The annual Google Summer of Code is upon us again. For the uninformed, that’s when Google pays hundreds of students and hundreds of mentors to work on free software projects, ranging from AbiSource to Zumastor. This is where great projects like the GDebiKDE installer were created. And this year looks even better than before, with 175 organizations and 1125 students. So today, I’m going to do a short rundown of some of my favorites. I can’t fit them all in (let’s save some trees!), but these are just some that stood out for me.

It’s really the most wonderful time of the year. Out of the top 6 GNU/Linux distributions (according to DistroWatch.com), four are releasing or have released builds between April and June. What’s new in them?

Let’s face it: GNU/Linux software is not always easy to use. Especially command line software (at least the GUI programs have buttons and tooltips). Sometimes, the program will have a manual or some documentation at its homepage, but that is not always the case. The solution? The magical man.

Since I was home schooled, I never had homework (homework and classwork were one and the same). And since I never had homework, I… never really had to learn how to study until high school. But when I did learn how to study, I found flash cards to be extremely effective. So I fell in love with KWordQuiz, a KDE Education project for flash card lovers just like me.

I’ve been looking for an SIP program for a long time. Linphone, OpenWengo, and Gizmo all failed to work with my Logitech AK5370 USB microphone (ah, the joys of drivers!). Eventually, after about half a dozen programs, I gave up. Then, out of the blue came Twinkle, a Qt-based VoIP phone.

In my last article, I talked about using the powerful gedit text editor. But no program is perfect, mainly because too many features imply too much bloat. That’s where gedit’s plugins come into play. In this article, I’m will explain how to install and use some of my favorite gedit plugins.

Most computer users spend their entire life looking for the Holy Grail. In other words, they spend all their life searching for the perfect editor that supports all their languages, is free as in speech, has spelling, has highlighting… you get the picture. Obviously, there isn’t a perfect editor out there. However, some come pretty close. Ironically, one of them is one that any Ubuntu (or in fact, any Gnome) user has installed, though they may not know it. It’s called gedit (also known as Text Editor).

gedit: not as simple as it looks

One of the reasons free operating systems are so great is because of their bug reporting features. Ubuntu is no exception. Like most other GNU/Linux operating systems, Ubuntu allows users to file bug reports using its bug reporting site, Launchpad. In the free software world, each user becomes a potential beta tester and gets the chance to contribute to the community without ever coding or writing documentation. Unfortunately, Launchpad’s bug reporting tool often scares away users who have no idea what a ticket, project, or distribution is.

Jabber is the only mainstream free (as in speech) instant messaging protocol. Unfortunately, most Jabber clients for GNU/Linux only provide options for messaging and group chats, overlooking the audio chatting portion of Jabber (powered by the Google-funded libjingle). Enter Jabbin, the free Qt-based Jabber VoIP client.

Anyone who runs more than one operating system has had to deal with GNU GRUB (the GRand Unified Bootloader). Grub is the tool that allows you to pick which operating system to book when you turn your computer on. But you can do a ton more than that by configuring it and derailing from the standard configuration. Unfortunately, until recently users were forced to open up cryptic config files in text editors and try and figure out what to do based on the comments (or, more diligently, by reading man pages).

I just saw my first Christmas lights a few days ago. Do you know what that means? I’m scrambling on my steep roof and putting up those “wonderful” icicles and decorating our ten foot high trees with lights up to the top. Not to mention those dang candles in the windows (which means putting out the lights on the upstairs windows and closing the shades). But Christmas time isn’t all doom and gloom. It brings a very special time: decorating your GNU/Linux-based PC.

Wallpapers

There is always a time when your GNU/Linux machine’s screen output stops working. Maybe it’s displaying garbage to your monitor instead of Gnome or KDE. Or maybe it’s displaying 640x480 resolution with 8 colors instead of 1280x1024 with 24 colors. Actually, this will happen with Windows as well. But unlike Windows, GNU/Linux provides a handy tool to fix it. It’s called dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.

Programming free software is tons of fun. But every so often, it’s nice to get a change from the daily grind and have some fun. That’s where Bygfoot comes in. Bygfoot is a Windows or GNU/Linux (or Macintosh via fink) compatible football (or soccer, as us Yanks call it) management game in the spirit of Football Manager (Americans and Canadians know it as Worldwide Soccer Manager).

What is it?

One of the biggest things holding back GNU/Linux adoption is the fact that most people haven’t tried GNU/Linux. That’s where SLAX comes into play.

Introduction

Linspire is doomed. No, they haven’t signed an unholy alliance with ID Software involving pre-installing DOOM on all Linspire computers. In my opinion, they are doomed to die a painful death in the operating system world. Why? Read on to find out.

Problem 1: White noise

We know all about how powerful the GNU/Linux terminal is. However, it’s a pain to have to fire up a terminal emulator like Konsole or gnome-terminal, wait for a few seconds for it load, and then have to keep Alt-Tabbing to it. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have a terminal that automatically hides and shows itself at click of a button? Today, I’m going to look at three different terminal emulators that do just that.

What the heck is a Quake-style terminal?

One of the biggest strengths of Debian (and derivatives like Ubuntu) is support for the .deb package. After all, it provides a one-click method of easily installing programs. Best of all, these programs are automatically updated via the official Debian repositories. Unfortunately, the official repositories aren’t always the best. Some programs aren’t always up to date (the latest version of Thunderbird is 2.0. However, the latest version in the repositories is 1.5).

One of the things I hate about Windows is that there is no good way to kill frozen processes. Theoretically, you type Ctrl-Alt-Delete, wait for Task Manager to pop up, and kill the process. But in reality, the process doesn’t always die immediately (it usually takes multiple tries and a very long time). GNU/Linux users don’t have this problem. Here’s how to end processes using the terminal, a few GUIs, and even a first person shooter.

Web developers are sometimes forced to travel. Unfortunately, lugging a big, bulky laptop around with all their programs is the only way to develop on the road. After all, using another computer is out of the question since it doesn’t hold all of your favorite programs. Luckily, there is a best of both worlds. Thanks to John T. Haller, the Apache Friends, evolt.org, winPenPack.com, and a host of others, you can carry an Apache server, a MySQL (and SQLite) install, a PHP install, a Perl install, a mail server, an FTP server, two popular web browsers, an FTP client, an HTML editor, an image editor, and a vector graphics editor on a 512MB flash drive to be used with any Windows computer. All using free software.

Ever since I first fired up KDE on openSuSE, I’ve been in love. The KDE interface just swept me off my feet. But there’s always been one nagging thing. Firefox and Thunderbird stick out like two sore thumbs. They don’t look like KDE apps (see figure 1 and figure 4), they don’t work with KDE programs (like KPrinter), and they just don’t feel like they belong in KDE. Luckily, since both of these apps have support for add-ons, it is easy to remedy this.