Being Linux fans, you all know that Linux offers a lot of ways to manage the desktop. One of the best ways that Linux offers for keeping your desktop organized is multiple desktops. This feature has been around since nearly the beginning of the Linux desktop. Multiple desktops (or workspaces) allow you to create a [...]

When you install a new application on a Linux distribution, that enjoys the Enlightenment E17 desktop, sometimes those applications will automatically add a menu entry and sometimes they won’t. When an application is installed, you might find yourself looking through the entire menu hierarchy to find it’s launcher. If there isn’t one there, what do [...]

That’s right, Ubuntu Natty Narwhal is about to hit the interwebs in its glossy, shiny, well-packaged, full-release form. But for now, we all have to sit back and enjoy the beta release. After downloading and installing this beta release, I thought users would like to know my first impressions on what is being offered up [...]

If you are using the latest, greatest KDE, then you are enjoying the default Dolphin file manager. Although you can still make use of Konqueror as the file manager, it only makes sense to go with the default behavior, as described by the KDE developers. So for those of you who do want to play [...]

I have been giving Bodhi Linux a lot of love lately. You can see my articles here (“Adding Visual Effects on Bodhi Linux” and “Bodhi Linux: Enlightened Ubuntu“). One of the main reasons I like Bodhi so much is the Enlightenment desktop. Not only is it a lightweight desktop, it’s also one of the most [...]

Since doing my first reviews of openSUSE 11.4 I have become a big fan. Not only is it one of the most stable and reliable distributions to date, it also offers KDE 4.6, LibreOffice, and a whole slew of other features that should appeal to most Linux users. And openSUSE can be used by nearly [...]

I’ve been really impressed with the work being done on Bodhi Linux, so I’ve been giving both it and E17 a bit more love lately. To that end, I thought I would highlight a few cool tips and tricks. Some of these will make you slap your forehead they are so simple (and handy). Some [...]

Today I finally dropped standard Ubuntu as my operating system of choice on my laptop and opted for Bodhi Linux. I say “standard” Ubuntu, because Bodhi Linux is built on top of Ubuntu 10.04, so it is effectively Ubuntu, but without the weight of either GNOME or KDE on top. Instead of GNOME or KDE, [...]

I have to admit, over the years I haven’t given openSUSE enough love or credit for being the outstanding Linux distribution is it. With that said, I wanted to give some attention to the latest release coming out of the openSUSE project. And, since the default desktop for openSUSE 11.4 is KDE, I will be [...]

It’s almost time. Soon a new paradigm of GNOME is going to drop onto the desktops of suspecting (and unsuspecting) users. When this does there is going to be reaction. As with any major change to the computer industry, users are going to have both negative and positive reactions. Some will go so far as [...]

Whenever I try to explain using cron to schedule jobs, new Linux users cringe at the thought of learning yet another command line tool. That’s a shame, because cron is an incredibly handy tool to have in your toolbox. But just because you fear the command line, doesn’t mean you don’t get to take advantage [...]

It’s almost here. Ubuntu 11.04 will be arriving in less than two months and when it does, there will be reactions. Big reactions. Some of those reactions will not be so great. I took the time to install the latest Ubuntu Unity and thought I should give my reaction to how this new desktop is [...]

Do you use the terminal in Linux? If you use Linux long enough you will. And chances are, if you are using the terminal in Linux, you are using either the GNOME terminal or KDE’s konsole. Each has their pros and cons and each has a lot of tricks tucked up inside their sleeves. I [...]

With my on-going search for making my life ever-easier, I have turned to using smaller applications to keep my readers and fans informed. This can get to be an overwhelming problem when you are tweeting, facebooking, blogging, and – oh yeah – writing. So instead of adding to my already-large collection of tabs in Chromium [...]

We could all use some handy tips now and then. Wouldn’t it be great if they were, quite literally, at our fingertips? If you are a Ubuntu user, those tips can be at your finger tips with the help of a handy tip applet. This applet works in conjunction with the Fortunes application and serves [...]

If you’ve followed me long enough, you know I have a soft spot for the Enlightenment desktop. I have gone to all lengths to make sure my distribution of choice has either E16 or E17 installed for those days when I just need a little enlightenment. Those days are many. Fortunately there are plenty of [...]

Are you a Facebook junkie? Do you find yourself constantly posting status updates? And…more important…do you constantly  upload photos of yourself, your friends, your animals, and your computers to your facebook account? If the latter is the case, do you find the standard method of uploading photos to facebook cumbersome? Don’t you wish there was [...]

If you are a fan of Pandora Music and a user of Linux you know that Linux is a bit behind in the app space for this service. There are only a few possible clients and, until now, those clients simply were not options. The official Pandora client, due to flash issues, could bring your [...]

So you finally made the plunge and have a brand spanking new Ubuntu Linux desktop. You feel far more superior and safer than you did prior to using Linux. So much more safer you feel like there’s nothing more you need to do to keep your machine and your data safe. And relatively speaking you [...]

Server OSes, such as CentOS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux Enterprise do not enjoy the same simplicity as does the modern Linux desktop when it comes to issues like sharing out directories (even though they share the same default desktops). You can see how easy it is to share out folders in my [...]

I love menus. Actually, I love to be able to configure menus in order to make the Linux desktop be as efficient as possible. The problem with that is, I tend to not go with the usual desktop (GNOME or KDE). So sometimes getting the menus exactly how I like them (or to suit my [...]

I use the terminal A LOT. Why? Because I’m an old-school Linux user. Because of this I like to have multiple ways to quickly access my terminal. In my never-ending search for more and more ways to make my desktop life easier, I came across a nifty way to add a program shortcut to the [...]

There are many ways to preview your files in Linux. Most often there is a single application used to preview a different file type. You have the Eye of GNOME for images, the Document Viewer for PDFs, and more. But what about a single application that will preview all types? Is there such a thing? [...]

There are many reasons why you might want to lock down a desktop. Say you run an internet cafe and you don’t want your users to be able to do certain things. Or what if your Linux box is being used as a kiosk and you don’t want users to be able to exit out [...]

Printer sharing was once a big challenge for Linux. It almost always involved manually configuring Samba to share out your printers. That is not so now. With the latest releases of the GNOME desktop, printer sharing is as easy as it is in any other operating system. So longer will you need to open up [...]

Linux, being a multi-user system, begs for you to configure it such that all users initially experience exactly what you want them to experience. One option you have, which is very easy to do, is to create specific desktop launchers that are added to all new users upon first login. Naturally those users can then [...]

I have been a fan of Enlightenment for a long, long time. It’s one of the most elegant desktops available today. But not only is it elegant looking, it’s a joy to use, more flexible than most desktops, and lighter weight than the “big 2″ Linux desktops. The only problem with E17 is the installation. [...]

Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Ubuntu is dropping the GNOME desktop as the default and switching to it’s own, in-house desktop. That desktop is the Unity desktop which was designed for the netbook environment. Whether you like this move or not, it’s happening. But what is Unity? And how do you experience it now, instead [...]

The desktop screensaver is one of those gray areas that does nothing for productivity but people always seem to want to tweak, change, and otherwise toil over. For some it’s just a way to save some power. For others, it’s a requirement (by law) that screens lock after a certain period of time. For some [...]

According to Ubuntu >= 10.04, left is the new right. It’s old news by now, but I’m sure there are plenty of you out there who have battled to try to acclimate yourselves to the new “standard”. For some users, this is a no-brainer. But for other users, the paradigm of upper right window control [...]

Recently I did an introductory “walk around” GNOME (see “A walk around the GNOME desktop“) which offered the new users to Linux a look from the ground level at one of the most popular of the Linux desktops. This time around, I will do the same service to the KDE desktop. I will focus on [...]

Recently I had a reader request a bit of a “how to” on the GNOME desktop. After giving it some thought, and at first wondering why anyone would need a walk around for the GNOME desktop, I realized that some users simply don’t have the ability to look at the computer desktop from the same [...]

Nautilus is one versatile file manager. The ability to add actions (with the help of Nautilus Actions) makes Nautils’ ability seemingly endless. I have covered adding actions to Nautilus before (see my article “Add actions to extend Nautilus functionality“). That article covered an earlier version of Nautilus Actions. Now that this tool has matured quite [...]

If you are a Windows user you are probably accustomed to cleaning up your registry on a regular basis. Adding and removing software can leave behind unused or corrupt entries in the registry which, in turn, can cause system irregularities or, worse, cause a system to not run. GNOME has it’s own flavor of the [...]

Being an old-school Linux user, one of the things that bothers me is that in some of the new distributions the CTRL-ALT-Backspace key combination (the combination that would usually kill and restart the X server) has been disabled. This key combination was always helpful when/if a program seemed to take over X Windows and keep [...]

Have you ever just wanted to quickly hand a file off to a fellow user on a LAN without having to resort to using an email client or shared folder? Wouldn’t it be nice to just click on a username, send them a file, and have their desktop automatically notify them that the file has [...]

I thought I would re-visit one of my favorite topics of late, KDE 4.5. The SC has been out long enough now for some of the smaller issues to pop up and workarounds be revealed. Most of these smaller issues are, by no means, deal breakers, but some of them can be annoying. Not everyone [...]

In my recent exploration of various file managers I realized that my favorite of the lot hadn’t received the attention it deserves. Here on Ghacks I have shown you how to do Bulk renaming in Thunar, and how to create Customized Action in Thunar. Outside of that, I’ve not really dealt with Thunar all that [...]

In the seemingly never-ending quest to find the perfect, light weight graphical file manager, I have gone through just about every one I can find. So far my favorite has been Thunar (see Thunar content on Ghacks for more information) which comes standard with a few distributions. PCMan File Manger can be found in the [...]

You’ve probably seen the advertisements for Windows 7 and the tiling windows feature. Believe it or not the very first tiling window manager was Siemens’s RTL (created in 1988). After that came a UNIX version called tAP (The Andrew Project) for the X Windowing System. Fast-forward to now and Microsoft claims to have innovated a [...]

With all of this talk about KDE 4.5 lately, I thought I should take a moment to mention a tool that hasn’t had much (or any) talk here on Ghacks. That tool is Kontact. But what is Kontact?  Kontact is the KDE groupware suite that includes more tools than your standard suite, has a lot [...]

If you’ve spent enough time around Linux you might have come across an installation process that requires the use of SVN. SVN is subversion which is a version control system based on CVS. What this means is that this tool manages files and directories and keeps track of the changes made to them. A lot [...]

Klipper is the KDE 4.5 clipboard and it is not your average clipboard tool. Unlike most operating system clipboards, Klippy gives the user quick and easy access to not just the last object copied, but multiple objects copied. Klipper is so powerful a clipboard tool,  you will wonder why other operating systems don’t mimic the [...]

So you’ve followed the latest series on KDE 4.5 (see Ghacks KDE 4.5 content) and you are now using the spectacular latest release from the KDE team. You want to use Compiz, but quickly realize that it is not necessary as KDE has it’s own built-in compositing effects. What you will find is that the [...]

Do you create or manage a LOT of files? Do you have image files taken from cameras that are all named IMG_XXX.JPG  (where XXX is a sequential number)? Do you stores of files you wish to change the names to reflect a date, a department, etc? If so, have you scoured the network trying to [...]

With KDE 4.5 came a lot of updates and changes. From the bottom to the top, nothing was immune from an update or two. One tool that received a nice overhaul is the Notification Area. Not only did the Notification Area get a face lift, it also received a streamlining of the notification system. Although [...]

In my last post (“KDE Desktop Activities explained“) I set out to help you understand just what KDE Desktop Activities are. This new feature simply wants to make your desktop experience as efficient and useful as possible. Of those Activities there is the  Desktop, Newspaper Activity, Folder View, and Search and Launch Containment. It’s that [...]

With the release of KDE 4 a new feature was added that, at first, seemed to be more confusing than anything else. Although the theory behind the idea was simple, the execution made the idea overly complex. The idea was this: You break the desktop up into activities so each desktop is very well defined [...]

For the longest time I have shrugged off KDE 4 because of poor performance. But since 4.4 I have noticed a rather vast leap of the improvement chasm. Now, 4.5 is out and the leap went lunar! That’s right, KDE has finally reached a level of usability and performance that rivals any of its competition [...]

It’s time to head off to that wonderful land of KDE where the desktop only gets better and better with each release. In fact, a new release should be out now – KDE 4.5 with 1,723 new features and 16.022 bug fixes. I don’t believe the packages have hit the repositories just yet, but they [...]