions of another software or hardware. Hence, video game console emulators are programs that enable computers to imitate the behavior of different video game consoles such as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), Game Boy (GB), Sega Dreamcast, and Sony PlayStation. To help you understand video game console emulators even more, you may check out this post: Play Classic Super Nintendo (SNES) Games on Ubuntu Linux.

The Apple iPad is a huge hit: 7.33 million of them were sold in the quarter ending in December. That's a pretty amazing achievement. But despite that, there are good reasons to believe that 2011 will mark the start of the ascent of Android as king of the tablet world.

The fourth day of the conference opened with a keynote by Eric P Allman, author of a little MTA some people may have heard of called Sendmail - an "... old program that has changed the world."

According to this article, Microsoft is pestering Intel to produce low-power Atom-based, x86 processors for server machines. I am wondering why they would force this direction. Do they know server requirements better than Intel? Why do they think that low-power x86 server chips are so important?

The Bash Shell is capable of performing math functions for you in the shell. This is a helpful tool for writing shell scripts.

Developers from Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Suse, and Mageia attended to a conference last week in which they've tried to find a way to make "installing and removing software on Linux suck less."

After another six months of hard work, the famous KDE Software Compilation (SC) suite reached version 4.6 on January 26th, 2010. With lots of bug fixes, many new features, new applications, breath-taking effects, KDE SC 4.6.0 is composed of the KDE Plasma Workspace, the KDE Applications and the KDE Development Platform.

Sabayon Linux 5.5 is released, it is available for both GNOME and KDE editions . This new release features, best AMD/ATI and NVIDIA Sabayon4Linux Desktop support, faster boot time compared to Sabayon 5.4, improved Windows autostart support, try Sabayon directly from your Microsoft OS and more

sar is one of the old and famous commandline utilities, which is often overlooked. It provides a wealth of information when you have kind of performance bottlenecks. By itself it only provides lengthy columns of numerical data, kind of hard to interpret. sar exists on most Linux distributions, for example Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Gentoo, and is also available on Solaris, AIX, and other commercial Unices. ksar, on the other hand, is a Java based front end for sar's numerical data. It produces friendly graphs which could be exported to .pdf and some other formats.

If you’re a Linux (or even Mac) user, and you’ve never toyed with your shell prompt, you might not realize just how useful a good prompt can be. Sure, it can show your user and host names, and perhaps the current directory, but a really good prompt can do a whole lot more. Those who spend a LOT of time in the terminal might even want to take it a step further and move into a custom semi-graphical shell with all kinds of bells and whistles. If you’re one such shell enthusiast, then check out Bashish – a way to theme your command prompt. Yep, you read that right.

Yesterday I followed the online event Virtual Experience, presented by Red Hat. The event was presented in 4 main areas :Red Hat Enterprise 6, Cloud Computing, Virtualization and Jboss, for an idea of the sessions available take a look here. I followed some of the sessions and from what I saw I had the impression that Cloud is the key word (or fashion) that is often repeated even in talks about other topics, RH surely is betting a lot there, but we are still in the early phases and there are enabling technologies, but the solutions must be built ad hoc on your infrastructure.

Google has released an early preview of the Android 3.0 software development kit (SDK). Android 3.0—codenamed Honeycomb—introduces Android's new tablet user interface, which is expected to officially debut next month on Motorola's Xoom tablet. Developers will be able to use the SDK preview to get a head start on updating their applications to support the tablet form factor.

The Sabayon Linux developers have announced the availability of the GNOME and KDE variants of version 5.5 of their Linux distribution. Sabayon, named after an egg-yolk based dessert (also known as zabaglione) is derived from Gentoo Linux and is intended to provide a "complete out-of-the-box experience" while being both stable and versatile.