When Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical/Ubuntu, made the comment that Ubuntu should be prettier than Apple OSX in near term I got excited - the man was absolutely right. It doesn’t matter how customizable and operating is, or how good can you make it look with some effort if it does look bad out of the box. The out-of-the-box experience is the key to reach the average users, and if that is not aesthetically pleasing a lot of effort is needed to win the user back. Interestingly Ubuntu with their orange/brown themes and very basic Gnome looks is possibly the worst looking distribution out of the major players. So here comes release 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex - a first step to the direction of making Ubuntu look good? We’ll see about that…

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VSO Software’s ConvertXtoDVD is without any doubt the leading video to DVD conversion software. It combines unbeatable ease of use, advanced features and a great combination of video processing speed and quality. The software has matured over the years to support just about every format on the market, but VSO continues to release new versions with small improvements. The latest v3.2.1.55 update adds support to .MTS file format introduced by certain Sony camcorders. They have also done some bug fixes and improved the Matroska (.MKV) demuxer and so on.

Link: ConvertXtoDVD version history
Download now: Click here
ConvertXtoDVD video guide: Click here

It’s about time - finally there is a high quality replacement for the discontinued Google Browser Sync. It was a tool to synchronize the bookmarks and passwords of multiple copies of Firefox web browser. As it was a Mozilla Firefox extension, it was a multi-platform solution allowing you to keep your web browser data synchronized even across platforms, like Linux and Windows for an example. But Google decided to pull the plug on this service as Firefox was updated to version 3. Once you are accustomed to the practicality of such service it is hard to live without. The only replacement was Mozilla Weave, which introduces more problems than it solves. Weave is slow, unreliable and practically seems to kill Firefox at least in Linux environment when performing the background synchronization. But fortunately you can now kiss Weave goodbye as the latest version of Foxmarks supports password synchronization - and it does it well.

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Or does it just simply fail? I have always rated Mandriva’s releases highly, and the past year has been especially good for them as the 2008 and 2008.1 have been awesome releases. Therefore the expectations were high when I was loading the Mandriva One 2009 edition to my IBM Thinkpad. After all Mandriva was the first one of the major distributions that would use KDE4 as the primary desktop environment, introducing the ‘next generation of desktop environments’ to the mainstream.

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XBMC Media Center has an interesting history, as it originates from the Microsoft Xbox game console - thus the name XBMC (Xbox Media Center). It has a long history as the project goes back to as far as the year 2002. XBMC can be considered as one of the killer applications for the original Xbox as it managed to expand the game console into a full blown media center that could playback Divx/AVI video, MP3s and just about any media content of that time. As time passed on and the original Xbox became a legacy product, the project was steered to new paths: They began porting it to GNU/Linux, Max OSX and Windows. As a result their next major release is now at Beta 2 stage, and available for all supported platforms, and believe me that it is a beauty.

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The famous documentary movie director Michael Moore has released his latest as a free download on the Internet. The movie Slacker Uprising is available at slackeruprising.com, but for some reason the download is restricted to US and Canadien IP addresses only. I have no idea what is the idea of this restriction, which is technically very weak and easy to bypass, but it gets even weirder as the movie was also released on the world famous Swedish The Pirate Bay BitTorrent tracker and search engine. Perhaps he couldn’t resist to use The Pirate Bay as a marketing gimmick, or whatever the reason is, but obviously the BitTorrent as a protocol does not respect any geographical IP based restrictions. Not surprisingly the movie is receiving a lot of attention at Pirate Bay, and is currently being downloaded by thousands of people.

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Back to basics - back to buring bits! Thanks to Pioneer Europe, we have had the chance to play around with the brand new Pioneer DVR-116D recorder. The DVR-116D is a high speed burner that records DVD-R media up to 20x speed and DVD+R DL with the maximum speed of 12x. On the other hand it introduces the brand new Optimal Write Speed technology, which is supposed to automatically pick the best possible recording speed for optimal quality.

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I have been using the KDE 4.1 since it was published in late July. I have used it with both, nVidia and ATI videocards, so I think I have pretty good overview of KDE 4’s status with the modern hardware. There are many good things about the KDE 4, but there is also a lot of room for improvement.

So let’s start with the good stuff first. KDE 4 has a completely new approach to the deskop: there are no traditional desktop icons, but the whole desktop is build of Plasmoids. In fact, even taskbar and desktop icons are Plasmoids. There are also mini-applications, Widgets, which are similar to Windows Vista’s Gadgets. All of these Plasmoids are easily resizable and customizable, making it easy to create a desktop of your likes.

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PCLinuxOS is awesome. Especially I like the “2008 MiniMe” edition, which comes as a bare-bone installable live CD, and contains only the KDE desktop essentials. This means that you will have to install all the desired applications on top of it, in order to make it a usable desktop system. In other words, the approach of 2008 MiniMe is very similar to Microsoft Windows XP, which also comes only with a minimal desktop environment and without applications. The beauty of this approach is that using PCLinuxOS package management (Synaptic) the installation of required applications is a snap and the selection of software is customized for your needs. No clutter, no useless applications, just the tools you want. As you result you have a stable, customized and a very light weight desktop environment.

I have recently installed a couple of PCLinuxOS systems, in most cases dual-booting along side with Windows XP. Along the way I learned a few useful tricks, which I wanted to share with the public. These are nothing spectacular and most likely will not reveal anything new for the Linux enthusiasts, but I think that newbies coming from the Windows world may find these valuable.

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I love WordPress. In a matter of just a couple of hours we just performed a huge update to the site. There are some rough edges and dirty workarounds, but overall things seem to work great. Most obvious change of course is the new theme, which I think is a nice upgrade from the previous and gives the site a more up-to-date look and feel. Do you like it or not? Use the comment feature to give some feedback.

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