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For the past eighteen months, KDE has been my primary desktop. I use it about two-thirds of the time, with the rest of my desktop usage divided between GNOME, Xfce, and occasionally other desktops like LXDE. You could call me a generally happy user -- but, as with any desktop not designed for me personally, KDE has one or two quirks or deficiencies that make my computing less than ideal. To be sure, KDE has made many improvements since the last time I complained about its shortcomings, in 2008.

The graphics capabilities of modern computers are truly amazing. Whether you're viewing an animated Mandelbrot fractal, watching a DVD, designing a highly-detailed 3D image in a CAD program, or just playing a contemporary game, impressive graphics are the rule. Until recently the creation of stunning displays depended on deep familiarity with programs and coding environments that seemed to require a Master's degree in digital image processing and an arcane knowledge of video hardware. In fact, the old ways of creating complex graphics really were almost that demanding. But the old ways are always steadily morphing into the new ways, and the new ways are bringing greater capabilities to the normal user, even in specialized fields such as computer graphics and digital signal processing.

Apple makes some great hardware, but their closed eco system is far from Linux-friendly. Thankfully it can be done – here’s how you can use your iPad, iPhone and iPod with your Ubuntu Linux computer…

FOSDEM is one of the largest gatherings of Free Software contributors in the world and happens each February in Brussels. We are now inviting proposals for talks on KDE, KDE software and general desktop topics to take place in the Cross Desktop devroom. This is a unique opportunity to show the novel ideas of KDE to a wide audience of developers.

Add-ons are useful if you want to add new functionality to Thunderbird or change its appearance. Today i have chosed some nice add-ons that hope will be useful for you.

Learn to manage file ownership and permissions on your Linux® filesystems. Learn about access modes such as suid, sgid, and the sticky bit and how to use them to enhance security. You can use the material in this article to study for the LPI 101 exam for Linux system administrator certification, or just to learn about file ownership, permissions, and security.

This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Jeos based server as a spamfilter in gateway mode. In the end, you will have a SpamSnake Gateway which will relay clean emails to your MTA. You will also be able to view your incoming queue, train your SpamSnake and carry out a few more advanced operations via Baruwa.

Lightweight Portable Security is a LiveCD distro designed by the US Department of Defense to function as a secure end node, in other words, a safe environment from which to access the web or a remote desktop host. The focus is on security, and for this reason, it boots from a CD and executes from RAM, providing a web browser, a file manager and a few other small tools.

Review of ten popular applications as replacements for applications which ship by default with Ubuntu Desktop CD.

Red Hat has acquired Makara, which develops software for managing applications in the cloud. The move could strengthen Red Hat’s Cloud Foundations, platform as a service (PaaS) and virtualization strategies. And yes, there are some key implications for channel partners as well. Here's why.

VLC 1.1.5 is the latest and fifth bugfix release of the VLC 1.1.x branch. Latest VLC comes with a number of important bug fixes and other security related improvements. Here is how you install latest VLC 1.1.5 in Ubuntu Maverick, Lucid using PPA.

If you've ever paid attention to the market share statistics for desktop operating systems you probably know that Linux is most frequently pegged at about one percent. That's a dramatic underrepresentation, of course, due largely to the fact that Linux is free. Whereas Microsoft, for example, keeps careful count of each and every copy of Windows it distributes, in the case of Linux there's typically no vendor keeping count. Rather, users simply download, share, and enjoy the open source operating system to their heart's content without any official monitoring.

Never memorize what you can look up. This is one of the essential rules of system administration, and it applies very well to creating crontab entries. If you're not an expert on cron, don't worry -- just use the Corntab site or iPhone app. Generally speaking, cron syntax is not hard to remember. You have five fields to specify the minute, hour, day of the month, month of the year, and/or day of the week that you want to run a job automatically. It seems straightforward, but plenty of users and admins get it wrong -- not because it's really difficult, but just because it's not something they do often enough to memorize the correct syntax for oddball times.

A Quake-style terminal is a drop-down terminal which can be shown/hidden just like the console in Quake (and most of the first-person shooter games out there), using the press of a key (~ in Quake). Guake is a terminal application written in GTK which uses the F12 keyboard shortcut by default to show or hide it.

Synapse is a semantic launcher (Gnome-Do like) written in Vala that you can use to start applications as well as find and access relevant documents and files by making use of the Zeitgeist engine

Themes for Ubuntu and Linux are truly coming of age. Without any doubt, Faenza icon theme is easily the best I have used in my Ubuntu. Here is a collection of three cool GTK themes namely Divergence, Orta and Equinox that are the best in my list of GTK themes to use with Faenza.

Stream filtering allows you to take a text file, extract only the specific data that you want to see, and then to display it in the manner that you want to see it.  You'll get to see several text-stream filtering utilities to help you do this.  In order to show you the full power of these utilities,  here is a quick review on the concepts of pipes and redirectors.

The SuperComputing Conference is THE international conference and expo for all things HPC (High Performance Computing). The astute attendee of this year’s conference could see that storage is a big part of this year’s show. Two major storage trends from this year’s conference: really fast storage and really dense storage.

An increasing number of contributions to the open-source Linux kernel are coming from mobile and embedded equipment vendors, according to an annual report about to be released by the Linux Foundation.

It will not have escaped your notice that the patent system has been the subject of several posts on this blog, or that the general tenor is pretty simple: it's broken, and nowhere more evidently so than for software. Anyone can see that, but what is much harder is seeing how to fix it given the huge vested interests at work here.