Last week I was asked for Google Earth by a not-so-tech-savy Ubuntu user. He found Google's .bin Installer and was asking for help with installing.

Like the iPhone, Google Chrome has been embraced by most of the media with rose-tinted spectacles enhanced praise. Much of the acclaim coming before anyone had actually even used the open source browser in a real-world environment. Now that it has been put to that test, how shiny can the Chrome reputation remain?

Let’s face it, Linux has come a very long way. I recently installed Linux on my little brother’s old computer and the only thing he said about it was that “Windows” was running much faster and that it looks different now. What he thought was a different looking, newer Windows XP was actually Linux Mint 4.0.

Many users think that gedit - the default text editor for the GNOME desktop environment - is a simple editor that can only do some basic editing. In reality, it has many features that makes it a good choice for programmers. But perhaps the most important feature of gedit is its powerful plugin system. In this post, I'll concentrate on 5 gedit plugins that are essential for programmers.

I bought a black Eee PC 901 with Linux. The 901 has an Intel Atom processor, 1 GB of RAM, a 20 GB SSD, and a 9 inch LCD. So far, I’ve been very impressed with it, except for the default Xandros-based Linux distribution.

If there's one thing the Free (as in speech) Software crowd can't do, it's create a good marketable name for an application or Linux distribution. The classic example of the former is the Gnu Image Manipulation Program, or Gimp. The best and latest example of the latter appears to be gNewSense (or nuisance).

A conversion calculator can save you a lot of time and unnecessary mouse clicks when you need to convert values in a document from the imperial to the metric system (or vice versa). Although OpenOffice.org doesn't have a built-in calculator, you can easily create your own one using OpenOffice.org Basic.

Deluge is a full-featured free opensource BitTorrent client for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. It uses libtorrent in it’s backend and PyGTK for it’s user interface. Deluge was created with the intention of being lightweight and unobtrusive. Deluge features a rich plugin collection; in fact, most of Deluge’s functionality is available in the form of plugins.