There are several resources out there to assist you in being a Linux gamer. The WINE project (www.winehq.org) is a great, free example of this as it allows you to run Windows programs (and games) on Linux.

Making custom Linux distributions can be an arduous task. Luckily, there are companies out there that are looking to make the process more friendly. Previously, I reviewed the Reconstructor Web UI, a web-based Debian/Ubuntu customization utility, and today, I'd like to present you with a SUSE-based alternative called SUSE Studio. Although SUSE Studio does have some offline components (such as SUSE Studio Onsite and the rest of the SUSE Appliance Toolkit), this review will focus on the online components which are freely available at susestudio.com. For those that are following along at home, I'll assume that you already have an account with SUSE Studio (if not, you can request a free invitation via this page).

Originally, PDF export in OpenOffice.org was limited to three levels of quality, whose exact differences were obscure to most users. But that was many releases ago.

In the ongoing saga of What doesn't work after the upgrade? I tried to run my logo-overlay script the other day to add the Linux Journal logo to a video and, as you may have guessed, it didn't work. In this case I'd been forewarned...

There are few things more aggravating than going out to a coworker's office to work on their computer and finding that to fix it you need a CD that is sitting in your office. If you have ever experienced that, or would simply like to no longer need to tote that book of CDs with you every day, then this article is for you.

In my last article, Quick and Dirty with Open Office Base, I described my initial experiences with building a simple database application for my wife in Open Office Base, having had no prior experience with the program.

One of the least understood features of OpenOffice.org is graphics text. People understand vaguely that it differs from regular text, but exactly how it differs or why anyone should care is mostly unknown. However, if you know the distinction, graphics text can work for you in ways that regular text cannot.

Recently I wrote about controlling konsole with dbus. As I've begun to use that script for setting up my konsoles I, like others, have discovered that the tab title that you set with dbus doesn't stick. This short note shows you a workaround to make your tab titles stay put.

I've been taking a Java programming course this semester at the local technical college, which has been a wonderful learning experience. The programming course uses the Eclipse 3.5.1 IDE along with the Java Development Toolkit for programming in Java. In addition to using Eclipse, I use Dropbox to save the source code and preferences from my home install of Eclipse, eliminating the need to carry a USB key or email/transfer the files through any other method. This Dropbox storage method also ensures that every machine I use has the latest version of source code files with minimal interaction and fuss on my part.

When grep and sed aren't enough, gawk may provide the extra horsepower that you need. The following tip contains a sampling of some of the things one might do with gawk.

Working on a little script the other day I had the need to determine if the input to the script was coming from a pipe or from the terminal. Seems like a simple enough thing to determine but nothing jumped immediately to mind and a quick internet search didn't help much either. After a bit of pondering I came up with two solutions: the stat command and using information from the proc file system.

Some time back I wrote about creating a number of konsoles automatically using dcop. Although we were at the time well into the KDE4 era I had not yet upgraded since there were still things that weren't quite working with KDE4, most of these have now been fixed so I've upgraded some of my systems to KDE4, which means it's time to update the original code to now use dbus.

There are many dialog programs out there, Zenity, Kdialog, xdialog, etc. I love programs like these. They make it so easy to spice up a shell script with a little GUI action. Today I'm going to go look at a dialog program called gxmessage.

One of my favorite new apps is a little system tray app called caffeine (and here). It's simple, yet very practical, its purpose is to inhibit a screen saver or sleep mode, which is great while watching flash videos on sites like hulu.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be dereferenced (ie the value is not available). But this is not so, variable names can be passed as parameters to functions and they can be dereferenced to obtain the value of the variable with the given name.

By changing your Xsession file you can start a kiosk-style machine that starts a single X11 application.

As a person who uses Linux regularly, often I am asked about my opinions about other operating systems, especially those coming from large companies located in Redmond, Washington. Here's the deal. Operating systems are tools. We use them to do jobs. It is always a good idea to think critically about what tools you are using, and verify if other tools can do the same job in a more efficient or flexible manner.

I'm sure that most people hardly think about page options in OpenOffice.org Writer. The average person may change the paper orientation from portrait to landscape, or narrow the margins to squeeze more words into a page, but not much else.

Ever wanted to get the MAC or IP address of your computer in a Linux shell script? The following two commands should work on most flavours of Linux/Unix.

In this series of articles, we've gone over making custom transitioning slide-show backgrounds in different desktop environments. So far, we've gone over GNOME, KDE3, and XFCE. This time, we'll do the same task in KDE4. I think that it is easiest to do this KDE4 compared to all of the other desktop environments.