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Although often classed as light-weight, XFCE qualifies as a medium weight amongst the Linux front ends. It's heavier than, say, LXDE or Window Maker but it uses less resources than KDE or Gnome. However, it is a desktop environment rather than simply a window manager, and as such, it comes with a set of associated utilities.

Where oh where can we find refuge from Microsoft Exchange? One option is Open-Xchange, a groupware suite that serves as a replacement for Microsoft Exchange. From a licensing and cost perspective, OX looks like a great deal--but that means nothing if your users are going to revolt. So let's look at how OX stands up from the user's perspective, and whether you can cut the ties or not and still keep users happy.

Customisation is an inherent part of Linux, but if you're not comfortable working without your mouse, tweaking aspects of your desktop can be tricky. That's where Ubuntu Tweak comes in. It's a nifty little app that helps you modify aspects of your Ubuntu installation. It breaks your desktop into various categories and enables you to tweak settings buried inside the regular Gnome admin panel and config scripts.

In a recent interview with The H, Eben Moglen professor of law and legal history at Columbia University, and the founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, spoke about his ideas for using simple hardware to free individuals from the tyranny of the client/server model imposed by current web services. It seems his ideas may be on the way to becoming reality in the form of the FreedomBox.

Microsoft and Mozilla traded barbs this week in a dispute over what constitutes a "modern" Web browser. The competitive friction is starting to heat up because the Redmond software giant and Silicon Valley nonprofit are preparing to release the next major versions of their respective Web browsers. Mozilla's Firefox 4 is expected to arrive this month and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 is in the release candidate stage. Both browsers are set to introduce a significant number of new features for end users and Web developers, including extensive support for critical next-generation Web standards.

Over the last few months the KWin development team worked on bringing the Window Manager for KDE's Plasma workspaces to mobile devices. This has required porting the compositing code to OpenGL ES 2.0, the open graphics API for programmable embedded graphics hardware. With the migration of KWin's codebase to git, the code was imported into the master development tree to be part of the next release of the KDE Platform.

Linux 2.6.38 contains patches to improve the scalability of VFS that has been the topic of much discussion for the past six months and that Torvalds himself was waiting for. Ext3 and XFS now support batched discard, which is interesting for SSDs, while Btrfs and SquashFS support additional compression technologies.

The Linux Foundation announced an event intended to increase & systems level& collaboration among Android and Linux developers -- and perhaps patch up an ongoing rift with Google over kernel contributions. The Android Builders Summit, scheduled for April 13-14 in San Francisco, is now open for presentation submissions, the organization says....

After some heady competition from its human rivals in the second exhibition round of Jeopardy, supercomputer "Watson" handily won round three, as well as the competition. Now the SUSE Linux-powered Watson is heading to medical school to prep for a role as a diagnostic assistant, while IBM readies a more context-sensitive successor dubbed "Racr".

Plug computing seems to be a popular theme at the moment and for good reasons. The devices themselves are relatively cheap, and they provide a basic capability that everyone needs: access to files from multiple devices. Not only that, they now have the ability to stream your media to virtually anywhere and any device including your Android, Apple or Blackberry phones. That's not bad for a device that will set you back less than a hundred bucks.

When Gnome Shell was first becoming available over a year ago, we took a look at it to see what the foundation was like, and to see what direction the Gnome desktop was likely to go. At the time, we liked it, though it was clearly a “rough draft” of what it could eventually become. Since then, time has gone by, and while Ubuntu may have decided to go with Unity instead, others have taken Gnome Shell up to the next level. Fedora, among others, will be putting it front and center in future releases. Today we’re going to take a look at one of the most recent builds available to see what this slick desktop environment has got to offer.

Summary: This series of articles explores how to use Python to create scripts for the GNOME desktop, the screenlets framework, and Nautilus to deliver a highly productive environment. Scripts on the desktop enable drag-and-drop functionality and quick access to the information and services you commonly use. In this installment, learn how to use Python to add functionality to extend Nautilus on your desktop.

In real estate it's about location. In storage it's about capacity. The next crop of high density drives are available but there are some gotchas related to some 3TB drives that you need to know before making a land grab.

For legacy reasons we standardized our environment on Ubuntu Server. Generally when a new Ubuntu LTS release comes out, we, like many others, start deploying any new installations on the new release while we start planning upgrades for our most out-of-date servers. When 10.04 (lucid) was released, we already had everything up to 8.04 (hardy), so it it wouldn't be terribly painful to bring everything up to the newer release. At least that was our thinking, but when we installed our first 10.04 server, we got a surprise.

You have something to say, but you’re only allotted several minutes and the presentation slides automatically change as you speak. Think you can do it? UpSCALE talks, held in the style of the Ignite presentations made popular by various O'Reilly-sponsored events, allow the six scheduled participants five minutes to speak on a topic, accompanied by 20 automatically-advanced slides provided by each speaker. This makes UpSCALE a fast-paced, fun event for participants and audience.

Two weeks ago we took a peek at the 3D studio Blender's revamped user interface and found a lot to like. Still, that doesn't make it the kind of application you can fire up and run away with your first time through. It is clear that talented artists can get amazing results out of Blender — just look at the Sintel animated featurette for the latest example — but what are we mere mortals to do? Let's take a look at the best places to dive in, and at what resources you'll need to shorten the learning curve.

With so many new devices -- with so many new interfaces -- coming out all the time, is your desktop starting to seem a little, well...boring? Are you frustrated by how slow and buggy Windows is? Are you tired of winter weather and wish that something – anything – would change? If so, this list is for you.

Mozilla has published an updated roadmap in which it lays out its plans for 2011. The organization hopes to significantly shorten its release cycle and deliver a total of four major releases during 2011, cranking the browser up to version 7 by the end of the year.

Oracle loves open-source projects and technologies – it's just not crazy about other people running them. Now, Oracle has a growing reason to dislike the projects themselves and it's got everything to do with the two things Oracle values most: money and control. Oracle has said that customers are picking the former Sun Microsystems' open-source GlassFish Java application server as an alternative to IBM's WebSphere and Red Hat's JBoss app servers. This means that those moving to GlassFish are not taking out an Oracle license for WebLogic, Oracle's flagship application server that they bought with BEA Systems in 2008 for $8.5bn. Oracle picked up GlassFish with a grab bag of other software – including Java – from Sun for $5.6bn.

The Sendmail mail transfer agent tends to be one of those programs that one either loves or hates. Both its supporters and its detractors will agree, though, that Sendmail played a crucial role in the development of electronic mail before, during, and after the explosion of the Internet. Sendmail creator Eric Allman took a trip to Brisbane to talk to the LCA 2011 about the history of this project. Sendmail is, he said, 30 years old now; in those three decades it has thrived without corporate support, changed the world, and thrived in a world which was changing rapidly around it.