After you've installed your distro, take the time to walk through the various user guides offered online. They will provide an installation guide, a complete tour of the desktop, along with how to manage software installation and upgrades to help get started. I had to go back to square one when I realized that there were too many subtle differences I wasn't understanding. A user guide helped me understand that ALT+Tab manages desktops, for instance, rather than merely switching among open apps.

Some things in GNU/Linux are surprisingly simple. No, really. Take DVD burning. This is all there is:

• Open a Nautilus window, such as Home or Computer. (Nautilus is the file manager.)
  
• Select Places > CD/DVD Creator.
  
• Drag and drop the files you wish to burn into this new empty window.
  
• Click Write to Disc.
  
• In the dialog box, you can change the name of the disc and the write speed if they are incorrect.
  
• Click Write.

And holy crap, it works. Same for my USB flash drive. Even though it was "Vista certified," it would only work in Vista if you applied a low-level format utility in XP! And then Vista wanted to reformat it every single time you inserted it. Under Fedora 7, it was recognized, and "mounted" on the desktop for me to open, copy, delete files to and from. Again, I'm surprised by that because of all things, I figured DVD burning and USB drives would be difficult. Similarly, playing audio files are not difficult either. Here's what the Fedora 7 user guide had to say:

                 Fedora includes complete support for many freely-distributable formats. These are the Ogg media format, Vorbis audio, Theora video, Speex
                 audio, and FLAC audio formats. These freely-distributable formats are not encumbered by patent or license restrictions. They provide powerful
                 and flexible alternatives to more popular, restricted formats such as MP3.

Ogg is a nice, high-quality format, but I'm not converting 40Gb of MP3 files, especially since the MP3 patent expires in 2011. Not a problem. That's fixed by merely downloading the LAME encoder. GNU/Linux supports every audio format except for WMA, which is only partially supported.

Another difficulty is that I have two HDs on this GNU/Linux system, and formatted both of them as ext3 drives during setup. However, the second HD is not "mounted." More reading. Spent an entire night looking for a solution, but the two I did find didn't work for me. Hmmm. Here's what I tried:

• Make a mount point, mkdir /media/seconddrive, then mount it, mount -t ext3 /dev/sdb1 /media/seconddrive. You should now see your drive available in Nautilus. If this doesn't work then post the output of fdisk -l
  
• Command wise, it is like above. sdxx refers to the device and partition, eg, sdb1 (sd = some device, b = second hd, 1 = first partition). '-t type' refers to the filesystem type, usually found automatically but on occasion it isnt, eg, ext3, ext2, ntfs, vfat (fat32), msdos (fat16).
  
• mount -t type /dev/sdxx /mount/point
  
• With the exception of loopback devices (iso's, encrypted file systems, etc), which are mounted like so.
  
• mount -t type /file /mount/point -o loop
  

I'm not embarrassed to say I didn't understand a single word of the above commands, and overheated my tiny dinosaur brain. More reading, I'll get there. I remember the similar DOS commands, but this is another animal. Meanwhile, I took time out to install Mac OS X in a VM and jeez, I still don't like OS X. It must be me; I still wonder why everyone goes ga-ga over it.

________________________________________________
Part-01: My journey from Windows to Linux
Part-02: Which Linux distro to choose?
Part-03: First impressions and first problems after installation
Part-04: The "User Guide" as life raft, more n00b problems

www.JayIsGames.com is one of the best sites to discover casual Macromedia flash games and they have been running some of the best small game programming competitions, with very high quality results.

Competition #3 is starting today and you have 4 weeks to submit something which fits in with the competition theme.

Here's the scoop: you, casual gamer / game designer / Flash whiz, design a game in Flash (version 8, AS 2.0) that incorporates our theme (see below). It doesn't have to be complex nor large in scope, in fact since you will have only 4 weeks to complete your design, simple ideas are probably the way to go.

Game design competition #3 theme: replayHere's the catch. Your game design must incorporate this theme: "replay".

You are, of course, free to interpret that any way you choose; however, the extent to which your game addresses the theme is left up to the competition judges to decide.

http://jayisgames.co...gn_competition_3.php

I've really been enjoying it lately.  Today is a gret one.

http://www.basicinstructions.net/

With last.fm being bought by CBS, I stumbled onto this:
http://mog.com/

The basic difference with last.fm is that you download an app, the mogg-o-matic, that scans your music collection. So mog does counts, recommendations, etc, but it has the advantage of _knowing_ what you already have.

This is actually very motivational
http://mog.com/story

Looks like a company started by 3 music lovers.

The only thing that troubles me is that the site looks ultra-professional, designed to appeal. I wonder if this is not some big name in the music industry hidden in the innocent appearance of a 'new cool music site that will free us all'...

App is indexing my collection. Will post more as I know more.

Here is a welcome new Windows feature for desktop users that would previously required an interruptible power supply to address.

...–Normal Sleep Mode–
With normal sleep mode a computer will go into standby, which is a state your computer can quickly resume from. It basically keeps power flowing through your memory, but just about everything else is shutdown...
...–Hybrid Sleep Mode–
But what about desktop computers? If you put your computer into standby, and then a little bit later your power goes out, everything will be lost. The desktop has no time to put the computer into hibernation like a laptop would, so you’re left with nothing.
Well, not with the new hybrid sleep mode. With this enabled your computer will store the contents of your memory immediately when entering sleep mode.

http://tech.cybernet...s-hybrid-sleep-mode/

HovText is a small freeware and open source Windows application that removes any formatting from the clipboard and it also works as a simple clipboard manager. Any text in the clipboard will be pasted as raw text without any HTML code, font size, color or layout etc. HovText remembers also the last 10 copied texts (both formatted and unformatted) and you can filter out whatever text you need with regular expressions.

Some key features:
· Removes all formatting from the clipboard (removes HTML code, color and layout etc.)
· Clipboard manager that remembers the last 10 entries
· Can be activated or deactivated via a hotkey or a single mouseclick
· Possibility to remove identical lines
· Possibility to remove leading/trailing whitespaces or linebreaks
· Possibility to copy links only and choose linktype (movies, pictures, emails etc.)
· Possibility to recreate old copied text (a simple clipboard manager)
· Possibility to specify a regular expression seachstring as a linktype
· Possibility to delete all settings from the registry (no unnecessary mess)

http://hovtext.com/i...age=features&lang=en