Like a famed race horse or a classic book, you don't just throw away a laptop because it's banged up a little. Even if it seems outdated and underpowered, most any laptop is still small, quiet, and relatively low on power consumption, making it a seriously valuable spare to keep handy—even without a working screen.

Ohh.. I expect some flames on that title! Lolz! Defend your camp is you wish, whether Linux or Windows. And yeah, when I say Linux here, it mostly refers to Ubuntu and its derivatives, considered as one of the friendliest distros, and a pioneer in bringing Linux to new users.

Griffith is an application for the Gnome desktop that organizes your movie collection, much in the same way Alexandria is used to organize your book library. Simply by entering the name of a movie, Griffith will query various databases on the internet and download cover art, plot details, and cast information.

One of the more common suggestions from readers following the article on my personal must-have apps for Ubuntu last week was that I install some sort of virtual machine on my computer and test software that way. So, I decided to do exactly that and found that VirtualBox is not only easy to install on Ubuntu (or other platforms) but is also easy to use.

Flashplugin-nonfree has been removed (see below), as this is closed source and we don't get security support for it. For security reasons, we recommend to immediately remove any version of flashplugin-nonfree and any remaining files of the Adobe Flash Player. Tested updates will be made available via backports.org.

After much disassembly, cleaning, and reassembly, I had a functioning computer. The included hard drive was dead, so I swapped in another that I'd pre-installed Ubuntu to. That worked fine, but I thought that so long as I had a "test computer" at my disposal I'd use the opportunity to try out a few untried distros I had sitting around: OpenSUSE 10.3, Mepis 7.0 and Mandriva 2008.

digiKam is a fantastic KDE application used to sort, arrange and manipulate digital photographs. It features: fetching pictures from a camera, cataloguing and complex editing. It also enables you to add comments to photos, tag them and rate your collection.