In the past I reviewed Minirok, which is a minimalist music player for KDE with a simple interface. Well, Decibel surely is its counterpart in GNOME. The version I'm going to talk about is 1.00 running in Ubuntu 9.04 with GNOME 2.26.

Windows and Apple rely on endless upgrade cycles to keep the money flowing. Linux, on the other hand, is much more considerate of the planet and our finances. Eric Geier has five excellent ideas for giving new life to old PCs with Linux.

GuitarPort XT is much more than a superb front end for your recording applications—jam along to your favorite songs, build up your chops, improve your soloing skills or just jam for fun.

When Microsoft offered more details about Office 2010 earlier this week, The VAR Guy noticed a rather interesting nugget of information involving Microsoft Office for the Web’s anticipated browser support and software as a service (SaaS) strategy. The software giant, it seems, will be giving equal time to Firefox (the open source web browser) and Apple’s Safari. Here’s the scoop.

While we regularly discuss Ubuntu, and to a lesser degree Kubuntu, there's also a version of Ubuntu tailor-made for the Xfce desktop environment. As most of you are aware, it's called Xubuntu, and after trying it out for the first time, I have to say that I find that it provides a better and more coherent experience than Ubuntu (let alone Kubuntu).

Many people will agree that the single biggest weak point of Linux on the desktop is the lack of commercial games... Enter PlayonLinux. PlayonLinux uses custom Wine scripts to set up an independent environment for each application you install. This allows you to have independent Wine settings for each game, rather than trying to make a single prefix work for every application.

Though you can now enable Flash on Google Chrome for Mac, the Linux still doesn't have support. However, if you're willing to run Chromium instead of the official Google build, you're in luck.

This guide explains how you can run virtual machines with Sun VirtualBox 3.0 (released on June 30, 2009) on a headless Ubuntu 9.04 server. Normally you use the VirtualBox GUI to manage your virtual machines, but a server does not have a desktop environment.