Ok, you have to give some kudos to Windows: everyone knows what a window is. In the Linux world, KDE and GNOME aren’t quite as obvious. A gnome stands in your garden or inhabits the World of Warcraft, and KDE doesn’t even spell a word. The truth is they’re the two major window environments for Linux today; if you don’t like one type of UI you have another.

"Skype fought the GPL and the GPL won. The OLPC XO project abandons free software just as RMS switches to an XO; RMS not happy. New monthly newsletters from the FSF and FSFE. GNOME and KDE want to have a joint development conference in 2009. GNOME and GCC conferences coming up later this year. Plus all the usual news: more GPL v3 conversions, HURD news, GNOME news, GCC news, and more..."

Who would have believed it in 2004? KDE and GNOME, the two major Linux desktop interfaces, buddying up and having their annual meetings together? It would have been easier to believe in cats and dogs signing a permanent peace treaty. Believe it.

GNOME’s Totem Movie Player now includes a plugin for searching and playing YouTube videos without leaving the player, and without Flash. It’s installed by default in Ubuntu 8.04, and works fabulously!

How to make the Windows Key on your keyboard open a panel menu in Gnome. Linked are also ways of accomplishing the same in KDE and Xfce.

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.

"The Free Software Foundation wants your help to end software patents and boycott Trend Micro. The GNU Project is going to be participating in Google's Summer of Code again this year. Rumor has it that Microsoft may be planning a GNU Project killer with its own recursive acronym. For the fourth time in its history, rms has passed Emacs on to new maintainers. A new version of GCC is out. The Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation are in kahoots to bring you new and improved software..."

Most computer users spend their entire life looking for the Holy Grail. In other words, they spend all their life searching for the perfect editor that supports all their languages, is free as in speech, has spelling, has highlighting… you get the picture. Obviously, there isn’t a perfect editor out there. However, some come pretty close. Ironically, one of them is one that any Ubuntu (or in fact, any Gnome) user has installed, though they may not know it. It’s called gedit (also known as Text Editor).