Nowadays, people have a lot of media. Music, videos and photos. One application for Linux for managing a library of photos is F-Spot. I thought I would take it for a spin, under Fedora 8 and GNOME.

As a new user, there comes a time (or there will come a time) when you are playing around with Ubuntu/Gnome, trying different themes, different engines, different window managers, etc, and all of a sudden you run into a problem that you can’t seem to find a way to fix it.

You keep thinking, "I wish I could just reset it back to its defaults, like a clean install, without losing all my applications and data."

Well, you’re in luck. There is a way to reset your Desktop settings back to their defaults.

With my GNOME Foundation hat on I thought that, rather than taking the easy way out by plugging a bunch of our rocking applications, it might be cool to show off some of the projects that make GNOME rock:

"Welcome to the new year and another monthly installment of news about the Free Software Foundation and the GNU Project. This month we have news from the FSF Europe, the latest numbers on GPLv3 conversions, the annual Gfortran report from the GCC folks, a GLib development release, Stallman commenting on the GNOME's alleged support of OOXML, GNU Hurd news, and more..."

Things are not looking good for KDE, following the news that KDE will not be getting long term support (LTS) whereas GNOME will according to Canonical.

There is a controversy in the Linux world. It doesn't have to do with Microsoft, or anything overtly technical. It may seem, to the outsider, the open source equivalent of the question, "Boxers or briefs?" But it's much more serious than that.

"...I am aware that I’m making a very long story short here. But I’m doing this on purpose: the conspiracy that Bruce refers could be summarized as Novell engineers hijacking Gnome to serve their own corporate needs, and the problem is, these needs are aligned with the ones of Microsoft. [...] The most important lesson of this is that what matters is the format, not the application. The format creates the network effect and captures users, unless it is open and standard. [...] Apparently some would still like us to believe OOXML is an open standard. Make no mistake, OOXML is not an open standard, just like Christmas is not Easter."

In the recent accusations that the GNOME Foundation has been supporting Microsoft's OOXML format at the expense of ODF, KDE has been presented as a counter-example. Based on a KDE News article, Richard Stallman suggested that "major KDE developers" had announced "their rejection of OOXML" and urged GNOME to do the same.