Recently, a new team composed by extremely talented designers was formed. Their goal? Design the visual appearance of KDE 5.  Known as The Visual Design Group (VGD), they will ultimately design what will become the default look. There’re relatively newcomers on the group as well as old faces, Nuno Pinheiro the lead designer behind KDE 4’s Oxygen iconography, Plasma and desktop theme among them. Just as exciting, perhaps even more, they’re asking the community to be more involved in the design process, you can participate and share your own thoughts, drafts and mockups at the KDE forums. So far so good…. Continue Reading

Minimum and usable requirements are not synonyms. Recommended specifications should not be confused with usability requirements, recommended specs are are more demanding (they represent the ideal set of components). A usability requirement is the condition in which the system not only installs and more or less works, but can also be used reasonably by other human beings. According to the official documentation, the minimum requirements to run Netrunner 13.12 are: CPU 1.6-GHz Intel Atom N270 RAM 1GB Hard Drive Size 10GB Graphics Card Intel GMA 945 Video Memory 128MB I decided to put this to test. The machine I used is… Continue Reading

Yo dawg, I herd u like Linux, so I put APT in yo Linux so u can manage while u package. That’s the gist of it. And now in human-readable text. Yes. Today, we will talk about Linux package managers, the neat software that lets you search, install and remove programs, tools, utilities, fonts, and whatnot in your Linux distribution. Now, we will not be talking about the low-level stuff, like DEB and RPM. We will focus higher up. First, I am going to present a handful of command line tools, with a bunch of pros and cons and options… Continue Reading

Thanks to the release of Steam for Linux and the announcement of Steam OS, the number of games available for Linux have been going up systematically. Valve is also preaching by example and porting many of their games to Linux, perhaps the most exciting of all is Portal 2. One of the best games ever made. Netrunner comes with Steam ready to install so, if you’re curious, the growing world of Linux gaming is only a couple of clicks away. One of the characteristics of the modern gaming industry is big studios mostly redo the same games over and over… Continue Reading

I would like to apologize in advance. This article is going to feature screenshots taken on a Windows 7 machine only, which might strike you as odd, given the fact this is a Linux-related topic we are discussing here. But it is exactly why we will use Windows. Nothing like pitch black to demonstrate pure white. Or the other way around. Indeed, LibreOffice 4.2 has been officially released, and it’s a major one. This latest edition of the most popular free, open-source office suite comes with a range of new options, tons of speed improvements, a variety of fixes, and… Continue Reading