In the battle of the social media sites, the two that seem to be everywhere these days are Facebook and Twitter. The hardest part of immersing yourself in any type of social media, be it for fun or for business, is managing it well. With all of the web based options available, most are geared towards managing a single site or account; it’s great to see Seesmic stepping up and making a very user friendly solution to manage multiple accounts for Facebook and/or Twitter.

The Seesmic desktop app is a free cross platform Adobe Air based application. This very usable Adobe Air based desktop application was designed by the same folks that made Twhirl. If you have used the Twhirl app before, you should definitely give the Seesmic app a try. It is a happy medium between having too many features which can make it hard to use, and too little features which would make it not very helpful.

A few days ago, Tavis wrote a great article on How to use SSH X-forwarding to Run Remote Apps. X forwarding is indeed a very handy feature of SSH, so I thought it would be a good time to expand on some of the other great uses for this excellent piece of software (and some related tools). Today, we’ll cover SCP and SSHFS.

To follow this guide, you’ll need the following:

- Client computer with openssh-client installed (for Windows, use Putty)
- Server computer with openssh-server installed (Available on any UNIX-style system)
- A working set of login credentials on the server

Many KDE 3 users depended on Krun, a simple yet effective application used to execute commands. Executed simply by pressing “Alt-F2″, it was much easier to start applications using it, rather than navigating through a launch menu or opening a terminal window. The only catch with Krun was that you had to know the exact name of the command you intended to launch.  With the advent of KDE 4, that has all changed.

Krunner operates independently of the Plasma desktop system as a standalone application. It includes a ton of features that make it useful beyond simple command launching.  It has retained many of the features present in KDE 3 and greatly expanded them. We would fail to do it justice if we did not give it a top ten list.

Most of the time, installing software in Linux is a breeze. Package management utilities like Apt, Portage, and Yum have made software installation in Linux even easier than it is in Windows (in my opinion at least). If you know what you want, you simply tell your package manager that you want it, and it’ll find, download, install, and configure your new package for you.

Sometimes, however, the package doesn’t exist in your distribution’s repositories. Often, in cases like that, your only option is to download a tarball (usually .tar.gz, .tar.bz, or .tgz) which contains the source code for the program that you have to compile yourself. While it may be a little intimidating at first, compiling from source is normally a quick and easy process. Today, we’ll learn how.

There are times when it is just quicker, easier or even necessary to use a graphical application, and there are also times when you might be away from the computer that has your crucial applications installed. Whatever the scenario, Linux and other operating systems running an X server have the ability to forward a graphical application through SSH. Following a few simple steps, you can run a remote application in all of its full graphical glory.

One thing that I love about Linux (and Ubuntu) is that it is fully customizable and I can configure it to the way that I want it. Previously, I have already illustrated its flexibility by showing how you can transform Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid into Mac OS X. Today, let’s bring a step further and see how we can transform Kubuntu Jaunty to Windows 7 in 3 simple steps.

In this tutorial, we will make use of the Vistar7 - Windows 7 transformation pack to perform the transformation. This transformation pack has a nice collection of Windows 7 themes and comes with an installation script to make the whole transformation a breeze.

For those who are using Ubuntu Jaunty, you will notice that there is a change in the way the system notifies you to upgrade software. In the past, an icon will appear on the system tray whenever there is new update available. In Ubuntu Jaunty, instead of showing the icon, the update manager will now pop up the window as and when it detects new update. While this is a good way to grab the user attention and get them to upgrade to the latest software version promptly, it can be pretty annoying for many, especially when you are in the midst of your work. To make it worst, if you close it without updating, it will keep on popping up in regular interval until you have upgraded your system.

Luckily, you can turn off this pop up feature easily and switch back to the old icon-appear-at-system-tray mode.

Everytime after you have reformatted the hard disk and reinstalled the Linux distro of your choice, the one troublesome thing that you need to do is to re-download all your applications and restore all the settings. This is made worst when your wireless connection just don’t work with the newly installed distro. How are you going to download all your applications when you can’t even connect to the Internet?

APTonCD aims to solve this problem by backing up all your packages into a Cd/DVD. You can then install your applications right from the CD/DVD. If you want to save up on CD, you can even store the data as an iso file and restore your system right from the ISO file.

For many years, editing digital video in Linux was not an easy task.  Linux users have long sought a nonlinear video editing solution that was both powerful and easy to use.  Kdenlive is the first video editor for KDE to combine both of these critical aspects into one package.  Its easy drag and drop functionality combined with powerful features make Kdenlive the number one video editor for KDE and arguably the most complete, user-friendly video editor for Linux.

A lot of games out there have some form of command prompt, often just for entering cheat codes. You know the type - you hit some function key and a bar drops down from the top of the screen letting you enter commands or codes or whatever else. Well some clever folks have taken that design and applied it to the command prompt in your Linux desktop. You can get a fully featured, skinnable terminal with split-screen views and all at the touch of a button. Yakuake is just such a program. It’s been around for a few years but has remained below the radar for most Linux users.