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Couple of months ago, just about a month before #cpgweds - the engagement my Envy 14 laptop started showing signs of dying - weird noises coming from the vents, system freezing arbitrarily, system getting incredibly hot - and that’s really unusual because the Envy’s cooling system is probably one of the best that I’ve seen in a laptop. Soon enough, it became clear that a fan was not working - my idle temperatures hit 85 degrees C, and start any game or even xbmc, and the temperatures would hit 95-100 and shutdown sooner or later.

I noticed this few days ago on the dev build: case ya'll haven't noticed, the Chrome's wrench icon is no longer there :( i.imgur.com/rkbMh.png — Sathya (@SathyaBhat) August 8, 2012 It’s been replaced with what I can only call.. “Three horizontal lines” which is really weird way of calling it :\ Having the wrench icon was so much better - have referred bringing up the menu quite a few times as “Click on the wrench” on Super User.

Here are our key findings: GNOME has a rhythm – there is a measurable increase in activity before release time, and after the annual GNOME conference GUADEC While over 70% of GNOME developers identify themselves as volunteers, over 70% of the commits to the GNOME releases are made by paid contributors Red Hat are the biggest contributor to the GNOME project and its core dependencies. Red Hat employees have made almost 17% of all commits we measured, and 11 of the top 20 GNOME committers of all time are current or past Red Hat employees.

openSUSE 11.3 is based on Linux kernel 2.6.34 and has KDE Software Compilation 4.4.4 as the default desktop environment. A GNOME version is also available and it uses GNOME 2.30.1. In terms of the default applications, it comes with Thunderbird 3.0.5, Firefox 3.6.4 and OpenOffice 3.2.1 to name a few. openSUSE 11.3 also gives the user the choice of using Btrfs during installation. You can view the complete changelog here or read the release note.

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux. Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications.

I love MusicBrainz Picard. It keeps my music collection organized, tags and renames them, and heck even fetches the cover art for (almost) all songs. Picard is just brilliant. And the icing on the cake - its FOSS & cross platform. And it was working fine - till couple of days ago. Eager to try out the RC of the upcoming 4.4 release of KDE, I upgraded it. Later on I got a bunch of music files from Ankit, and I set to tag ’em correctly.

Ever wondered if there’s a quick and easy way to write an iso file to a CD-R/DVD-R ? Don’t want to open K3B or Brasero ? Here’s a handy way of writing the iso file. First, switch to root using su su Next, type cdrecord -scanbus You’ll get something like this: scsibus0:<br /> 0,0,0 0) 'TSSTcorp' 'DVD+-RW TS-L632H' 'D200' Removable CD-ROM<br /> 0,1,0 1) * Note the first 3 numbers corresponding to your CD/DVD writer.

Well I was browsing through some Kannada sites the other day and all I got was big blocks. Turned out that Gentoo and Sabayon didn’t have support for displaying Kannada characters, though, I had no such problems with Hindi & Bengali characters [amongst others]. Changing the Character encoding in Firefox to Auto-detect or Unicode didn’t work either. After doing a bit of searching, found the solution. So open the terminal, switch to root user and type

There are lots of times where you’d want to mount a CD/DVD image. Say your friend who uses his Windows box has given you a .iso file or a .mds/mdf file, created using Alcohol 120%. How would you mount them in Linux? Using the Terminal and making use of the loop device,there is no need for any external software tools and utlities. Here’s the steps: Open the Terminal/Console. Switch to root user(mounting more often than not requires root privileges, we’ll have a look as to how make media user-mountable later) by typing su root *buntu users and others distros in which the root account is disabled, can skip this step.

KDE users have for a long time had the jack-of-all-trades, all-singing-all-dancing Konqueror for file management. In KDE 4 we’ll be joined by the new Dolphin which will be the default file manager. If you yearn for a change of file manager now, however, and you’re a fan of the left-right split in your file manager, you might just like Krusader. On first run, Krusader will search your system for tools it can integrate with as you can see here.