Open attitude.

I maintain that computers are the hot rods of the 21st century, and changing up your desktop background is the first and easiest step to pimping your ride.

Today I thought I’d share my favourite Linux wallpapers so far — if you see one you like you can download the full version from my Flickr account, but it’s probably better to get it from the official source, which I’ve also linked to where available…

Ah, the first of the month — time to back up my data to optical media, my NAS, Dropbox… And this month there’s a new tool in my arsenal. It’s called Clonezilla.

Developed at the National Center for High Performance Computing in Taiwan, Clonezilla will make a byte-for-byte, partition-for-partition copy of whatever you tell it to. And of course it’s free — even better, it’s been released under the GPL for everyone to benefit from…

Anyone using the GNOME desktop environment with their Linux distribution will probably be using Nautilus as a file manager as well. Among other handy features — like tabbed windows, for example — Nautilus has support for mounting Samba shares (like my NAS) built-in.

As I’ve chosen the more lightweight Xfce for my netbook the default file manager isn’t Nautilus but Thunar — a very capable app in its own right, but without any Samba support…

Over the past week I’ve been giving the latest and greatest KDE desktop a play on my desktop machine, and the lightweight PCLinuxOS ZenMini a trial on my netbook. As of this morning, I have nuked both drives and put Ubuntu proper on the desktop and Xubuntu on my Eee PC…

Say what you want about KDE, but I don’t think the merits of its default music player, Amarok, would be argued by those who have tried it. I’ve got version 2.3.1 on my installation of openSUSE; let’s see what all the fuss about!