Ubuntu 8.04(Hardy Heron) comes with a full featured version of Compiz Fusion, but the main problem is that there is no way to configure these effects. To configure the different options we will use a tool called Compiz Config.

Could hardware vendors be deliberately blocking and sabotaging Linux? What would their incentive or motivation be? One would think that would be just stupid, since no matter how small the Linux market is, at the end of the day there will be money exchanging hands. Why would a company say no to paying customers?

‘Gmrun’ is a run-program utility that provides bash-like TAB completion and history, the ability to run commands in a terminal using CTRL-Enter. CTRL-R/CTRL-S may be used for history searches, similar to ‘bash’.

Arch Linux, the simple, fast and stable distribution which was first released in 2002 has not changed much since. The default installation will give nothing more than a text based operating environment with some basic utilities to manage packages, networking etc. All configurations are done by editing the corresponding files directly rather than by a tool.

Since version 2 came out in 2005, Google Desktop for Windows has included a sidebar that users can fill with screen gadgets, but the Linux version (version 1, from June 2007) provided only indexing and search functions, with no eye candy whatsoever. This has finally changed. Google recently released Google Gadgets for Linux (GGL), which closes the gap between the operating systems.

Some Windows users secretly love Linux. They want to use Linux but are too chicken to install it on their hard drive. So, they use a program like Windows Blinds to radically alter the graphical user interface of their Windows desktop and make it look like that of Linux. To prove it, here are some screenshots of Linux secret lovers' desktop.

For those of you who have older machinery or just wish to extract every ounce of speed from your machine there is a new offering that has just hit the Debian Lenny repositories. It is called LXDE. You can find more information about it from their web site here.