Most PC users have no idea what a boot loader is. Yet all PCs have them. Most Linux users, by nature, do know what a boot loader is because they have had to deal with them one on one for a long time. Of course times have changed and gone are the days when you [...]

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

Recently I had a request to illustrate how I managed to get a particular theme working in GNOME. The article referenced was my article on “What will Ubuntu 10.04 bring to the table“. The image in that article was using a number of cool tricks to get the look they had. So I thought I [...]

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

Ubuntu 10.04 has been out for a while now…long enough so that some of the more pestering issues have been finally fixed. But in some cases those issues continue on. What do you do? Some of these issues are hardly noticeable. Some, on the other hand, are fairly annoying. In this article I am going [...]

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

If there’s one thing that Linux has it’s flexibility. And this is true from the top down; from the desktop environment all the way down to the kernel. One area that offers a lot of tweaks, one that most new users aren’t used to being able to tweak, is the file manager. This is true [...]

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

Are you desperately searching for ways to finally reach that elusive 10 second boot time? You certainly heard that Ubuntu 10.04 has the capability of doing just that right? It can…but you have to help it along. One of the ways you can help your boot time is removing unnecessary services and drivers that are [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source, Tutorials Advanced

On this, July 4, 2010, the day the United States celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I thought I would take a moment to celebrate that same day with a toast to those Linux distributions that shirk all non-free software. This means EVERYTHING on these distributions is protected under, at least, the GPL. [...]

Categories: Linux, Open Source, Operating Systems

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