The GPL-licensed Pivot blogging software stands out among blogging applications because it requires no database, no extra libraries, and minimal installation effort. While it's still in an early stage of development, its flexibilty and the ease with which it can be set up make it ideal for those new to maintaining their own blogging Web sites.

Over the past week I helped my sister switch over from Ubuntu to Xubuntu. (Maybe I was a little biased about Xubuntu as she was making the switch, but c’mon…I write a blog about it, I might as well be! :P)

How to completely change your distribution on a remote box without a boot disk, with only ssh access, using only one partition, and with only one reboot at the very end of the conversion process. And by completely, I mean completely. You can delete every single file of the old distro if you want.

After a few months of toying with Thunderbird (in conjunction with Gmail, which I've had since July 2004), I've decided to remove it.

Shae Stevens in the Ubuntulite group has put together a workable deb that, when installed via aptitude, brings in the entire framework for an ultralight system. It’s built around Openbox with XDM, and has a nice array of default applications to keep your old Pentium II in business.

Big graphs are not the only way to visualize data in a text document. Using a couple of tricks, you can spice up your OpenOffice.org Writer documents with sparklines – word-sized graphs embedded into text. Developed by infographic guru Edward Tufte, sparklines provide a simple yet effective way of visualizing data directly in the text body of the document.

"I’m pleased to announce the release of Flock 0.9.1 less than 70 days after the launch of 0.9. Today's upgrade to Flock includes over two hundred bug fixes and feature enhancements..."

Pre-configured for simplicity and ease of use, you’re productive in minutes, not hours.