If you are a user of a Linux distribution that takes advantage of Launchpad’s Personal Package Archive, then you know how easy that tool can be for adding those hard to find applications pre-packaged for your system. Once you get used to PPAs, it’s fairly easy to depend upon those repositories. But there is sometimes [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source

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 [...]

Categories: Desktop Manager, Linux, Open Source, Software, Tutorials Basic

For many, the biggest barrier to adopting Linux is the challenge of having to use the command line for too many tasks. One of these tasks, it is though, is the installation of applications. While everyone has seen this is not true of any application installed via the Add/Remove Software utility (which nearly every distribution [...]

Categories: Desktop Manager, Linux, Open Source, Tutorials Basic

I thought I’d take a bit of a break from the desktops (we’ll come back to a new alternative desktop soon) and help the users out with getting both Ubuntu 10.04 and Fedora 13 working with some of the popular media types. This is a crucial chapter in a users life with Linux as we [...]

Categories: Linux, Music and Video, Open Source, Tutorials Basic

If you are a user of KDE then big things are happening in your world. The development team has released the SC (Software Compilation) version of 4.5 which means this is the final bugfix version. The feature freeze has already happened so you know this release means it’s nearing in-the-wild stability. But why should you [...]

Categories: Desktop Manager, Linux, Open Source, Software

As you have most likely seen on Ghacks, there are numerous ways to keep your Linux distributions up to date. There are new systems available such as the Ubuntu Software Center (see my article “The new Ubuntu Software Center“) that make installing software a piece of cake. But even with applications such as the USC [...]

Categories: Advice, Desktop Manager, Linux, Open Source, Software, Tutorials Basic

How many times have you installed Linux, tweaked it to perfection with various applications, only to have something happen and you have to re-install. Or you get that machine up and running with all the goods and then want to re-create the system on another machine. In either of these situations, the last thing you [...]

Categories: Advice, Linux, Open Source, Software, Tutorials Basic

For those of you who like a little more power behind your tools you will certainly appreciate the Aptitude front-end for the apt package management system. Aptitude is based on the ncurses computer terminal library so you know it’s a pseudo-hybrid between console and gui. Aptitude has a powerful search system as well as an [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source, Software, Tools, Tutorials Advanced