After changing its stable release policy to a more accelerated pace, Mozilla released Firefox 5 pretty quick after the latest major Firefox version was put out. Firefox 4 was released on March 22, 2011 and this version follows only three months later. Here’s an announcement on the Mozilla Blog website.

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Today we’ll be talking with Tom Wickline, leader of the Bordeaux Technology Group, a company specialized in development of Windows compatibility software, supporting Linux, FreeBSD, PC-BSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana and Mac OS X.

TuxArena: Hello there Tom, thank you for being with us today.

You’re welcome – I always like talking about Wine and projects involved with Wine.

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Five more file managers were added: Sunflower, Marlin, SpaceFM, Ranger and FDclone. This overview now contains 25 file managers. Thank you for all the suggestions!

Dolphin | Homepage
Dolphin is the default file manager in KDE and it features an easy to use interface, tabs, previews, three view modes (icons, details, columns), vertical window splitting, file and folder sorting, service menus, tags, two-mode location bar.

sudo apt-get install dolphin

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First of all, I’d like to point out this article doesn’t include full-fledged IDEs, I’ll leave those for another article. So in conclusion you won’t find here Emacs, nor Vim or Eclipse and so on. This article overviews text editors, which may or may have not features belonging to a programming environment, like indentation or syntax highlighting, but aren’t full-blown development environments.

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ISO Master is a free, open-source application that allows the creation of ISO9660 images, as well as reading and extracting files and directories from an ISO image.

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Ubuntu Unleashed 2011 Edition: Covering 10.10 and 11.04 (6th Edition) is a book written by Matthew Helmke, Andrew Hudson and Paul Hudson. With over 700 pages, The 2011 Edition is the perfect Ubuntu manual and it covers Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.04 from A to Z, including installing, configuring, desktop applications, system administration, games, Ubuntu as a server, programming in Ubuntu.

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First of all I’d like to thank TuxArena’s readers for giving good feedback in the first part of this series, which overviews 15 of the tools I consider particularly useful in a console. This article overviews 10 more such tools, and most of them were suggested by you. Screenshots included.

telnet
telnet is a well-known command-line tool which uses sockets to open a TCP connection to the specified hostname and port. telnet can be primarily used for non-secure connections to connect to a HTTP server and get a file or to an IRC server for example. Escape character in telnet is ^] (press Ctrl+])
Homepage

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I didn’t include here applications like GIMP or Krita since they are full-fledged image manipulation applications, not just simple painting programs, nor Scribus or Inkscape since they serve different purposes. This article overviews 7 11 simple drawing applications for both KDE and GNOME. The command to install each of them in Ubuntu is displayed below the screenshot of the program.

Please bare with me on the screenshots, I could never draw anything more than rectangular circles and curvy lines.

Update 1: Three more applications were added to the list, Tux Paint, Pinta and GrafX2.
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cmus
cmus is a music player that I admire the most when it comes to command-line because it’s really powerful and has a lot of nice features. It is built with ncurses and therefore providing a text-user interface. cmus is indeed feature-rich, with several view modes and Last.fm song submission support via scripts. It supports Vi-like commands and auto-completion with Tab too. Recently I wrote a full guide on how to use cmus, you can read it here.
Homepage

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After the overview of 20 best KDE applications, it’s time to have a look at what GNOME has to offer, right? This article overviews 20 of the GNOME applications which are, in my opinion, the best in their category. Only a single application from each category is included, and screenshots are attached. The list is put up in no particular order and at the end of the article I put noteworthy alternatives for each category (only GTK alternative applications).

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I took some time to contact Jeff Hoogland, lead developer for Bodhi Linux, and asked him a few questions about the distribution he is in charge with.

TuxArena: Hello there, Jeff. Thank you for taking the time to talk with us about Bodhi Linux.

Jeff: Any time – I always love talking about projects I am involved with.

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PeaZip is an open-source file archiver with GTK and Qt interfaces, with support for all the major archives out there, including gzip, 7z, bzip2, zip, and arc.

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It’s not easy to put up a list of “best” applications which do something, however there are some highlights in each category which really deserve to be mentioned. In this article I will overview 20 KDE applications which I believe are best in their niche, one application from each important category, in no particular order.

BasKet (Notes-taking application)
I think each time I’ve talked about BasKet I mentioned it is a ‘killer app’ for Linux. BasKet is a full-blown notes-taking application for KDE, but it takes the concept to a whole new dimension, bringing features which make it a fully-fledged content creation program. It supports inserting text, images, links, frames. It organizes notes in a tree-like hierarchical manner, supports tags, importing notes from other notes-taking applications or text files, back/restore function.

BasKet 1.81

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