While there are tons of news, excitement and hypes over the release of Firefox 3 and how it is going to break the Guiness World record, few have realized that Opera has also released their latest version 9.5. This browser was built with a new browser engine and it contains plenty of useful apps, that hopefully, could steer itself back to the browser race.

Since Firefox 3 is come pre-installed in Ubuntu, I took the opportunity to test out Opera 9.5 and see if it has enough juice to replace Firefox as the default browser in your desktop.

The following are some of the noticeable differences that I observed:

Gnome-schedule is an application that provides an easy way for anyone to schedule (and automate) tasks on their computers. It provides a simple graphical user interface that uses cron and at command to manage the crontab file. Be it scheduling a recurrent task or task that happens only once, Gnome-schedule has no problem in handling it.

There are tons of interesting and nice photos on Flickr. While you can download them and set it as your desktop wallpaper manually, wouldn’t it be great if there is a software that can automate the downloading process and change your Ubuntu wallpaper every now and then?

Webilder does just that. It allows you to download images from Flickr and Webshots and set it as your wallpaper. You can customize it by setting the keywords (or tags) to watch for and/or check out the Webilder channel for tags and albums shared by others.

I have just started using Twitter and it have been really addictive. One thing I hate though: to load the twitter site on my browser and login before I can post a message. So here I am, searching for a desktop alternative to twitting.

Desktop twitting has been a rather easy task in Windows and Mac since there are plenty of Twitter client around. In Ubuntu Gutsy, I have found the below few methods to work:

For anyone who is keen to migrate to Linux platform, but can’t live without Windows application, then Wine can be a great solution for you.

What is WINE?

WINE stands for Wine Is Not Emulator. Here is what it is about:

“Think of Wine as a compatibility layer for running Windows programs. Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely free alternative implementation of the Windows API consisting of 100% non-Microsoft code, however Wine can optionally use native Windows DLLs if they are available. Wine provides both a development toolkit for porting Windows source code to Unix as well as a program loader, allowing many unmodified Windows programs to run on x86-based Unixes, including Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, and Solaris.”

Doing the same thing over and over again is a boring chore. Windows and Mac understand that, that why they have the automation program built into their OS. Windows XP & Vista have a task scheduler that allow you to create and automate simple task. Unknown to many, Mac OS X iCal alarm function can also be used to schedule and automate task.

In Ubuntu (or basically Linux), task automation used to involve writing shell scripts and setting cron job, and this is not an easy thing for a new user to do. Luckily, there is the Gnome-schedule that come with a simple graphical interface and makes task scheduling a breeze.

It’s a fact that Linux users don’t like Windows. The pictures say it all…

Windows: We suck more! and that’s guaranteed

For people who are new to Linux and Ubuntu, you might be overwhelmed by the huge library of applications available to you. Below is my 10 favorite applications. Hope it is useful to you.

Gaming in Linux is always a big issue. Many gamers are not willing to migrate to Linux (though they are not happy with Windows) because they are worried about the lack of support for gaming. This is really a big myth, since there are really plenty of great games in Linux.

In case you are wondering what choices of game you have in Linux (Ubuntu), here are my top 10 list.