Apr 242014
 

Guest post by Kerry Blake

If you are planning to buy a new printer and currently using Ubuntu or Linx Mint, the 2 most popular desktop operating systems, next to Windows and OSX, you should probably buy a printer that can hand shake with your Linux box, out of the box.

Computer peripherals like printers, web cameras, scanners, and mobile Internet devices can work on your distro right away like a Mac computer. Both the Ubuntu and Mint community have been constantly adding the necessary packages to their OSs so that all the numerous hardware out there that works with Windows can also work with Linux. You shall take a look at the https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsPrinters recommended list of printers for Debian-based distros if you want to buy one that works with your machine without having to open the terminal. If you find your printer in this list, you can easily make it work.

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Mar 162014
 

fitbit linux
I’ve recently received a fitbit flex as gift, and I love it, this personal device tracks steps, distance, and calories burned. At night, it tracks your sleep quality and wakes you silently in the morning. Just check out the lights to see how you stack up against your personal goal. Flex allows you to set a goal and uses LED lights to show how you’re stacking up. Each light represents 20% of your goal. You choose which one — steps, calories, or distance. It lights up like a scoreboard, challenging you to be more active day after day.

Flex automatically syncs your data to PCs and Macs with Fitbit’s wireless sync dongle (included), many iOS devices and select Android phones without plugging in or pushing buttons. Now all this sound fantastic and really funny if you like to take your stats and see nice graphs, but there is a small (big) problem about fitbit, it doesn’t support officially Linux.

Sure, you can use a compatible smartphone, but in general I like to use the idea of using my Linux computers for anything and with some research and some tests I’ve been able to sync successfully my flex with my Linux Mint 16.
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Feb 172012
 

Gnome 3 has failed to win users over. Unity was so unpopular it wiped out Ubuntu’s lead on Distrowatch and made Linux Mint number one. With the dominant desktop (Gnome) and the dominant distribution (Ubuntu) both failing to set users’ hearts racing we’re reminded once again why we love using Linux – there’s so much choice.

There might even be too much choice. From Fluxbox to XFCE and KDE to MATE there are a vast and confusing selection of desktop environments to work through. Whilst some have looked to move to a lightweight option like XFCE that captures much of the flavour of Linux past with some funky new features (the nice see-through dock at the bottom of the screen on Xubuntu looks really sharp for example) others are looking to the future. In Cinnamon we have a very exciting, beautiful future that you’ll soon be recommending to everyone who’ll listen. Continue reading »

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