Gnome 2.28 was released this week, and one of the more interesting changes was the switch taking place in Epiphany, Gnome's default web browser. There's been a change under the hood, with Mozilla Gecko being replaced by Webkit.

Webkit has made some serious gains this year in terms of browser market share. Already providing the powerplant for Safari, Google Chrome, and Maxthon 3 (as well as numerous others), the open source project continues to win converts -- due in no small part to its speediness.

No, gaining Epiphany doesn't mean Webkit-based browsers are going to overtake Firefox for second place overall in browser share any time soon. But when you consider the large number of Gnome-based Linux distributions out there, this is still an interesting development for the Webkit project.

[via Linux Magazine]

Linux-powered netbook users that have been missing their doctors' appointments and kids' school plays because operating a calendar application on their tiny portable is, at best, clunky and painful, can finally breathe an accurately-scheduled sigh of relief. Srinivasa Ragavan, who is one of the user interface developers for the open-source Evolution personal information manager project, has taken it upon himself to develop netbook-happy frontends for the calendar and mail portions of Evolution.

The calendar interface, as shown off on his blog, makes use of the entire screen for the calendar view. It features a handy upper toolbar for navigation, and a powerful drop-down menu for selecting more viewing options. The mail frontend, named "Anjal," features such optimizations as a similar upper toolbar, a tabbed interface (something soon to be seen in Thunderbird 3), and Gmail-esque threading.

Srinivasa hasn't yet released any working source for the calendar interface, but the Anjal mail project is available for anyone willing to install Moblin on their netbook, or (for even more fun) build it from source.

[via All About Netbooks]

An XHTML editor is a lot like a teacup dog breed or a designer pig. Okay, so they don't tremble incessantly or have the tendency to pee in the corner of your living room. They are really just highly specialized, souped-up versions of something else. Chihuahuas are pack animals, just like wolves. Potbellied pigs know instinctively how to root around for tasty things, as do wild boars. And XHTML editors edit text.

They have many tools to make editing XHTML (and other bits of code geared specifically for web use) faster and easier, but there's nothing says you need to use an XHTML editor for web coding. Text editors can do the job as well. If Kate, gedit, or Cream do the job for you, either on their own or with a few plugins, that's got you ahead of the game.

But there are some XHTML editors that manage to bundle the basic functions and a whole slew of handy extras into a nicely finished package. There are quite a few of them, and we'll be touching on more of them next week.

This week we'll take a peek at Bluefish and Quanta Plus. Why? Because they are the two most often included in Linux as the sort of "came with the distro" web development applications. Even if they aren't installed by default, many people try them first.

We've always been fond of Amarok. It has some good features, nice add-ons, and felt just a little friendlier than some other Linux media players. We recently discovered a contender to the title of most loved Linux media player, the ominously named Banshee. Fortunately, Banshee doesn't involve listening to shrieking demons, unless that's your genre of choice.

It's an application that has been increasingly packaged with distributions that include GNOME as the default desktop. For those distributions that don't include it on a standard install, it's almost always available from a repository. Many of those repositories include, at present, Banshee's 0.13.3 version. This is the stable version of Banshee and shows loads of promise, but it isn't quite Amarok.

We recommend, if possible, hunting down packages for your distro of choice of the latest version of Banshee (0.99.2). If there are no packages available, try installing the newer version via Subversion. It takes a bit more time, but it is well worth the effort.

Why? Because Banshee 0.99.2 (or alternately, Banshee 1.0 Beta 2) is an almost completely different screamin' demon. It may be a beta version, and not without its bugs, but it works much more smoothly than the 0.13.3 install we were using previously on Hardy Heron.

Way back in the dark ages of 1993, we were introduced to this thing called email. Email in the olden days was not like email now. All the packets traveled uphill no matter where they were going, and usually there was a good three or four feet of snow on the internet backbone. We used these big hulking things called VAX/VMS nodes that were attached to some pretty sweet fourteen inch monochrome VT 100 terminals. There were also these machines that ran something called UNIX, which sounded to us like something that should have been found in the college health center, not the computer lab.

Eons passed, and things changed. Though there were many more email packets flying around, plate tectonics had changed the course of things so that now they traveled downhill, really really fast. The internet backbone became a series of tubes. All the VT 100 terminals banded together and created an archipelago in the South Pacific. And UNIX...

UNIX evolved. Mutated. It trickled down into various UNIX brands and distributions. There were things like BSD UNIX, HP-UX, and AT&T Bell Labs UNIX. There were other branches, too, rogue sprouts on the evolutionary tree: FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Slightly alien but vaguely reminiscent life forms injected their DNA into the gene pool: Linux, and this weird little UNIX-esque animal called Solaris.

Sun recently let Solaris go open source. OpenSolaris is more a traditional UNIX environment than a Linux type environment, but the appeal of taking a peek at the 2008.05 OpenSolaris release was too great for us to resist. The folks at OpenSolaris knew this, and baked some goodies into the OS that no Linux user could refuse.

We were given a no-strings attached liveCD, so our Linux install would never know we cheated. We had a bash shell, and the GNOME desktop environment, so our eye candy and commands would feel familiar and easy.

Sometimes, though, evolution goes horribly, horribly wrong.

Back in prehistory (or January, thereabouts) we talked a bit about webOSes, and the migration of Ewedrive to Desktop on Demand. This week we got a chance to play around with Desktop on Demand in more depth.

Desktop on Demand (DOD) is a true networked OS. It's a Linux based system, with a clean, clear GNOME interface. There is online storage, and a good mix of open source apps. Our little issue about using a browser to access a webOS to surf the web in its browser has been addressed in an innovative way: launcher clients.

Yes, DOD offers clients to launch the service. Truthfully, we heard this and got a little annoyed. But trust us when we say that this is actually a freakin' huge advantage over the old time webOS set ups. The clients are available for Windows, OS X, and Linux. They are small, and can be installed on a flash drive. If you want to keep one on a hard drive on a given computer, it runs from the downloaded location. Very easy, very unoffensive -- very personal, and very secure.

When the desktop opens, it doesn't open in a browser. Maybe this shouldn't sit better with us, but for some strange reason, it just does. It feels much more natural. There is less clutter and we could forget that we were using a completely different operating system underneath it all.

Theming one's OS to look like a Mac is all the rage these days, but for the most part such modifications are superficial. However, Global Menu actually changes the user experience quite a bit. For those who haven't seen a Mac before, [do such people exist?] on Mac OS, the menu for applications is located in a bar at the top of the screen, rather than the top of the window, like in Windows and Gnome.

With Global Menu, and a simple GTK hack, one can get the same interface on GNOME. It lets you use their computer differently, and yes, it makes your OSX themes more authentic. We've been using it for about three weeks now, and it is pretty nice. It all comes down to the individual's preferences, and that's what Linux is about, after all.

This week's Squadcast features an interview with one of our own. Kristin Shoemaker joins Grant and Christina to talk about what it takes to switch to Linux and leave Windows behind, for good.

Also, we take a look at our five favorite Linux applications for people who've recently switched. Direct replacements for a few of those must-have apps on Windows.

More from Download Squad on switching to Linux.
Kristin's series on switching to Linux.
From the archives, Download Squad's "Switcher podcast" with Brad Linder, Alex Hung and Grant Robertson.

Download The Squadcast 07 in SD(480i) Mpeg4(84MB)

Check out previous episodes of The Squadcast

There's one thing for certain: Now is an exciting time to be a KDE user. The much anticipated launch of KDE 4 is slated for January 11th, 2008. This is a major revamp of the look and feel of the KDE desktop, with the inclusion of a built-in compositor (think eye candy) and something called "plasmoids" (little functional widgets embedded into your desktop).

It's a lot of new bling aimed at improving the desktop experience. Will it? More importantly, will it for you? What would make you choose KDE over GNOME (or vice versa)? This week we take a brief look at KDE in both its 3.5.x and 4 incarnations, and outline a few rules of thumb on choosing your desktop environment.

Let's take a quick look at KDE's history and underpinnings. KDE was launched in 1996 and is based on the Qt (pronounced "cute") toolkit. (A toolkit is a set of libraries of the things that make up a graphical user interface -- things like windows, buttons and their functions.) But all was not right with the world. Qt, at that time, didn't use a completely free software license. This caused some concern about the legality of linking to Qt libraries, and the Debian distribution even went so far as to remove KDE from their repositories for a time.

Currently, Qt uses a dual license. The toolkit is available under the GPL (GNU General Public License) and the QPL (Q Public License), and linking to the Qt libraries is no longer an issue.

The time between Christmas and New Year's is what folks in the biz typically like to call a slow news period. But in the fast-paced world of technology (cue the Quantum Leap-them song styled synth pop), the news never stops. Here are some of the stories you might have missed if you were spending too much quality time with the family this week.

Flipping the Linux Switch: The GNOME Desktop Environment
So there's this operating system called Linux. You may have heard of it. It's kind of like Windows or OS X, but it's highly customizable, stable, and runs on all kinds of machines. Linux has come a long way since the days when you had to understand and love the command line in order to use it at all. But unlike Windows or OS X, Linux presents users with a choice of graphical user interfaces. Our resident Linux guru Kristin Shoemaker will help you decide which desktop environment is right for you. In part one, she looks at GNOME. Stay tuned for part two, an in-depth look at KDE coming soon.

The world ends on January 19, 2038: Thank Unix!
Remember how the world ended in Y2K? You know, power went out around the world, airplanes fell from the sky and all the nuclear warheads stored in government bunkers just up and exploded. Oh right, yeah, that never happened. But if you're looking for another potential disaster to worry about, look no further than 2038. That's when Linux machines will start to party like it's 1901. Of course, there's about 30 years to fix this problem, so you might not need to invest in a bomb shelter just yet.

There is a controversy in the Linux world. It doesn't have to do with Microsoft, or anything overtly technical. It may seem, to the outsider, the open source equivalent of the question, "Boxers or briefs?" But it's much more serious than that.

GNOME or KDE? There's a lot of emotion on both sides of the argument. Because we here at Download Squad value our lives, we're not going to tell you which is the best (yeah, as if we agree anyway). What matters is what works best for you. That's why we're spending this week and next discussing the virtues and pitfalls of GNOME and KDE.

The GNOME project began in 1997. GNOME is built from entirely open software under the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), unlike KDE, which uses the dual-licensed Qt toolkit. This means that both proprietary software and open software can link to the libraries that make up GNOME -- free of charge. Encouraging developers in this way brings more choices and stronger applications to Linux.

Picture this: It's late at night. You've restarted your computer. The optical drive is whirring contentedly, but you have butterflies in your stomach. Tonight is the night you install Linux for the first time.

You choose your language, and then your keyboard layout. This is pretty easy, so far. A partitioner works its magic on your hard disk, either resizing your Windows partition or wiping it completely.

Suddenly you are blindsided by the question: Which default desktop environment would you like to install?

Do you know? Do you care? What in the blazes is a desktop environment, anyway? How is that different from a window manager? When is it more appropriate to use one over the other?

Gnome-Do is a lightweight and speedy little file and program launcher for the Gnome Desktop environment. Basically, Gnome-Do does for Linux what Launchy does for Windows, and a tiny bit of what Quicksilver does for Mac.

The application works great on Linux, letting you launch any installed application in a matter of nanoseconds. In order to use Gnome-Do, you'll need to make sure it's running, either by starting it from your Applications menu or by adding it to your session's startup programs. Once it's running, you can pull up your Gnome-Do menu by simultaneously pressing your Windows key and the spacebar. Then just type the name of the program you want to launch.

You can also quickly open files or folders or even your web browser's bookmarks. There are also plugins for Rhythmbox, Evolution, and Thunderbird.

[via Lifehacker]

So now that Gutsy Gibbon is out, you've decided to try out Ubuntu. But you can't decide which version of the popular Linux distribution is right for you.

Ubuntu's main system has a toolbar at the top, a brown color scheme, and comes with Firefox preloaded. But Kubuntu has a nice calming blue feel, a Windows-like taskbar and start menu, and comes with a powerful new file explorer called Dolphin. And then there's Xubuntu, which has simple, streamlined look and uses the XFCE interface that's designed for quick performance on older, slower machines.

Well, it turns out you don't have to choose. Sure, you could pick one, download it and burn it to a disc and then install it. But you can also install all three desktops. After all, they're all pretty much running on top of the same operating system.

1. If you've installed the default Gnome version of Ubuntu, just open a terminal by hitting Alt-F2 on your keyboard and typing "gnome-terminal"
2. To enable Kubuntu, type "sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop," enter your password when prompted, and answer yes to any questions that pop up.
3. To enable Xubuntu, type "sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop"
4. If you're already using Kubuntu or Xubuntu and want to enable Gnome, type "sudo apt-get install gnome-desktop"

The next time you logoff or restart your computer, you can change session types at the logon screen.

There's been a lot of talk this week about Ubuntu 7.10, which was released today. It has improved hardware and driver support, 3D Desktop graphics, and integrated desktop search. But Ubuntu's main branch isn't the only OS getting an update this week. Kubuntu, Edubuntu, and Xubuntu and other Ubuntu-related projects are also getting a facelift.

Kubuntu, if you're not familiar, is basically Ubuntu with the KDE interface instead of Gnome. You can easily turn Ubuntu into Kubuntu by installing the KDE packages from Ubuntu's repository. Or you can download it directly from Kubuntu.org.

Here's what's new in Kubuntu 7.10:

• KDE 3.5.8 is the new default desktop manager, but you can also install KDE 4 Beta 3. This is an unstable release, but it's a dramatic redesign of the KDE Linux desktop environment.
• Dolphin is the new default file manager. It doesn't replace Konqueror, which acts as a file manager and web browser. But Dolphin supports split views, undo and redo, renaming of multiple files, and other features familiar to Windows users.
• The enterprise version of personal information manager Kontact is available.
• There's a new KDE front end for the APT package manager. GDebi KDE lets you install Debian based packages with a single click.

Overall, Kubuntu looks and feels a bit more like Windows than Ubuntu. It's up to you to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. But we have to say, we like the default blue background better than Ubuntu's orange and brown scheme.