Continuing in this series of slide show backgrounds, in this article I will explain the process of creating a set of desktop backgrounds that will transition like a slide-show in XFCE. Note that I am using XFCE version 4.6.0 in this tutorial. Other versions may be able to use this tip, but the screen shots may look different. See corresponding howtos for GNOME, and KDE3 also.

My recent article about transitioning slide show backgrounds in GNOME garnered quite a bit of attention, so here's my first reminder of how to do the same thing in other desktop environments. This one will show you how to create a custom slide show backgrounds in KDE3.

This tech tip provides you with information on how to customize your motd (Message Of The Day) message to display the output of one or more scripts. This uses the update-motd package, which updates the motd message when run. I use this method on Ubuntu 9.10, but not all systems provide this package so extra effort may be required to use it on other systems.

I wanted to store geolocation information in the photos I take with my digital camera. That way I wouldn't have to specify the photo locations manually when I upload them to the Picasa webpage. Since my camera doesn't have built in GPS support, I wrote this script to add the location information to the pictures when they are on the computer already.

While test-driving the new Gnome 2.28 desktop, I was surprised to see that among the default backgrounds, there was a "Cosmos" slide-show of several cosmic pictures of space that regularly transition on your desktop. While I had used this feature in the past when using KDE, I was not aware of how to create my own slide-show backgrounds in Gnome. By examining how the Cosmos slide-show works, I figured out how to create my own custom slide-show backgrounds. Read on and find out to create your own custom desktop background.

If you watched the video and wondered what the JavaScript code was for my "Move Junk" button in Thunderbird, then read on. If you haven't watched the video, this article describes how to add custom toolbar buttons to Thunderbird using the Custom Buttons addon.

Most shells maintain a history of the commands that you've typed and that history can be used to save time and typing. Most of us have probably used the up/down arrow keys already to move through the list of commands that we've already entered, but there are other ways to access the data in the history list.

One of OpenOffice.org's greatest strengths is its emphasis on styles. Some users balk at styles, claiming they are restrictive, but no other feature repays a little organization with so much ease of use and saving of time. Yet even those who are used to styles in Writer tend to overlook the styles used in other applications. That is especially true of graphic styles.

A few months ago Apple updated their movie trailers site. This update restricts the viewing of Apple Trailers on non-approved systems. Unfortunately, as Linux users, we fall into the category. Thankfully with the use of a FireFox plug-in known as "User Agent Switcher" and a little know how we can still enjoy these trailers and decide what movies we would like to see at the theater.

I've written about bash quoting before, and yes, it's about as exciting as watching paint dry or listening to the corn grow. It can also be extremely frustrating when it doesn't do what you want, case in point: trying to script the updating of a field in a mysql table when the field to be changed contains quote characters.

It's fairly simple to find large files on your system using commands such as find, but if you're looking for directories over a certain size find won't help you. The Perl script presented here can help you track down those explosively large directories.

As I've mentioned before I'm an openSUSE user, and as long as they don't make the "U" lower case again, I'll probably stick with it. When it comes to package management, OpenSUSE and SUSE Linux Enterprice (and SuSE before them) are usually associated with YaST (and yes, I'm still waiting for them to upper case the "a"). YaST works well but it's a bit verbose for installing a single package, and of course that's just more fodder for the apt-getters with all their apt-get install this and their apt-get install thats. And you can't argue with them, but there are other options with openSUSE: yum and apt4rpm come to mind, but the preferred solution is zypper.

In the last release of Ubuntu (9.04) the Ctrl+Alt+Backspace key sequence normally used to kill the X server was disabled by default. Apparently many people like to kill their X server this way so a workaround "dontzap" package was used to enable it. With the latest Ubuntu release (9.10, aka Karmic) it's even simpler to enable it.

Sometimes when you're watching online videos on youtube or other sites, you want to save some of them for later offline playback. You've probably heard of Firefox extensions like DownloadHeloper that can do this, but sometimes you may only have a bare version of Firefox, or perhaps a different browser, one that doesn't have a plugin for doing this. Using the tip below, you can save videos no matter what browser you're using.

I usually lock my screen when I leave my cubicle for a tea-break etc. With all the talk of saving energy these days I've disabled screen-savers on my system. Still, when I'd lock my screen I noticed that the LCD didn't turn off completely. Wanting to go as green as I could I wanted to switch off the LCD as well.

In Part I we tested out Android on VirtualBox. Now we'll try running Palm's WebOS as a Virtual Appliance. This article assumes that you are using:

If you don't want to step up to a full monitoring solution such as Nagios you can create your own scripts for monitoring the things that you want to monitor, such as disk space. The following script alerts you when your root partition is almost full:

With Google and Verizon recently announcing that several Android phones will be coming out on their network, a Linux lover might have smartphones on the brain.  Obviously, having Linux running on your phone is awesome, but which Linux OS should you choose? Android?  WebOS?  Maybe even

Now that summer is over and your digital camera is full of pictures, how do you get them organized? At the command line of course! The script provided here automatically organizes them into sub-directories by date.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.