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Every desktop environment has its share of good and bad features, and a few good features that some find a little bit annoying. The Taskbar Thumbnail is one of those good features that manages to be, for some, annoying.

One of those applications, is the installer. While I will not necessarily describe it as an “excellent application”, it is one of the very few graphical installation programs with support for disk encryption, which is a very important feature to have and configure if you want to boost the physical security profile of your computer.

When the going gets though, as the saying goes, the tough gets going. That is usually a test of character. When it comes to software companies in a financial mess, that old adage can be paraphrased as: When the going gets tough, we dump our software on the (open source) community.

Regarding the GNOME 3 desktop, I was hoping that the developers will at least make an attempt to customize the default desktop in a manner that makes it more user-friendly, just like that of Linux Deepin or Comice OS. But that is not what you will see if you install a Mageia 2 GNOME 3 desktop. Rather, you get the familiar but so user-unfriendly default GNOME 3 desktop. At least the wallpaper looks cool.

Now that you know what the overall goal is, how do you get from here to there? First, understand that if you have a computer running Windows 7, that Windows 7?s boot manager is responsible for making sure that the system boots. Installing Ubuntu on the same hard drive throws another boot manager into the mix, so the most important decision you are going to make about this, is which boot manager (Windows 7?s boot manager or Ubuntu’s) do you want to be responsible for primary boot operations?

Apache OpenOffice 3.4, the first (stable) release of the free software office suite since its development was handed over to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), has been released. The announcement was made earlier today.

One of the most important aspects of a distribution (there goes that word, again) or an operating system, is the installer or installation program. PC-BSD’s installer, aside from Anaconda, the Fedora system installer, is one of the most frequently updated installers on any distribution that I have used or reviewed on this website.

And it is a pretty good, point-and-click installation program, though, not without its faults.

Unlike other Linux distributions that feature a graphical package manager, Chakra’s tend to have issues handling major updates, so a decision was made not to ship a graphical package in the April ISO image. Which meant that installing and updating applications (and the system) on a default installation of Chakra Archimedes 2012.04 could only be accomplished from the command line.

There was a time when distro-hopping was fun, but for me, it has since lost its shine. Now, I just want to stick with one desktop distribution. But I do not want to stick with just any one. It has to be perfect.

While both editions just work out of the box, they leave a very important feature disabled by default. That feature, is the firewall. The really bad thing about this distribution is not just that the firewall is not configured, but that there are open ports that leave your computer wide open for Black Hats to mess with.

The very latest edition, Linux Mint Debian 201204, was released on April 24. Installation images for 32- and 64-bit platforms for the Xfce and MATE/Cinnamon desktop environments were released. The MATE/Cinnamon edition has already being reviewed. This article is a review of the Xfce edition,

Typing the wrong command can severely cripple your computer. A wrong switch or wrong option is all it takes. One command that I learned to avoid a long time ago, based on what experienced users told me, is rm -rf /. The rm command is what you use to remove or delete a file or directory.

By itself, rm will delete a file. With the -r or -R option, it will recursively delete a directory. The -f option will force the action. So, you can imagine what rm -rf / could theoretically do to you your system. But will it?

Linux Mint Debian 201204 MATE/Cinnamon is the latest edition of Linux Mint Debian, a desktop distribution based on Debian. It offers a choice of two GNOME-based desktop environments – MATE and Cinnamon.

The MATE/Cinnamon edition was released at the same time as the Xfce edition. This article is a review of the MATE/Cinnamon edition.

While we can excuse developers for installing more than one application for the same computing task, there is no excuse for what Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, is doing with the scrollbar.

For reasons that do not make sense, the scrollbar has become a distraction in the minds of the folks responsible for Ubuntu. So they came up with a new type of scrollbar called the overlay- or Ayatana scrollbar.

One of the better alternatives to Unity that has been made available is the Cinnamon desktop, a project of Linux Mint, a desktop distribution based on Ubuntu Desktop itself. This article show the simple steps needed to install and use Cinnamon on Ubuntu 12.04.

One edition of Linux Mint Debian released a few days ago, features two desktop environments – MATE and Cinnamon. The former is a fork of GNOME 2, while the later is an attempt to bring sanity to GNOME 3, to make it look like something designed for use on desktop computers. However, if you attempt to run it on older computers, those without 3D acceleration, or in a virtual environment using VirtualBox, you will very likely get this error message shown in the screen shot below.

Though the default disk partitioning scheme works, you may find yourself in a situation that requires creating partitions manually. At such times, you need to have a good knowledge of disks and disk partitions in Linux to create the partitions you need.

If you did not know how already, this tutorial gives you a step-by-step guide on how to proceed.

Gameplay 1.2, a cross-platform, C++ game framework designed for learning and writing mobile and desktop games, has been released. Gameplay is an open source project hosted on Github and developed by Sean Paul and Steve Grenier, both graphics and game developers at Research In Motion, maker of the BlackBerry® smartphone and PlayBook tablet computer.

Aside from the usual kernel and software updates or upgrades, there is very little difference between Chakra Archimedes-2012.04 and Chakra Archimedes-2012.02. So this review will not be as comprehensive as the one published in February, but for those new to Chakra, here are the major features of this distribution:

Published articles on this subject include how to compile and install it on Linux Mint 12 KDE and how to install it on Fedora 16 KDE. In this article, the steps required to replace Kickoff menu with Takeoff Launcher on Kubuntu 12.04, are presented in an easy to follow manner.