TuxRadar rips out a great newbie’s guide to Fedora 12 along with some basic user function app notices. Worth a shot if the Linux world still scares you (which it shouldn’t). The Twitux app looks pretty sweet and I might feature that for Thursday’s FOSS review.
Our pepper seedlings are already taking off! After last years successful gardening adventure we’re poised to strike yet again, only this time a bit wiser and better prepared. Here are some of the seedlings already poking their heads up.
While searching for some new Script-Fu scripts for Gimp (cause I’m lazy) I ran across this tutorial on how to take a normal image and create a pencil drawing effect. Very cool and very simple!
End result:
With the F13 Feature Freeze soon approaching, I took some time to review the current approved feature list scheduled to freeze on 2/9.
Some of the features that caught my eye
I’m not sure if this is enough to persuade me to hop on F13 as I currently don’t have a large need for any of these. My webcam doesn’t currently work in the latest Skype version, but I believe that’s more to blame on my cam than the kernel support.
I like my news and I like to get it fast. I struggled to find a sleek but powerful RSS reader under Windoze, but I’ve hit syndication gold in Fedora via Liferea.
Out of the box Liferea comes with a smattering of subscriptions already enabled including CNN, Slashdot, Fedora’s rawhide notices, and other tech related feeds. The interface is sleek and easy to use, while still providing a collection of options that would make a Swiss Army knife seem jealous. You can customize fetch intervals, prune topics based on relevance, and archiving limits.
Liferea offers binary packages for most popular distros which have made it into their respective repositories as a permanent staple.
..like a glass of milk with a spider in it, Dark Void ends badly..
In the latest browser market share report by NetMarketshare we see IE continue its downward slide, FireFox remain consistant at 24%, and the new kid on the block, Chrome, starting to pick up steam.
I’ve not yet fiddled with Chrome yet as the plugin support just isn’t there for me. I typically run No-Script, Flashblock, and FireBug with any fresh install of FireFox and have become accustomed to having said tools available.
What browser are you using? Why?
While I’m not totally sold on the desktop search realm of applications due to their history of being monolithic resource destroyers, I decided to revisit this group of GUI alternatives to grep, find, and awk.
The app that seems to have improved the most in the past 18 months is clearly Recoll. It allows (well in this case, forces) the user to schedule the search index updates instead of them occurring automatically. While this does introduce an extra step in the setup process, it allows you to keep the resource-hungry indexing process from running during your peak usage hours. Most Windoze users should be use to this with their Antivirus program of choice running its weekly “omg-please-say-I-didn’t-get-slammed-with-another-batch-of-malware” scans, and have opted to have these ran during the early morning hours on a Sunday or something.
The beauty of a desktop search tool is to allow quick searches through gigs worth of files, including content, metadata, and context checking. While expertly crafted grep/find/awk commands can execute this request, they still must traverse your entire drive if you have no idea where to begin the search. A desktop search tool utilizes an index of said files that can be tailored to specific directories or file types if you wish. This results in faster search results within a context you care about (or at least told the app you care about).
Recoll is available via your package manager of choice, or for the most recent release check out their RPM page.
Ulmer released another drum cover, this time it’s Sad but True by Metallica. Enjoy!
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