Even though I am a strong advocate of learning as much as you can about using the command line, I admit I like my GUI a lot (and Compiz of course).

I've been running Fedora for some time at home and on several work computers--most recently the latest Fedora 10 development branches. I ventured out to try OpenSuse, and brought in Beta 5. I must admit, I was blown away. I had last run OpenSuse a year or so ago, and was not as impressed as I was with Ubuntu at the time.

In your Ubuntu machine, when you click on the ‘X’ (close button) on any applications, you will find that some of them will exit while some will minimize to the system tray.

The number of Firefox extensions continues to grow. For example, when I last wrote about tab extensions just over a year ago, about 110 existed. Now, despite the need to rewrite many extensions to make them compatible with Firefox 3.0, the number is over 190, and the choice is greater than ever.

The latest version of Canonical’s Linux distribution, Ubuntu 8.10, still outshines the Linux desktop offerings from Red Hat and Novell, and is the best open-source alternative to Microsoft and Apple operating systems. However, both Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux and Novell’s SUSE distributions are ahead of Ubuntu 8.10 in the server space.

The PasTmon passive traffic monitor keeps an eye on your network, recording which clients are interacting with which services, when and how long things took.

Just how ubiquitous has Linux become? You've probably read about the 10 Linux-powered e-book readers. And of course you've heard about the Google Android G1 handset.

In a continuing series of articles highlighting that GNU/Linux is a viable replacement operating system, today we're exploring how to encrypt emails using the popular Ubuntu distribution.