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YAD (Yet Another Dialog) creates GUI dialogs for data entry, user notification, etc. It was written by Victor Ananjevsky and is described as a fork of Zenity. In fact, it greatly extends Zenity and has a very large number of handy options. Here I explain how to build a multiple-item data entry form with YAD.

Switching to Linux requires users to abandon their usual set of favourite programs and to employ what is available. In terms of archive utilities the first and most obvious choice is the GNOME desktop environment File Roller. But does a Linux neophyte ready to get into all that stuff at once? Let’s face it - native Linux programs can be “a little bit” confusing. Of course there is a number of alternatives like Xarchiver, PeaZip, but even they are not always ready for immediate work. It is virtually impossible to pick any program that could be the best for everyone. Some applications excel only at certain points or go on compromises to achieve balance between functionality and usability. That’s the case of B1 Free Archiver.

Trove is the National Library of Australia's online database. It contains almost 400 000 000 digital items, including Australian newspaper articles from 1803 to 1954. Each article has been OCR'ed and the OCR text is presented in a separate box at the left of the page viewer.

I recently wrote about how the Birdie project, a lightweight and attractive Twitter client for Linux, was being rewritten and reborn as Birdie 2.0, an entirely new codebase. The Birdie Development team were kind enough to provide The Linux Rain with a private preview build of the new upcoming Birdie 2.0.

If you do a Web search for 'linux delete blank lines' you'll find lots of command-line advice. Some of the advice, though, only applies to special cases. Here I explain two elegant and general methods for finding and deleting any blank lines in a text file.

Geoscience Australia has a freely downloadable gazetteer of Australian placenames with more than 370 000 entries. The download is a .zip file (83 mb) containing a user guide together with placenames data in GML, KML and Microsoft Access (.mdb) formats. What I wanted from all that data was a simple table. Each row would have one placename, its latitude, its longitude, and maybe some other useful items, like the State or Territory in which the place was located. After inspecting the downloaded .zip file, I built the table in a few minutes using GNU/Linux shell commands.

Here's a BASH shell script that automatically logs the date and time I start my Iceweasel web browser, and the length of time I use it. I launch the script (and Iceweasel) with a keyboard shortcut, and close the script by closing Iceweasel.

On Linux systems, numerous users often come across a program or process that locks-up. The user will usually kill the software if the system does not do it first. Users may be familiar with some of the kill commands and signals, but does anyone understand all of them? There are four common kill commands and a total of 64 kill signals.

It was only a bit over a week ago that I wrote an article on the Birdie Twitter application. Well, now the Birdie team is scrapping the current codebase and looks to be rebooting the application as Birdie 2.0.

Humble Indie Bundle 11 adds another three games plus Valve announces the release of the Portal 2 beta for Linux!

The new Debian-based distribution known as Tanglu has just recently been released as 1.0, 'Aequorea Victoria'. I took a look at the live GNOME edition. Tanglu is a fairly young project and perhaps has flown under the radar somewhat. The 1.0 release is a major milestone for the distribution, which is based on a mixture of Debian Testing, Debian Unstable and in some cases even Debian Experimental.

I work a lot with spreadsheet tables of points in the landscape. Each point has a latitude and a longitude, in decimal degrees. If I want to check where particular points are on the map, I could import the whole table into a GIS program and then select the points of interest. But that's way too slow! Here's a much faster way, using Google Earth as the quick-and-dirty mapper.

I recently had something of a debate on the meaning Linux Advocacy and thought I should offer explanation of my take on the topic.

Evolve OS is a new upcoming Linux distribution based on openSUSE and sporting a new desktop environment based on the Gnome 3 stack. You may immediately be thinking, is this yet another 'Ubuntu Killer' promising a lot and ultimately delivering little? But Evolve OS has a different philosophy and some interesting ideas. Read on to find out more.

If you're looking for a Twitter desktop application for your Linux operating system, especially a lightweight and simple program you can just leave running with very little drain on system resources, Birdie may be for you.

If you're anything like me, you may have thought or assumed that SeaMonkey was just a web browser; perhaps just a rebranded Firefox like Iceweasel. But it is in fact much more and has the name "all-in-one internet application suite" for a reason.

I use 16 special characters fairly regularly. They sit on a launchable 'palette' on my desktop. I select a character, then paste the character with a middle-click into wherever it's needed: text editor, word processor, email, webpage form etc. I built the palette using dzen2, a desktop notification utility written by Robert Manea and available in repositories.

Is Xfce's default window manager (Xfwm4) getting you down? Not enough effects for your fancy? Or perhaps it's giving you that infamous screen tearing with the lack of OpenGL VSync? There's plenty of alternatives out there, but had you considered KDE's compositing window manager, KWin? It can be done!

Arch Linux, the popular rolling release Linux distribution, seemingly has a reputation as bleeding edge, elitist and sometimes unstable. Bleeding edge? Most seem to agree it is. Elitist? I'll leave that to you to decide. Unstable? Perhaps, perhaps not, which is what I will now try to give my take on it as a full time Arch Linux user.

Today we are going to take a look at ROSA Fresh R2 LXDE Edition, a Linux distribution by Russian company ROSA, who produce both desktop and server Linux solutions under the ROSA name.