The GUIs that most Linux users run every day are good - I'm talkin' about KDE & GNOME here, although you could also throw in Ice & the other window managers as well - but there's no reason they're the be-all & end-all of GUIs. In the spirit of innovation & trying out new things, an intrepid group of open source developers are working to create a new GUI that incorporates a barrelful of monkeys of new ideas: Mezzo & Orchestra, part of the upcoming Linux distro known as Symphony OS. The best way to understand what they're trying to do is look at the admitedly gorgeous screenshots, which are heavily annotated. If you feel like livin' on the edge, you can install the packages now; for Debian users, of course, it's particularly easy. (Check out all of our posts on GUIs.) ...

Robert volunteers for a St. Louis organization called ByteWorks, which takes old PCs & refurbs them, then teaches kids how to use 'em. At that point, the kids get to keep the PCs. Pretty cool program. Robert is helping them move from old versions of Windows to Linux, which is great. Unfortunately, these machines are so old that "modern" Linux desktops like GNOME and KDE are too much. Here's what I suggested: <begin my email to Robert> If this was for "normal" users we were trying to wean away from Windows, I would push KDE, but that's impossible with this ancient, underpowered hardware. Ice [a window manager] is way too different & weird. Actually, so is KFCE, since it's based on GNOME's ideas about desktops (which are quite bizarre). Have you looked at this? http://www.simplekde.org It's a stripped-down KDE. Or this? http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8239 Another stripped-down KDE. Interestingly, Auditor - one of the absolute best Live CDs for security - switched from ICEwm to a ...

There is only one RSS/ATOM aggregator worth a tinker's damn: Bloglines. http://www.bloglines.com Yes, it's a Web site. Yes, it's an application - a Web service. Don't let that stop you. Bloglines is to RSS feeds what Gmail is to email. And, like Gmail, it runs on Linux, which is icing on the cake. Believe me, I've looked at all of them. I've been subscribing to RSS feeds since 2001, and I've tried a variety of clients on Windows and Linux. The best of them, by far, isn't a client you run on your machine; it's Bloglines, a Web application. Powerful, feature-complete (and very respondent to user suggestions), persistent storage - and it's free. It just does things "right" - or at least more right than everyone else. Check it out. And if you're looking for some RSS feed suggestions, pls feel free to check out my blogroll: http://www.bloglines.com/public/rsgranne ...

Knoppix is awesome, but books about Knoppix act as icing upon the already delicious cake. The O'Reilly book Knoppix Hacks is great, & my upcoming book Hacking Knoppix is going to be wonderful, but there's another book that you really ought to check out about the coolest Live CD in the world: Knowing Knoppix, a 134-page FREE ebook. And when I say free, I mean both in terms of cost and the fact that the text is released under the GNU Free Documentation Licence. Available as both PDF and OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 SXW formats. So, get Knowing Knoppix now, buy Kyle Rankin's book soon after, & then buy my book when it comes out sometime in the near future. Do that, & you'll know everything there is to know about Knoppix. Everything! (Check out all of our posts on Knoppix.) ...

Holy freakin' mackeral, I've just discovered SSHFS (pathetic of me, I know), and this thing is awesomely cool! Most of you know that you can mount Samba-shared drives using smbfs. In other words, you enable Samba on a machine, share a directory, and then go to another machine & mount that shared directory via smbfs, which makes it appear as though that remote directory is actually directly connected to your machine. Pretty freaking cool, except that (a) you have to have Samba set up, which can be a PITA, and (b) you can't share drives over the Net. But don't despair - now there's a better way. Using SSHFS, if you can ssh into machine BAR from machine FOO, you can mount a directory that's located on BAR and then access it on FOO, as though it was directly connected to FOO. It's super easy to do it - much easier than with Samba - and better still, everything is encrypted! To add icing on the cake, you can set things up in fstab to make the whole process more automated, if you so desire. ...

The Weblogs, Inc. network features over 100 independent, unfiltered bloggers producing over 1,000 blog posts a week across over 75 industry-leading blogs. Each week we ask our bloggers to choose their top posts, which we bring to you in one easy-to-read weekly post. You'll find links to the hottest posts from the second week of July after the jump. Enjoy! ...

Peter Besenbruch on the Libranet list tried out the Xfce windowmanager, and then wrote up a good overview of his impressions. I'm a KDE guy myself, & it looks like Peter is too, but it never hurts to try another environment out, as it gives you a better sense of the good & bad things of your chosen GUI, and it's also just good to know about all things Linux. Here's what Peter had to say about Xfce: ...