Mining the logs from the famous DistroWatch.com website enables to formally assess the trends in the GNU/Linux ecosystem. In particular, this first part analyzes the popularity of Ubuntu with respect to the former predominance of Mandriva.

Phatch is a simple to use cross-platform GUI Photo Batch Processor which handles all popular image formats and can duplicate (sub)folder hierarchies. Phatch can batch resize, rotate, rename, … and more in minutes instead of hours or days if you do it manually.

In the closing days of 2007, open source voice-over-IP (VoIP) project WengoPhone found itself without a sponsor. The project's creator and underwriter, Wengo, announced it was halting its support after more than three years of development. Fortunately, longtime contributor MBDSYS offered to take over maintainership of the project, and has begun the transition, setting out a roadmap and reinvigorating the developer base.

One of the great new features in Fedora 8 is the inclusion of the PulseAudio sound server. PulseAudio allows multiple streams of audio to be played at once, eliminating the worry of having your sound card locked up by another running program. There's also a handy volume control applet that will let you set the volume of each audio stream independently. That's right folks, listen to your MP3s, watch (and listen!) to a YouTube video, and voice chat with your IM buddies, all at the same time and with independent control over each program's volume. Setting up PulseAudio is very easy. Read on for instructions.

For years now, I have been clinging to xdm as my display manager; years ago, I spent several days tweaking the configuration files of xbanner and xdm to get it to look “just so”, and I didn’t want to change it. But no more! After my last upgrade predictably broke my xdm and xbanner configuration, I decided to spend a little time trying to get each display manager to look “right” with my original login screen design. Pleasantly, both gdm and kdm are much easier to customize, and I had something tolerable with each in less than an hour. I found that kdm was more flexible and gave me much closer to what I was looking for, while gdm was quite obstinate about appearances, though it may be slightly more capable technically.

Most GNU/Linux distributions pick default images that are bland, inoffensive, and boring, all of which have their place, but we can do better. This article will look at making your GNU/Linux machine look beautiful. Note: this article only covers KDE.

The Creative Commons released LiveContent 2.0 a Free Live DVD. We checked it out and wanted to give you an overview of what it’s all about. Basically, it’s a Fedora Live DVD with free and open source content, that comes loaded with Creative Commons’ (CC) licensed material and all you favorite FOSS programs.

A lot of people complains about Wine looks. But not everyone realizes that one can make it look neat easily. This article preents a few simple tips to convert your default Wine to a special one.