New AMD/ATI 8.35.5 Display Driver Control Center

AMD 8.35.5 display drivers shave come up with new feature – AMD Catalyst Control Center for Linux. A GUI control center that offers some similar features to that of the text-based aticonfig. AMD Catalyst Control Center Linux Edition (or amdcccle), is the replacement for fireglcontrolpanel.

With AMD in charge we are seeing push towards better Linux support ….

MEPIS Launches New Community Site

MEPIS is pleased to announce its new Community site at www.mepis.org/community. This new site will provide a better way for the MEPIS community to interact with each other, while making it easier for users to find helpful information.

Warren Woodford said, “We hope that having an improved site for our community will encourage more users to participate in the forums and in creating documentation for the Wikis. We also hope this will make it easier for new users to learn about MEPIS, and the different ways that they can get involved in the MEPIS project.”

The new site also includes links to MEPIS forums for English, French, and Italian users, as well as links to MEPIS Wikis in English, Spanish, French and Italian.

Matt Melbert of MEPIS said, “MEPIS users are encouraged to add content to the Wikis. Expanding and improving MEPIS documentation will benefit the entire community.”

Melbert added, “I would like to thanks MEPIS users AdrianTM and Jerry Bond for volunteering their time to get the new community site up and rolling. We couldn’t have done it without them. But this is just the start – we need more people in the community to help us keep this project going, so head over to the new site at www.mepis.org/community and find out how you can help.”

Satisfied users are encouraged to make a contribution or make a purchase at the MEPIS store. User support helps offset the costs of producing this MEPIS release and funds further development of MEPIS Linux.

Debian Sarge 3.1 Composition

 “GNU”, “Linux”, or neither…?

 

OpenOffice 2.2 Release

The OpenOffice.org community announced version 2.2 of the popular open source office suite, a release it hopes will make further inroads into the Microsoft Office user base.

While the previous version, OOo2.1, worked well on Microsoft’s new Vista operating system, this version is the first release to begin making use of some of the new cosmetic changes included in Vista. Among these is the use of new dialogue boxes.

For Apple users there is good news with a smaller download and install size, always welcome in an application this size. OOo version 2.2 requires Mac OS X 10.4.x running X11.

Also on the table this time around is a series of security enhancements following a spate of vulnerabilities reported in the media over the past couple of weeks. “OpenOffice.org 2.2 also protects users from newly discovered vulnerabilities, where users’ PCs could be open to attack if they opened documents from, or accessed web sites set up by, malicious individuals,” the team said in a release this morning.

In line with attempts to make OOo a more appealing alternative to Microsoft Office, the team has also enhanced the PDF export function to include optional creation of bookmarks and support for user-definable export of form fields.

Calc, the spreadsheet component of OOo, has a number of enhancements to improve Microsoft format compatibility including improved support for pivot tables and some specialised trigonometric functions.

Base, the database component, has improved SQL editing functionality as well as a new queries within queries feature. Compatibility options for some database drivers, such as Oracle ODBC, have been improved.

Impress, the presentations component, offers improvements in the handling of hidden slides which has been made more intuitive.

Become a Digital Video Editing Guru Using Linux Tools

Shooting, editing, and producing video clips has been my passion for about 10 years. As a free software adept, I always tried to perform this process on Linux. This year I have finally found a set of tools that work for me. This article provides a brief tutorial on home video production.

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The process consists of several steps. First, you transfer the video source material to your Linux machine (video grabbing). Next, you edit the video, possibly mixing it with other video and audio material, and then render it into an output video file. If your goal is to upload a file to the Web or share it with your computer-savvy friends, then this is the end. Sometimes, however, you want to create a DVD suitable for conventional DVD players. In those cases the final step is authoring the DVD.

As far as convenience goes, Linux may present a sharper learning curve, but this learning curve is worth the trouble. Once you find your way around all the steps, you will feel comfortable using the whole chain. The stability and predictability of the free software, as well as the active community of users and developers, is a huge asset. >>>>>>>

Sad But True …..

As a lot of Linux users do, especially if you like playing latest games (heard of latest S.T.A.L.K.E.R?) on PC, you eventually go back to booting WIndows, which is damn true with me ……

But then again if you are satisfied with games that are Linux friendly (you know they are of course not what latest PC gaming has to offer),then The Linux Game Tome is the place for you. The Linux Game Tome is a forum-based site that has up to the minute news about gaming as it relates to Linux. The site has news, reviews, guides, and tips for all of your Linux gaming needs.

The Power of Customizing Your Firefox Browser

Don’t we simply love ouf Firefox browser …. I know I do.

The reason that Firefox took off where Netscape floundered is that they had the guts to just take stuff out and make it what most people need: a nice little no-fuss browser that loads fast. So that’s what Firefox is. However, there are many features, some very useful and some perhaps more obscure, like the number of threads to keep open for downloading graphics. If you want to get at them, just type about:config in a Firefox browser window.

Right-click on an option if you want to modify it. To learn about each option you will find a lot of information over this page.

Importing Outlook Express Emails Into Thunderbird And Evolution

This tutorial shows how you can import Outlook Express emails, contacts, and account settings into Mozilla Thunderbird and Evolution. This is quite useful if you want to switch from Windows to Linux but don’t want to lose your mails and address book. The procedure should be similar if you use Outlook instead of Outlook Express.

1 Preliminary NoteTo export the mails and contacts from Outlook Express, we will install Mozilla Thunderbird on our Windows system. We can then use a wizard in Thunderbird to import the Outlook Express emails/contacts/settings. Once we have done this, we can move the Thunderbird directory that contains the imported files to our Linux desktop where we can “feed” the files to the Thunderbird installation on our Linux system. In an additional step we can import the mails and contacts in Evolution, but even then we need Thunderbird.

Complete HowTo

Five Free Open Source Shopping Carts

One of the most alarming factors for new e-tailers is the cost of some of the commercial e-store software. While you can pay a few extra dollars for shopping cart software when signing up for a hosting account, these plans don’t always offer the functionality or design options that fit your needs. This is where Open Source software comes in to play.

Open Source Software
Many like-minded programmers create software that costs nothing and can be edited just as freely. The result of this collaboration of professional programmers is software that is often as feature rich as its commercial competitors. Best of all, of course, it’s free. Open Source software is nothing new, but it was once considered to be lacking in features and incredibly difficult to install without the help of a trained professional. However, now many Open Source e-commerce packages are as intuitive as commercial solutions. And, with such a vibrant and active Open Source community, there are many options available and lots of support should you need it. To help you decide what’s a good fit for you, we’ve highlighted the features of five Open Source platforms we recommend.

Reviewed carts include osCommerce, Zen Shopping Cart, Agora Shopping Carts, NoPCart and Commerce.CGI >>>>>>

Tips: Manage the Use of Swap Memory

The use of the swap memory by default on Kernel 2.6.xx is set to 60% that means that the system will use intensively the swap memory. This sounds good if we have a small amount of memory (around 512MB or less) and lot of load on our PC especially if it is working as server. But if we have plenty of RAM (at least 1GB), as I do which is 2GB, and we are using our PC as desktop machine for daily use, we can change the percentage of swap to be utilized. This setting will increase the performance of Linux experience.
This is valid for quite a lot os distributions inlcuding openSUSE, Debian, Fedora and CentOS.

On a Terminal do this as root (use sudo if running Ubuntu)

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

You should see 60. Now change it to 10

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=10

Now is time to work for some minutes with some applications if you see that is better, you can make the changes permanent.

vim /etc/sysctl.conf

and add this line at the end (let me know if it is better to insert this in other file for openSUSE distribution)

vm.swappiness=10

Related: Reduce your Linux Memory Footprint