For those of us who enjoy using the Gnome desktop environment, we know we want our GUI applications to be easy to use and seamless. But, there’s always that one program that uses the KDE QT library to provide a front-end. [...] If not, this tutorial uses a very common Gnome Clearlooks control scheme and the Human icon set to help unify the Gnome and KDE look & feel.

While I’ve found my share of little bugs and annoyances my overall take on Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO is that it is far more polished than any previous Vector Linux release, 5.8 Standard included. A lot of the issues I raised in my January review have been addressed and while some new bugs have cropped up they’ve been minor.

Do you sometimes wonder how to use parameters with your scripts, and how to pass them to internal functions or other scripts? Do you need to do simple validity tests on parameters or options, or perform simple extraction and replacement operations on the parameter strings? This tip helps you with parameter use and the various parameter expansions available in the bash shell.

Some distributions have better controls for handling display issues than others. Two that do it right out of the box that come to mind include Fedora (Red Hat) and OpenSuSE (Novell). Each includes tools that minimize the need to do what I gleefully refer to as the “Xorg dance.” Unfortunately, even with the latest release of Ubuntu, we have yet to see this level of functionality.

Mandriva this week announced the general availability of Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0, the latest version of its enterprise-dedicated, KDE-based Linux work station. The new desktop features a 2.6.17 kernel and can be installed in under 15 minutes and extensively customized, thanks to a new post-installation tool, the company said.

Aping a world class business process is never a bad thing. Even when it comes from Microsoft.

So it is that the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), which was created to build the Linux channel, has created a customer-level membership class. Redmayne-Bentley, a UK stock broker, is the first customer member.

The intent of this article is to show you how to configure your Linux machine and Samba server to participate in a Windows 2003 Active Directory domain as a Member Server using Kerberos authentication. This involves using the security = ADS security mode in Samba.

In recent years, the world's leading software and hardware providers such as IBM and Intel are rushing to do compatibility testing and quality authentication with China's local Linux products. It indicates that China's brand of Linux has become established [...]