I haven't written in a while. Mostly because life after university is pretty hectic, especially in this current environment where every company is cutting headcount and looking at expense reduction in all possible ways.

QuickStart is like a Swiss army knife, it allows you to do various things on your Ubuntu desktop: creating and restoring backups, running scheduled backups, backing up configuration files, installing some common applications, installing DVD codecs, deleting unnecessary files, etc.Complete list as follows.

If you haven't bought that special geek in your life something electronic yet for Christmas, here are 10 ideas for you. They're all Linux-based and are sure to bring a smile to any geek's face. They are in no particular order.

A month ago NVIDIA had introduced the Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) that brought PureVideo-like features to Linux. Our initial benchmarks of this video decoding API within NVIDIA's binary driver were quite favorable as it was able to dramatically cut down on the CPU usage when playing H.264 video files.

As big PC companies like Hewlett-Packard finally push into desktop Linux, WorksWithU will give equal time to the industry pioneers that evangelized desktop Linux before it went mainstream.

Everybody knows that you can liven up your OpenOffice.org Impress slide shows with animations. Did you know that you can also use several animation techniques, in combination, to really draw attention to your key points?

Despite common misconceptions, there are more solid backup solutions for desktop Linux than most people might suspect. Best of all, many of them are completely free with the code being open source. Some of them however, are not.

As controversial as it has been, i've been a supporter of KDE 3's Kickoff menu ( as introduced by openSUSE Linux ), and hence a supporter of the new KDE 4 default menu. There are some vocal protesters, but i feel that this sort of menu is a huge leap forward in general