This is a pretty good tip. The default style irritates me to no end. Check out the full post, there are some great tips, especially if you’re new to Nautilus like me.

Ever since some distros started their attempt to become more “user-friendly” and gaining the nice looks, some default features got changed.

In this case, it’s the location bar. Instead of it they got some buttons that shows the location and let you navigate through the directories! So, if you’re using one of these distros and want to pop up the location bar, all you have to do is to hit Ctrl+L. However, if you’re like me and like to have it always there, each time you fire it up, you canchange the default value of it in gconf-editor, or alternatively use this following command in the terminal

gconftool-2 --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/start_with_location_bar --type bool 1

via anxiousnut’s playground

Ext2Read is a Free & Open Source Software which allows you to browse your Linux partitions in a very Windows Explorer-esque interface. Unlike other tools Ext2Read also supports ext4 filesystem, even if extents feature is enabled. Like the name suggests – Ext2Read can only read, not write to the partitions – so in case you are paranoid about the tool causing data corruption to your Linux partitions, you can drop those fears.

via techie-buzz

It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox.

[....]

All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.2.6 is a lot slower and sometimes unresponsive, as compared to version 3.1.8.

A fresh install of VirtualBox 3.2.0 on Windows 7 Ultimate x64 Edition even managed to completely crash the Windows Networking Subsystem, necessitating the uninstallation of VirtualBox

via Is Oracle trying to kill VirtualBox? | Muktware.

The article is either a bunch of baloney or the test system as got some serious hardware/software compatibility problems. Oracle VirtualBox 3.2 has been absolutely rock solid, smoother than ever before. Seamless mode is awesome, and I managed to resurrect my dead Windows installation by installing a Windows 7 VM using Oracle VirtualBox and then making a bootable Windows 7 USB pen drive (long story worth a blog post, will do soon!). The article doesn’t mention how many test systems were used to test the software – if its a single box then drawing a conclusion that Oracle is killing VirtualBox based in just one system is pretty stupid.

And heh, the author calls himself “BaloneyGeek“. Go figure.

Couple of days ago, there was a huge debate (argument ?)  between Matt Mullenweg  - developer of WordPress and Chris Pearson – developer of Thesis premium theme over twitter which then extended to Mixergy.

Crux of the argument is the disagreement amognst the two over the licensing terms. Matt believes that Thesis should adopt GPL which as Wikipedia states:

The GPL is an example of a powerful copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.

Chris, on the otherhand disagrees with this. The full transcript of their discussion is available on Mixergy, here are some quotes which I found interesting:

[...]

A quickie:

I wanted to change the default application from Banshee/Totem for my media files to VLC ( since I didn’t have proprietary codecs installed, and VLC does). Searched all of YaST/Settings and couldn’t find where to change the default application.

[...]

Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.

Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.
[...]

Seems like lot of openSUSE Gnome users don’t like the new Gnome panel, which is radically different interface from the traditional Menu bar with Applications/Places/System entries. Personally I prefer the new style, perhaps because I’m used to the openSUSE Kickoff panel, and I really dig the search feature

[...]

I wasn’t aware of this tiny little thing  - the filesystem in the  file created by a Wubi install can be easily mounted as a loop device.

[...]

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird pretty extensively past few months. Even though I do have Microsoft Outlook installed on my work laptop – with the amount of mails  that I send and receive, Outlook just dies when the Inbox size shoots up and that’s an absolute killer. One of the problems with Thunderbird is that unlike Outlook, its an email-client, and not a complete PIM suite, and my work requires me to maintain an extensive calender system. But thanks to addons, you don’t have to worry about this. Let me show you how you can convert Mozilla Thunderbird to complete PIM suite.

[...]

It’s been a while since I last used Ubuntu – I have generally shunned away from Ubuntu since Fiesty – for the main reason that I’m more of KDE guy, I never really liked Gnome, and my experience with Fiesty was rather unsavoury. You might say ‘hey you want KDE try Kubuntu’ -  Kubuntu – well I won’t get started on that. I’ve been using Sabayon and was pretty darn impressed with that. With Jaunty being due for release soon, I decided to check Jaunty, even more so after Manish kept raving about Jaunty’s performance.

[...]