Showing headlines posted by soulrebel

There’s blogging nowadays and everyone has to be writing stuff on the web all the time about what they have been doing. Sometimes even to the cost of not actually doing it properly. There is a whole bunch of newbies out there writing poor howtos, pretending to save the day of a fellow GNU/Linux user, but not teaching him any real knowledge. I want to share a couple of examples of this behaviour I have seen in the last days and a real suggestion for you, fellow user.

Since Gnome 2.28 they decided that applications’ menus should be text only, without any icons. I actually like icons in Gnome and don’t think that they were abused in menus. Luckily there is a way to revert to the old behaviour by setting a gconf key.

When giving a presentation you have to get the projector working quickly and correctly otherwise it might get embarrassing. Many laptops have a special button to control the external screen but that does not always work with Linux or with some configurations, as sometimes there are too many things for the computer to figure out. Best thing to do is learn a couple of commands to control the external VGA output and do the thinking ourselves.

A new service from Ulteo lets you use OpenOffice.org from a browser. It consists in a sort of remote desktop that, streamed through a java applet, that gives you control over a real openoffice instance on the Ulteo’s servers, no html, xul or javascript magic. Currently this is in beta and accepting up to 15000 testers, you just need to open a free account.

One thing that Ubuntu has left half finished is power management. It goes a long way supporting standby, hibernation, laptop buttons and switches out of the box, but leaves many important features hard to configure. Currently at least two different systems coexist in a Ubuntu installation: laptop-mode-tools and acpi-support. Out of both we have powernowd and gnome-power-manager which only take care of a particular aspect. As you see there are too many programs doing small bits of a bigger job...

In these days lot of good things for GNU/Linux are happening or about to happen. Is the future of GNU/Linux looking bright for the first time? What good stuff is arrived and what is coming?

From time to time you need to boot a Linux live cd to perform some task. There are so many variants that choosing the best for your need may actually be hard. A list of features that a GNU-Linux live cd should have to be the best live cd around