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The lack of a grammar checker is a pet peeve of many OpenOffice.org users. But there is a solution for those who are in desperate need of grammar checking capabilities in the productivity suite.

Switching to a lightweight graphical desktop environment is a great way to improve the overall performance of your system, especially if this system happens to be a notebook or netbook.

When it comes to filers and pilers, I firmly belong to the latter category. I do like to keep all my disparate data -- notes, links, to-dos, etc. -- in one application, so when I need to find something, I have to look in one place.

digiKam is undoubtedly a powerful application for processing and managing your photos, but there are situations when you need something lighter.

Using open source software? Then we have something for you. In collaboration with the open source community, we’ve designed some classy stickers you can use to spice up your notebook or netbook and show the world your support for open source software.

My photography workflow is based on two key tools: the digiKam photo management application and a Bubba Two personal Linux-based server.

Although digiKam supports watermarking, this feature is hidden so well that you might not even realize that it’s there. This is because the watermarking function in digiKam is tucked under the Batch Queue Manager tool which you can use to watermark multiple photos in one go. Here is how this works in practice.

One of the major selling points of Eee PC netbooks is their impressive battery life which is achieved by utilizing the Asus Super Hybrid Engine (SHE) technology. While it's designed to work under Windows, you can take advantage of this technology if you're running a Linux distro on your Eee PC, courtesy of the Jupiter utility.

Can’t wait till the latest version of digiKam appears in the official Ubuntu software repositories? You don’t have to: using the personal package archives (PPA) provided by the Launchpad service, you can install the latest release of digiKam with a few simple commands.

digiKam offers several features that can improve photos containing under- or overexposed areas. For example, the Exposure Blending tool lets you merge multiple shots with different exposures into one perfectly exposed photo. But what if you have just a single image?

digiKam is an immensely powerful photo application, so learning all its features requires time and effort. But this capable photo management application also offers a few easy to use features which you can use to instantly improve your shots.

Giving your photos meaningful names makes it significantly easier to keep tabs on them. Of course, renaming each and every photo by hand is not particularly practical, especially if you take dozens or even hundreds of photos each day. This is when digiKam’s Rename feature can come in rather handy.

Using digiKam's Kipi plugins, you can upload your photos to a variety of popular photo services, including Flickr, Picasaweb, and SmugMug. But what if you want to host your own photo album and still be able to populate it with photos directly from within digiKam?

The Déjà Dup backup utility may not be the most powerful or flexible backup tool out there, but it does have its advantages.

No matter how good your camera is, taking a well-exposed photo of a high-contrast scene like a black bird on snow can be really tricky.

Checking whether a specific Web server is up and running is as easy as issuing the ping command in the terminal, but if you are looking for a more versatile tool that you can use while on the move, try httpmon for Android.

Amazon S3 provides unlimited storage at low prices, which makes it an ideal solution for storing backups. But to make use of it, you need a piece of software that can actually interact with Amazon S3. And aws, a simple command-line utility written in Perl, is the perfect tool for the job

Keeping your system clean can be a time-consuming affair, unless you use specialized tools like BleachBit. With just a few mouse clicks, this nifty little utility can help you to purge all the junk produced by the system and installed applications.

Whether you want it or not, your Web activities are tracked and analyzed in many different ways. But you don't have to put up with this, especially if you are using Firefox as your primary browser. There are a few handy Firefox extensions that can beef up your favorite browser's privacy features. Here are my three personal favorites.

While TonidoPlug is a great personal server as it is, you can teach it a few neat tricks. For example, how about turning your TonidoPlug into a fully-fledged server running the MySQL/PHP stack?