At my office, we have a pair of old laptops purchased back in 2003 or 2004, which are terribly slow, woefully underpowered and horribly outdated, but which we still use periodically. In other words, they made a perfect target for an OS makeover.

Ubuntu Karmic Koala 9.10 Beta was released today and includes the previously mentioned:

-Updated Human GDM theme, Humanity icons and new log-out screen
-New wallpapers and GDM theme - The gdm 2.28 login manager is a complete rewrite compared to the version in earlier Ubuntu releases, permitting a more integrated login experience.

A software application that gives users the ability to compose and edit vector graphics images interactively on a computer is called a vector graphics editor. CorelDRAW and Adobe Illustrator are some of the most popular proprietary vector editors for Windows. But if you are looking for a capable free alternative that can also work on your Linux box, there are a lot to choose from.

"GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP, HTTPS and FTP, the most widely-used Internet protocols. It is a non-interactive commandline tool, so it may easily be called from scripts, cron jobs, terminals without X-Windows support, etc..." — via GNU Wget —

I loved Amarok 1.4 and even used it in Gnome. Then, I really hated all the 2.x series until this 2.2 RC1. It's kind of slow, but it finally looks like a real music player and reminds me why I liked Amarok so much.

If bookmarking a site in your web browser sounds like rocket science to you then you're probably the perfect candidate for Jolicloud, which dumps a bunch of shortcuts for social networking sites and such onto your netbook screen.

I have been reading quite a few blog post comments these days just to get a feel for what people think about Kubuntu, KDE, and the other KDE distros. The comment I see the most is something along the lines of “Kubuntu’s KDE is garbage while distro x’s KDE rocks!”