dnsmasq is a lightweight, open-source DNS forwarder and DHCP server. In this article we go through how to prepare the system in order to run dnsmasq and also how to configure the latter as a caching-only DNS server. A configuration file is also provided as a drop-in replacement for the default dnsmasq.conf that ships with [...]

Mozilla has announced the general availability of version 3 of its popular open source email & newsgroup client, Thunderbird. Thunderbird has been my desktop email client of choice since its early stable releases, both in Linux and Windows. Actually, the only programs I’ve ever used for email and newsgroup management are Outlook Express, Mozilla Thunderbird [...]

I use Microsoft Windows 7 RC on my main desktop computer since June 2009. Since there was no Windows ports of my favorite editors in Linux (gedit on Fedora/CentOS), I decided to use Notepad++, an open-source source code editor and Notepad replacement, which is released as free-software. Soon I realized that this application was too [...]

Since a long time ago I wanted to install Windows 7 and OpenSolaris on a physical partition and use them a bit, so to form an opinion about them. Although it is a bit early for a review, I decided to post a few thoughts about them.

When it comes to software for your CentOS installation, there is no such thing as a good yum configuration, but a configuration that can bring you the software you need, while, at the same time, causing the least possible trouble regarding core package upgrades. This small article goes into the details of configuring YUM using [...]

CentOS 5.3 for the i386 and x86_64 architectures has been released today. I usually do not reproduce such announcements, but this CentOS release is somehow special to me.

During the last week two applications I use quite often, Skype and the official Last.fm client, had stopped working. The error message that was displayed the first time any of these programs was launched during the login session indicated that there was a problem with the imsettings-applet. This has been a bit frustrating as I [...]

Recently, I needed to burn several GBs of data, located on a SAMBA-based fileserver, to DVDs. The Nautilus’ CD/DVD burning extension simply could not burn the data over the network. I decided to try brasero, since it is said to be the most actively developed CD/DVD burning frontend for the GNOME desktop. Despite the fact [...]

During the last week, I’ve installed several operating systems in Virtualbox or VMware in an attempt to discover the one that manages to balance between innovation and usability. What is funny is that there is one desktop environment I want to use, GNOME, but I cannot decide on the backend, aka the operating system! Of [...]

Having used Fedora 10 for several days, I can say that this release is by far better than Fedora 9 in terms of desktop-related software quality. Of course, it is not bug-free and I still cannot consider it a desktop on which one can work efficiently. Having to deal with numerous known-bugs every six months [...]