GNU Mailman is the most popular free software mailing list manager, and probably the most configurable; however, it normally requires you have a web and mail server always connected to the Internet. With a little extra work, you can run Mailman from your intermittently-connected GNU/Linux desktop.

xbindkeys is a program that allows you to launch shell commands with your keyboard or your mouse under X Window. It links commands to keys or mouse buttons, using a configuration file. It’s independent of the window manager and can capture all keyboard keys.

The gOS distribution is based on the Ubuntu 7.10 distribution. It uses the Enlightenment 17 window manager instead of the usual GNOME or KDE desktops, allowing for lower memory and speed requirements. Therefore gOS starts to work reasonably well on systems as low end as a 1GHz Pentium III with 256MB RAM.

Preload is an "adaptive readahead daemon" that runs in the background of your system and observes what programs you use most often, caching them in order to speed up application load time. By using Preload, you can put unused RAM to good work, and improve the overall performance of your desktop system. Best of all, it's easy to install and use!

Having an SSH server can be incredibly useful; you can access a “headless” server without a monitor, get shell access to your system from anywhere in the world, transfer files without using FTP, securely tunnel VNC or web browsing, safely restart a locked-up system, and a lot more. However, improperly setting up a SSH server can leave your system vulnerable. Here’s how to install a secure SSH server (specifically OpenSSH) on Ubuntu or other Debian-based distributions.

In Firefox you might have noticed that after opening several tabs and browsing a while system memory starts to be eaten up a lot and performance start degrading a little. Here are some not so obvious tweaks to improving performance.

One of the great features included in Linux is the IPtables firewall. Unfortunately, its command-line use is rather complex, and it can be intimidating for even experienced Linux users to configure it. Firestarter is a friendly graphical interface that allows you to configure a software firewall in Linux using the built-in IPtables/IPchains utilities.