Wow. What a few days it has been. I have to say that I certainly did not expect the reaction that my previous post generated! Call me naive (and that’s not the worst thing I’ve been called over the past few days), but I genuinely didn’t anticipate the amount of views, comments, and discussions on other forums that my opinion would cause.

This blog normally trundles along, receiving between 500 to 1,000 views per day, but the “Linux is alive” article spiked at twenty times that on the first day! I don’t want to thrash this subject to death, and I’m neither apologising nor backtracking on my views, but I want to address just a few of the points that were raised. Read more…

For no other reason than “it looks nice” (and showing snooty Windows users that we can do anything they can do – and in hundreds of different ways ), I decided to set up my desktop wallpaper to change at different times throughout the day.

There are programs in the repositories which will do this (notably CREBS and wallch), but I like to keep things reasonably light by not having too many other processes running in the background.

The standard desktop background applet comes with this functionality built in, and creating your own slideshow from scratch is a fun and geeky project. Read more…

If you’ve recently upgraded to Ubuntu 11.10, then you may be pining for the days when you could just right-click on the desktop and create a new launcher (or “shortcut” – if you’re still using Windows-speak). I’m not sure why this function was deemed surplus to requirements, since it was one of the first things I went looking for. There is an answer but, as with all things with Linux, the trick is to ask the right questions. Read more…