For the past three versions of Ubuntu, I have tested seven news websites to find out if I could watch their video feeds using Ubuntu. You can read the results for 6.10 and 7.04, and 7.10. Each time, I was disappointed to learn that a majority of the video feeds did not play correctly on Ubuntu Linux. This time, however, something amazing has happened.

"In the spirit of my last post, I decided to turn one of my favorite long comments on Hacker News into a blog post in the hopes that someone would find it useful. There was a good discussion last week about how to learn Lisp, and since I was a little late to the thread, most of the things I wanted to say had already been said. So, in an effort to pull it all together, I made a nice long summary comment, which is reproduced and cleaned up below [...]

Why do you need an article on building slide shows in Impress?

Have a file on in your system that you just can't figure out where it came from? Searching for the name in Synaptic doesn't help? About ready to heave your weary keyboard out the window in an administrative rage? Fear not, dpkg to the rescue!

For newcomers to the open source world, selecting a Linux desktop from the many available choices can seem overwhelming. But don't let that stop you! There's plenty of free expert advice available online to help you narrow the field and figure out which distro is likely to best suit your needs.

You've looked at the newest Dell XPS, maybe a spiffy HP Pavillion. You've surfed over to Apple's Web store to drool over the powerful, stylish machines of Steve Jobs. But there's a problem: You're broke. You just don't have — or shouldn't be spending— the $600 to more than $2,000 you'd have to pay for one of those new digital hotrods.

I'll start at the end by telling you that I'll finish this with a discussion of my “Distro of Choice”, Gentoo. But before we get there . . . It royally annoys me when people say that Linux is too hard to learn!

Which Distro is the one to go with If one has never dabbled in Linux. Keeping in mind that once I do get the hang of it I can always upgrade to something more advanced. but for now I want to learn which would mean something that is more straight forward and easy to grasp.

OK, I’ve now tried KDE 4.1. I’d been assured that it would be better than KDE 4.0x. It is. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I still find KDE 4.1 to be inferior to KDE 3.5x.