nixCraft » Linux desktop

Linux / UNIX Desktop Fun: Let it Snow On Your Desktop

Vivek Gite — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 13:22:19 +0000

Feeling lonely this holiday season? Try Xsnow. This little app will let is snow on the desktop. Santa and his reindeer will complete your festive season feeling with moving snowflakes on your desktop, with Santa Claus running all over the screen.

Linux Desktop Fun: Summon Swarms Of Penguins To Waddle About The Desktop

Vivek Gite — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 08:07:07 +0000

XPenguins is a program for animating cute cartoons animals in your root window. By default it will be penguins they drop in from the top of the screen, walk along the tops of your windows, up the side of your windows, levitate, skateboard, and do other similarly exciting things. Now you can send an army of cute little penguins to invade the screen of someone else on your network.

Download of The Day: Paint Program For Young Children [ Linux / Apple OS X / MS-Windows ]

Vivek Gite — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 16:25:58 +0000

Tux Paint is a simple graphics educational painting programs for young children. It is free, Open Source software, distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License. The program can be installed all all versions of Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X v10.3+, Linux, BeOS, Haiku, FreeBSD and NetBSD operating systems. It combines an easy-to-use interface, fun sound effects, and an encouraging cartoon mascot who guides children as they use the program.

Linux / UNIX Desktop Fun: Steam Locomotive

Vivek Gite — Thu, 26 May 2011 20:42:03 +0000

One of the most common mistake is typing sl instead of ls command. I actually set an alias i.e. alias sl=ls; but then you may miss out the steam train with whistle.

Linux / UNIX Desktop Fun: Terminal ASCII Aquarium

Vivek Gite — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 13:54:02 +0000

You can now enjoy mysteries of the sea from the safety of your own terminal using ASCIIQuarium. It is an aquarium/sea animation in ASCII art created using perl.

Download Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) CD ISO / DVD Images

Vivek Gite — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 12:19:31 +0000

The latest version of the popular Linux desktop distribution Ubuntu 10.10 has been released and available from the official project web site. New features since Ubuntu 10.04 includes - Gnome 2.32, KDE 4.5.0 (QT 4.7), new KDE browser Rekonq, Pulse Audio as the default sound server, Firefox 3.6.9, OpenOffice 3.2.1, Evolution 2.30.3, Shotwell, Btrfs with experimental support, kernel 2.6.35, and X.org version 1.9.

Google Public DNS Servers Launched

Vivek Gite — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 19:43:55 +0000

Today, Google has announced the launch of their free DNS resolution service. Many ISPs and 3rd party provider such as OpenDNS snoops around or send traffic to ad servers. However, Google promises not to play with end users and send the exact response his or her computer expects without performing any blocking, filtering, or redirection that may hamper a user's browsing experience. In other words Google will not hijacking your traffic on non-existent domain name and it will follow strict RFC standard.

Linux / Windows Application For Prevention Of RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury)

Vivek Gite — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 05:21:00 +0000

Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is occupational overuse syndrome, non-specific arm pain or work related upper limb disorder. RSI caused from overusing the hands to perform a repetitive task, such as typing, writing, or clicking a mouse. Unfortunately, most people do not understand what RSI is or how serious it can be. You can easily prevent RSI using open source software called Workrave.

Download Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic koala) CD ISO Images

Vivek Gite — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 13:43:27 +0000

The latest version of the popular Linux desktop distribution Ubuntu 9.10 has been released and available from the official project web site. New features since Ubuntu 9.04 includes - Firefox 3.5, GNOME 2.28, an enforcing AppArmor profile, Linux kernel 2.6.31, ext4 file system (default), Empathy instant messenger instead of Pidgin, the Ubuntu One client, which interfaces with Canonical's new on-line storage system. It also includes a new application called the Ubuntu Software Center. A quick screen-shot tour of new features available here on our website.

BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones: Not Happy With Ubuntu Linux

Vivek Gite — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 18:17:03 +0000

BBC's blogger Rory Cellan-Jones took Ubuntu Karmic Koala for 24 hours test drive and predicated that - "... Ubuntu will remain a very niche product - but it's Google's Android which could bring open-source to the mass consumer market...".

Use a Linux LiveCD to Avoid Windows Malware For Netbanking

Vivek Gite — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 12:53:55 +0000

Internet has revolutionized the way online users can shop and avail banking services like internet Banking from anywhere, anytime without visiting bank. But, how safe is your money with online net-banking which allows to carry out money transfer? Companies and in some case individuals lost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 dollars because of a single malware infection. The cyber crooks are targeting innocent MS-Windows user. If you are concerned about how best to protect yourself from this type of fraud, use Linux LiveCD for online banking and avoid Microsoft Windows at all cost.

Celestia 3D Space Simulation Software For Linux / Windows / OS X

Vivek Gite — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 23:20:07 +0000

Celestia is a real-time visual space simulation astronomy program. It is a cross platform, open source software and released under the GNU General Public License. NASA and ESA have used Celestia in their educational and for interfacing to trajectory analysis software. It allows users to travel through an extensive universe, modeled after reality, at any speed, in any direction and at any time in history. Celestia displays and interacts with objects ranging in scale from artificial satellites to entire galaxies in three dimensions using OpenGL. It is a perfect software for astronomer, educator, student, and teacher for astronomy purpose.

Download Slackware 13.0 CD / ISO Images

Vivek Gite — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 12:28:43 +0000

Slackware version 13.0 has been released and available for download from the official project website. This release brings with it many major changes since Slackware 12.2, including a completely reworked collection of X packages (a configuration file for X is no longer needed in most cases), major upgrades to the desktop environments (KDE version 4.2.4 and Xfce version 4.6.1), a new .txz package format with much better compression, and other upgrades all around -- to the development system, network services, libraries, and major applications like Firefox and Thunderbird. Also, this is the first release of Slackware with native support for the 64-bit x86_64 architecture!

Dell Says Linux Netbook Returns A Non-Issue

Vivek Gite — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:59:43 +0000

Microsoft chief operating officer Kevin Turner recently talked about netbook and claimed that retailers experiencing higher return rates as compare to MS-Windows operating systems:

And the reason that we were able to make so much traction - because this is the first real test of the value of Windows - the reason we were able to make so much traction on this particular space is because we went to retailers and said, "Hey, what are your return rates on these Linux netbooks that you are getting?" And they said, "Oh, gosh, they're, like, four or five times higher than what we're seeing on other PCs that have Windows." I said, "Exactly." So let's do the TCO story. Let's talk to customers. And you can't find a retailer - I challenge you to find a retailer who wants to sell Linux on these netbooks, because the returns are bad. The customer complaints are bad. And our ability to really showcase the value proposition with Windows has never been greater and was never tested more than it was with this particular product. But we've made great progress there, but the up-sell opportunities with Windows 7, because it runs so well on these low-end laptops, is going to be tremendous for us.

Top 5 Email Client For Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows Users

Vivek Gite — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:41:12 +0000

Linux comes with various GUI based email client to stay in touch with your friends and family, and share information in newsgroups with other users. The following software is similar to Outlook Express or Windows Live Mail and is used by both home and office user.
Webmail interfaces allow users to access their mail with any standard web browser, from any computer, rather than relying on an e-mail client. However, e-mail client remains extremely popular in a large corporate environment, small business, home and power users. An e-mail client (also mail user agent (MUA)) is a frontend computer program used to manage e-mail. Mail can be stored on the client, on the server side, or in both places. Standard formats for mailboxes include Maildir and mbox.
The following are top five amazing piece of cross-platform software from various projects to make your life easy with wide variety of plug-ins / add-ons.

Vmware Linux Guest Add a New Hard Disk Without Rebooting Guest

Vivek Gite — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 06:55:53 +0000

As a system admin, I need to use additional hard drives for to provide more storage space or to separate system data from user data. This procedure, adding physical block devices to virtualized guests, describes how to add a hard drive on the host to a virtualized guest using VMWare software running Linux as guest.

It is possible to add or remove a SCSI device explicitly, or to re-scan an entire SCSI bus without rebooting a running Linux VM guest. This how to is tested under Vmware Server and Vmware Workstation v6.0 (but should work with older version too). All instructions are tested on RHEL, Fedora, CentOS and Ubuntu Linux guest / hosts operating systems.

6 Tools To Find Out Website Load Speed

Vivek Gite — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 17:42:34 +0000

Research shows that if your web pages take longer than 5 seconds to load, you lose 50% of your viewers and sales. As a UNIX admin often end users and web developers complain about website loading speed and timings. Usually, there is nothing wrong with my servers or server farm. Fancy java script and images / flash makes site pretty slow. These tools are useful to debug performance problems for sys admins, developers and end users. Here are six tools that can analyzes web pages and tells you why they are slow. Use the following tools to:

Make your site faster.
Debug site problem, especially client side and server side stuff.
Better user experience.
Improve the web.

Google Announces Linux Kernel Based Chrome OS

Vivek Gite — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:49:05 +0000

Google has announced Google Chrome OS, which should be available mid-2010. This is a direct challenge to MS Windows operating systems. This is excellent news and it is going to tied tightly to its Chrome Web browser. Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS - said Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, in a blog post.

Download Of the Day: Firefox 3.5 For Windows, Linux, Mac OS X

Vivek Gite — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 05:25:00 +0000

Firefox version 3.5 has been released and available for download. Firefox 3.5 is the fastest web browser. It is twice as fast as Firefox 3. As a result javascript and multimedia enabled web apps loads faster. Firefox is the first browser to support open video and audio formats, allowing practically limitless new ways for sites to display rich content. This is based upon the open formats (HTML 5) which allow displaying media without a plug-in and/or proprietary software.

Download Fedora 11 CD / DVD ISO

Vivek Gite — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:06:24 +0000

Fedora Linux version 11 has been released and available for download ( jump to download link ). Fedora Linux is a community-based Linux distribution. Fedora is sponsored by Red Hat, Inc.

One of Fedora's main objectives is not only to contain free and open source software, but also to be on the leading edge of such technologies. Fedora 11, codenamed "Leonidas", was released on June 9, 2009. The features include ext4, a 20-second startup, and the latest GNOME, KDE and XFCE releases. Firefox 3.5 and Thunderbird 3's latest pre-releases are available as well.