Gnome Do is very similar to the Windows-only app Launchy, but much more powerful. If you’re using Gnome on your Linux distro it may worth trying out Gnome Do to help speed up your productivity.
Although not a new application, I was hesitant to use Gnome Do just to avoid having another service running in the background sucking my computer’s resources. But, after trying it out the 40MB of RAM it uses on my machine is surely worth it.
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Have you ever used another computer to find out it doesn’t have a program you really enjoy using? Or, not have it fine tuned to your own style? To avoid situations like these, I always try to carry my pen drive full of Portable Apps.
Portable Apps are programs you can install and run directly from your pen drive, without the need to install anything on the machine itself. The list of applications available is pretty good, including: ClamWin, The Gimp, 7-zip, OpenOffice, VLC, XAMPP, GnuCash, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a couple dozen more.
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Running on Java, aTunes is a multi-platform application that manages your library of songs. Do not let the name resemblance fool you, according to the siteaTunes will only read songs from your iPod but not write to them.
The program can play pretty much all the major audio track formats (mp3, ogg, flac, wma, and more). The playlist functionality, podcast management, and cd ripper tools look to be pretty solid.
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Over the weekend I updated my Ubuntu machine from 7.10 to the brand new 8.04 release. I waited a few days after the official release to see if I heard any reports of upgrade problems.
I searched and searched and really didn’t find that many written reports of people that had updated their machines, most prefered to install from scratch. So, I took the risk and pressed the update distribution release button.
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The ever so popular and handy Long Term support 8.04 versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Xubuntu are out. The star of the show, Ubuntu has quite a nice set of new features, including:
A windows based Ubuntu installer, so you don’t have to go through creating and managing partitions; New out-of-the-box programs such as Transmission (for BitTorrents), Brasero (CD and DVD burning), Firefox 3 beta; new Gnome 2.22; plus lots and lots more.
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This is the second of a sequence of posts where we’ll take a look at a few of the main Linux distros to find out which are the most welcoming to Linux newbies. In our first article of this series, we took a look at Fedora 9 Beta.openSUSE 11 BetaThis Linux distro welcomes me to a desktop which makes me wonder whether I really used the Gnome or KDE version. The Gnome desktop layout tries to take the Windows (or KDE) style a bit by placing only one panel at the bottom, which has only one ‘Computer‘ button.
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Miro, the social video management platform has just been upgraded to v 1.2.3. What’s new?
When you download videos from YouTube (whether by search or in a YouTube feed), we get an MP4 rather than a FLV, if it’s available. The video quality of the MP4s is much higher. Updated translations in lots of languages. We’ve updated the linux version to Mozilla 1.9. We’ve updated VLC on Windows to 0.
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For the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of work editing images in .eps format. Since I really like my Gimp, I spent weeks trying to find a nice way to edit these images with this program, instead of running to Photoshop. Well, I was finally able to find a solution I now share with you.
The steps you’ll need to follow are actually quite simple:
Download Gimpand install it; Download Ghostscriptand install it; Go to the /bindirectory of where you installed Ghostscript copy all .
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While OpenOffice is a pretty handy office suite in itself, you can add even more functionality to it with different plug-ins. Some of my favorites are:
OoGdocsIntegratoror OpenOffice.org2GoogleDocs: both will download and upload documents to Google Docs. The first also being able to integrate with Zoho. Writer’s Tools: adds a lot of functionality such as dictionary, translation, and map search, backup to email, a timer, and more. Sun Weblog Publisher(not-free): submits blog posts directly from OpenOffice.
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