When I first set out to try MeeGo, I had hoped to boot up the live USB image on my netbook. What I soon discovered, however, is that it would not work.

Sure, Ubuntu Lucid is running OK on my aging 2002-era Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101 laptop. But I feel the strain of all that gwibber-service/desktop-couch activity in the Ubuntu LTS. So I've been looking around for my next distro. I'm running Fedora 13's LXDE spin from the live image right now, and I have the Xfce spin ready to test.

Making an image copy of your system disk is a great way to create a backup. With the cost of portable USB drives at all time lows, you could keep a couple around for rotation purposes. If your main drive does crash, you could be back up and running in a matter of minutes. Now all that's left is making the actual image copy.

Today EFF and the Tor Project are launching a public beta of a new Firefox extension called HTTPS Everywhere.

Q4Wine is a qt4 GUI for W.I.N.E. It will help you manage wine prefixes and installed applications.

When a developer creates a new application, he must start writing it very early in the Ubuntu development stages to be able to get his application in the official Ubuntu repositories (Universe) or else the only way he can provide that application to the current Ubuntu release is through a PPA - which is not easy discoverable by the users.

It would be great if all PDF files could be easily manipulated without relying on bloated, proprietary, update-obsessive applications (I'm looking at you, Adobe).  But the fact that that's not the case doesn't mean Ubuntu users are out of luck when it comes to editing PDFs.  Here's a look at some of the PDF editors available for Linux, and how well they work.

I recently came across Zorin, an Ubuntu based distro that focuses on easing a Windows user's transition to Linux by theming it's interface to look like Microsoft's operating system.