Here's a roundup of some Linux desktop news from the past couple of weeks.

Novell's Shaking Things Up

Many changes have been occurring at Novell over the past couple of weeks, including the naming of a new company president and job cuts for more than 10% of its staff. Novell also has said it will focus its efforts on the two areas the company believes have the most growth potential--Linux and identity. These moves are part of an overall company restructuring that hopes to cut costs and raise profitability in the coming fiscal quarters.

Issue number eight, November 2005, of TUX now is available.  Subscribers, you can download this issue here or simply follow the Download TUX button on the right to download the current issue. If you're not yet a TUX subscriber, consider subscribing today for instant access to this issue and many more! 

The future of computer software is programs and applications that think for themselves--but don't write us off the screen.

In the GOD (Good Old Days), we learned that computers do exactly what we ask them to do. Thus, Phil Hughes is not Phill Hughes, 012345 is not O12345 and so forth. For programmers, this meant they must write exactly what they want or things didn't happen right.

This situation is in contrast with natural languages, where meaning can be expressed without perfect words. For example, both "My car is blue" and "Me car is blue" will be understood by most people. I must say that living in a Spanish-speaking country has taught me the difference between saying something correctly and just being understood. If the people here applied computer-like rules to verbal communication, I would have starved long ago.

Here's a look at some of the Linux desktop news from the past week:

LSB Desktop Project

The Free Standards Group and the Linux Standard Base this week announced their new project to help further the implementation of Linux on the desktop. The LSB Desktop Project intends to work towards the standardization of many runtime and installation time requirements across various Linux distributions. By doing so, both software and hardware developers will be able to develop new products more easily that will work on the Linux desktop, regardless of which distribution is being used.

The author of a new book for Linux users explains how and why he chose to use the Linspire distribution.

Do you have any pets? A few years ago, I decided there was a void in my life that could be filled only by a dog. I had whole rooms full of wooden furniture that was not yet chewed and, being single, I hardly ever woke up at 5am because a furry creature stuck its cold wet nose in my ear. A dog definitely would fill both these aching voids.

But what kind of dog? Dogs come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. How do you choose among them? There's only one way for software enthusiasts to tackle a question such as these: create a weighted multi-variate spreadsheet of conditions and values!

Earlier this week, Dell announced it was releasing a new desktop computer "to meet growing customer demand for open-source ready systems". The Dell Dimension E510n base installation offers a Pentium 4 630 processor, 512MB of DDR2 memory, a 128MB ATI RADEON video card and an 80GB SATA hard drive. The E510n doesn't ship with Linux installed, but it does have a blank hard drive, so purchasers can install Linux or other operating systems at their will. The new Dimension desktop is available now for purchase from the Dell on-line store.

How to make life easier by using your KDE-based PIM on different platforms. [This article initially appeared in TUX, issue 7.]

If you are like me, you like to use a computer to do as much work for you as is “machinely” possible. If you are like me, you also carry various devices with you that leverage all this work you've made your poor PC do on your behalf. This means carrying a PDA, memory stick or other gadgets that hold information.

If this description fits you, you probably face the same situation that I do: accessing all of the information that you've so diligently entered in one place (like your Linux PC) in other places (for example, a Windows PC).

Want to take a quick photo of an image on your desktop? KDE has an easy tool to do exactly that.

I'm a KDE user. When I decided to give Linux a try, I felt KDE was the desktop environment most like what I was used to using. Using KDE has not been hard for me, but there are many things I have done over the years that I have to learn again. One of those things is how to do a screen capture. I am beginning to think the hardest part of using Linux is deciding which program to use. There are so many choices.

I needed an easy way to capture screens on my desktop. I looked at various programs and decided to use KSnapshot. KSnapshot is amazingly easy to use and offers all the options I need. Below, I am going to describe how to use it, but knowing KSnapshot is there to be used probably is the most important point of this article.

Issue number seven, October 2005, of TUX now is available.  Subscribers, you can download this issue here or simply follow the Download TUX button on the right to download the current issue. If you're not yet a TUX subscriber, consider subscribing today for instant access to this issue and many more! 

How to use the cross-platform program Audacity to edit sound files. [This article initially appeared in TUX, issue 6.]

Audacity is a cross-platform audio editor that provides some of the same abilities as store-bought audio editing programs such as Peak Express. This program has more capabilities than merely cutting and copying files; Audacity also can record from an input source, which goes along with mixing multiple audio files together. This is the same type of utility that Audio Production Studios use, although they use a hugely expensive program called Pro Tools.