On a single user system i like to have the same background for bootsplash, login screen and desktop. As the new xsplash and gdm in ubuntu karmic (9.10) makes this easy to access.

While test-driving the new Gnome 2.28 desktop, I was surprised to see that among the default backgrounds, there was a "Cosmos" slide-show of several cosmic pictures of space that regularly transition on your desktop. While I had used this feature in the past when using KDE, I was not aware of how to create my own slide-show backgrounds in Gnome

This tutorial shows you how to setup an interplanetary background in Linux, including live-updates for current cloud coverage and daylight! Set an image of Earth, Mars, the Moon, or the entire solar system as your background, and have it update every hour with a cron job. Very cool!

Only a few days ago, we ran an article on the future of KDE and GNOME, and which of the two had the brighter future based on their developmental processes. Barely has that discussion ended, or the GNOME engineering team comes with a pretty daunting plan to introduce a fairly massive reworking of the GNOME interface for GNOME 3.0 (2.30). Read on for the details.

The desktop environment for many Linux users, Gnome, is fast, organized and very easy to learn. But Gnome is also very powerful and highly customizable. Today's top 10 lists the various ways you can tweak Nautilus and the Gnome desktop to turn Linux into a productivity powerhouse.

Gnome, KDE and XFCE users will have no problem changing the wallpaper on their desktop. However, if you are using a lightweight desktop manager such Openbox or Fluxbox, you will find that there is no way that you can set the wallpaper for your desktop. In this case, Nitrogen will come in handy.

In a sense, the desktop is the best thing that ever happened to the command line. Because a virtual terminal runs in a graphical environment, it boasts all sorts of enhancements that the unadorned shell lacks -- everything from multiple tabs to easy selection of display fonts and background and foreground colors.

Gnome 3, due for inclusion in Ubuntu 10.04, will mark the first radical change to the Gnome Desktop since it's inception thanks to it’s “new” interface ‘Gnome-Shell’.

Applications like Firefox and OpenOffice.org get all the glory. They're highly visible as cornerstone applications of the free desktop. But what about the background apps that do the grunt work and sit silently in the background, ignored unless we run into a bug?