As we pointed out last week, Netrunner isn’t just any Linux distribution, it’s a truly web enabled experience. As such it recognizes that in the modern world most users don’t store their contacts or calendars on their local hard drives, rather this type of information is stored in the cloud. Dryland Second Edition provides the necessary tools to be useful in this new world, not only by offering ways to sync your cloud stored data with it, but rather making it as straight forward as possible. While applications like Kontact have always support this kind of integration, these features were… Continue Reading

Netrunner is not just another Linux-based distribution, it has a clear web connected vision of the future, this can be seen as soon as the cursor appears: Web Accounts, Runners-ID, Network Drives, web apps readily available on the main menu, are the first contact users will have with Netrunner. A few weeks ago we published a video on our channel showing Runners-ID, but this well designed feature not only deserves an article of its own, it deserves to be compared with some major mainstream offerings, including those of the Internet giant known as Google Inc. In the aforementioned screencast, I… Continue Reading

Hullo, my first article here, and I’m blithely taking on Telepathy. Officially, Telepathy is a software framework which can be used to make software for interpersonal communications such as instant messaging, Voice over IP or videoconferencing. Telepathy enables the creation of communications applications using components via the D-Bus inter-process communication mechanism. Through this it aims to simplify development of communications applications and promote code reuse within the free software and open source communities by defining a logical boundary between the applications and underlying network protocols. But that’s geek lingo. For normal people, this is an instant messaging client with additional audio… Continue Reading

The new version of Netrunner is out. Dryland Second Edition has quite some new features, and comes with the following software: KDE 4.8.3, Gimp 2.8, Firefox 12, the just released Skype 4.0, Wine 1.5.3, Virtualbox 4.1.10, VLC 2.0.1, LibreOffice 3.5.2,  among many others. However, perhaps, the biggest news is Netrunner’s integration of web- and especially cloud-services. From Facebook and GMail to owncloud and Runners-ID, we’ll be checking everything about how to setting them up and squeeze them in the next days, screencasts included. You’ll get a mix of the latest Kubuntu 12.04 LTS and some new cloud integration technologies. Because Neturnner is… Continue Reading

The most popular VoIP service has release a new version of their Linux application. Finally achieving parity with the Skype apps on Windows and Mac OS X. Skype was recently bought by Microsoft and this beta has been in the labs for so long I can’t remember. So this release may serve to calm fires regarding whether  it will keep supporting Linux. In fact, Skype’s support just gets wider and wider, ironically though, the worst of all its apps is the one for Windows Phone 7. New in this release, codenamed Four Rooms for Improvement, are the new call interface (which… Continue Reading

Last week we revised Calligra’s presentation app, namely Stages; we didn’t doubt to call it a piece of software not ready for prime time yet. Today we take a look to Sheets and the situation is completely different. Sheets it’s a mature application ready to fight toe-to-toe with any out there. As we’ve been doing with other members of the Calligra family we will start by talking about the main dockers. Main Docker It’s used to insert formulas into cells with a little more space and more comfortably (like the main formula line in most spreadsheets apps). Once you finished writing a… Continue Reading

Stage is Calligra’s presentation app. Thanks to the fact that it supports ISO standards presentation can be opened and edited by all popular applications. Dockers As all other members of the suite its UX design is build around dockers. As a big example of how integrated Calligra’s app are, Stage’s main dockers are shared dockers, and therefore we’ve covered it in our opening article regarding Calligra. That said, Stage does have a few dockers specifically designed for it. Document Shows a list of all slides. You can easily add and remove slides. It has three different view modes: Thumbnail view, Detail view… Continue Reading

Every six months all members of the Ubuntu family get updated. Every six months new features are added, bugs are corrected, new apps get in, some apps get off. Some releases come once every three years. Long Term Support (LTS) releases must be more stable and polished than usual, there’s less room for experiments, this versions are meant to be used for a long time and by users on enterprises or managing systems that require as much stability and longevity as possible. Moreover, Kubuntu 12.04 isn’t just another LTS, it’s also the last Kubuntu version with the lead developer Jonathan… Continue Reading