If you are disgruntled by the new interfaces provided by recent distribution releases, namely GNOME 3 and Unity, you might want to take a look at Cinnamon. With its traditional feel and extreme theme-ability, Cinnamon is a desktop interface bound to spice up anyone's computer.

Why would you spend a few hundred dollars on a device that is little more than a smartphone (with a bigger screen, without the phone)?

Playing and managing your music in text mode.

June is Reader Appreciation Month here at Linux Journal.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the older real-time communications methods still in active use on the Internet. Due to its popularity, flexibility and cross-platform nature, it still has a very vibrant user base today.

I've mentioned before that I keep my entire e-book collection in my Dropbox folder, and I can access it anywhere I have a Web connection. I didn't come up with the idea myself; instead, I shamelessly stole the idea from Bill Childers. I suspect he stole it from someone else, so feel free to steal the idea from me.

Keeping It Cool... Three days ago here in northern Michigan, we had a heavy frost overnight. Those gardeners who ambitiously planted their plants early had to cover them with tarps or tents to make sure they didn't die in the frigid night. Yesterday, the temperature was 96°F. Michigan weather is weird.

For those of you playing along at home, you'll recall that our intrepid hero is working on a shell script that can tell you the most recent year that a specific date occurred on a specified day of the week—for example, the most recent year when Christmas occurred on a Thursday.

Your hardware is ready. Now, let's load up some software and get cracking.

Directory services is one of the most interesting and crucial parts of computing today. They provide our account management, basic authentication, address books and a back-end repository for the configuration of many other important applications.