The recent success of the ASUS Eee PC has shown that running Linux from flash memory is now commercially viable in the consumer market. If you don't have an Eee PC, you can still run Linux from a humble USB flash disk, which will hold not only Linux but also your data. Several Linux distributions run from flash; here's how some of them compare.

WinFF is a easy to use graphical interface to the command line FFmpeg video and audio tool. WinFF makes it easy to encode many videos to a wide range of formats all at once. Its FFmpeg back-end should handle just about any video you have.

Since the first three parts of this series came out, (One, Two and Three) the beginning of May has seen the launch of the new EeePC 900 series; it's slightly larger and heavier, with a nine-inch screen and higher resolution.

Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME offer a popular interface to computing. Unfortunately they are also often heavy on resource usage. By contrast, the Equinox Desktop Environment (EDE) is the fastest desktop environment I know of -- but its lack of standards support and a few missing features may be troubling to some users.

There is a myth that “linux filesystems don’t need to be defragmented.” As it may be truth in general, it still can be dispelled by a simple script, which creates a certain number of directories and in each of them creates and deletes a certain number of files - in, let’s say, two passes. So, does your filesystem need defragmentation?

I think this should work for any Linux operating system using Gnome, I have tested on Debian and Ubuntu.

Well, automatic login will let you avoid to enter your login and password each time you turn on your PC, this could be insecure, but if your computer is physically secured it is Ok to enable this, that could make your booting more smooth.

How to do it?

A company called Fiire is shipping a home automation, media control, and security system based on the open source LinuxMCE distro. Built around a dual-core AMD Athlon X2-based box called the Fiire Engine, the Fiire system also includes FiireStation thin clients and a Z-Wave-based FiireChief controller.