I was a Mandrake user for several years, before Ubuntu and Fedora were even part of the Linux lexicon. At the time, Mandrake was one of the easiest distributions in the Linux community. Mandrake was derived from Redhat with a focus on ease of use and usability.

Canonical and IBM, as expected, have expanded their relationship. The latest move involves a virtual appliance, comprising IBM's DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. At first glance the Canonical-IBM relationship is a nice win for Ubuntu. But perhaps there's a deeper story angle here... involving Canonical's continued pursuit of Oracle on Ubuntu. Here's the speculation.

When it comes to filers and pilers, I firmly belong to the latter category. I do like to keep all my disparate data -- notes, links, to-dos, etc. -- in one application, so when I need to find something, I have to look in one place.

Have you ever gone through the items listed in the "add to panel" option? If not, then you are missing one of the finest GNOME features. It has a great number of some really useful applets.

Often when a term gets thrown around enough to become a “buzzword”, it starts losing its meaning because people grow numb to it. Once that happens, you get pushback from people, even people to whom the buzzword applies.

There are lots of command-line utilities to kill unresponsive programs in Linux, but for the button-pushing-inclined, the Force Quit panel button lets you kill any app that you can click on without needing to remember anything.

If you’re looking for something that isn’t simply a variation on the default Ubuntu Light themes, shies away from looking like Aero & shuns using garish colours just to ‘seem different’ then Elegant GNOME by arobase could be just what you’re looking for.

After putting so much effort into an application it would be shame to see it not being used just because it was only available in English. Most people pay more attention and give more respect to a product which is available in their own language.If you want a global audience for your software, it is very important that you localise your application for your users. Here's how...