Linux Beacon (formerly known as No Thick Manuals) is a wiki that offers a growing collection of quality hands-on articles and tips to the best open source applications for Linux. Linux Beacon was born on February 6, 2005. Linux Beacon supports open source software (see a list of projects that have received donations).

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• Finding files and documents with Recoll Desktop search engines are all the rage these days. While Beagle may be the most popular desktop search engine for Linux, there are alternatives. If you are looking for a light-weight and easy-to-use yet powerful desktop search engine, you might want to try Recoll. Continue to read

• Getting the most out of OpenOffice.org Writer Writer is, without a doubt, the most frequently used application in the OpenOffice.org suite. It offers many advanced features that can help you to create anything from a simple letter to a book with a complex layout. But, as with any powerful application, you often have to dig deep in order to get the most out of Writer. The following tips will help you to quickly master Writer’s many useful features. Continue to read

• Create ODF documents without OpenOffice.org While you can create and save documents in the OpenDocument format using OpenOffice.org, KWord, or AbiWord, there are other ways to generate ODF files. odtwriter, for example, can help you to quickly convert plain text files formatted using reStructured Text markup into odt (OpenOffice.org Writer-compatible ODF) documents. Continue to read

• Instant Pictoguide to Knoppix 6.0 The latest version of Knoppix represents a radical remake of the venerable Live CD Linux distribution. Knoppix 6.0 is leaner, faster, and more versatile than ever. In addition to that, the new version brings another significant improvement: the amazingly fast boot process. Even when Knoppix runs from a CD, it takes less than a minute to boot to the graphical desktop. More importantly, the improved boot process doesn’t affect Knoppix’ legendary hardware detection capabilities. Continue to read

• Make ebooks pretty with GutenMark Project Gutenberg is a real treasure trove for bookworms and casual readers alike, but turning etext files into a readable form is not as easy as it may seem. In theory, since etexts are just plain text files, you should be able to open and read them on any platform without any tweaking. In practice, however, this approach rarely works. Hard line breaks, for example, ruin the text flow, making it virtually impossible to read the book on a mobile device. Fixing all these and other issues manually to make an etext readable – or even printable – is a very daunting proposition, especially when dealing with longer texts. Thankfully, the GutenMark tool can take most of the burden off your shoulders. Continue to read

• Buddi: Personal finances without a headache Although the idea of using an application to manage your personal finances does make a lot of sense, not all of us have the time and patience to learn all the intricacies of tools like GnuCash or Money Manager Ex. In this case, you need Buddi, probably the most easy to use personal finance manager out there. Continue to read

• No-nonsense guide to configuring Conky When it comes to monitoring your Linux system, few tools can rival Conky. This lightweight system monitoring utility can help you to keep an eye on virtually any aspect of your system, and it offers a huge list of options to choose from. But this flexibility comes at a price: all Conky’s settings are stored in the .conkyrc file, which you have to create and tweak manually. The good news is that once you’ve understood the inner workings of the .conkyrc file, you can easily create rather powerful Conky configuration profiles. Continue to read

• Get the most out of your mouse with btnx When you splashed out for a new swanky mouse like Logitech VX Nano, you sure want to make the most out of your investment, which means making its programmable buttons work. The problem is, however, that many Linux distributions recognize most mice as a generic pointing device, so none of the fancy extra buttons work right out of the box. Fortunately, the btnx utility can help you to turn your mouse into a versatile tool it meant to be. Continue to read

• Indywiki: Visual browser for Wikipedia No matter what you think about the quality and nature of Wikipedia articles, there is no denying that the encyclopedia provides an immense knowledge repository full of exciting facts and information. And while you can quickly find an article about a particular topic using Wikipedia’s search capabilities, there are other ways to explore Wikipedia that break away from the traditional search box approach. Indywiki is a good example of a tool that tries to rethink the way we search and browse information in Wikipedia. Continue to read

• Sync everything with Conduit Keeping your documents and files in sync between multiple computers is a tough challenge as it is, but there are other factors that make this task even more difficult. Nowadays, documents and files are not only stored on a desktop machine or laptop, they are quite often dispersed over different web-based services and applications like Flickr, del.icio.us, and Gmail. Conduit is a unique synchronization utility, which can help you to keep stuff on your laptop in sync with myriads of web services as well as other machines. Continue to read

• Better writing with OpenOffice.org and Writer’s Tools Contrary to the conventional wisdom that a word processor can’t help you to become a better writer, you can use OpenOffice.org Writer with the Writer's Tools extension to improve your writing skills and make the writing process more efficient. Continue to read

• Creating OpenOffice.org extensions the easy way with BasicAddonBuilder So you’ve written a nifty OpenOffice.org macro and want to share it with the world. You can, of course, publish the code on your website, but a better way to go is to pack it as an easy-to-install OpenOffice.org extension. Using BasicAddonBuilder, you can create an extension in a point-and-click fashion. Continue to read

• Quick and easy FTP backup with lftp No matter what Linux distribution you are using, chances are that you’ll find more than one graphical FTP client in its repositories. But if you are looking for a powerful command-line FTP tool, your best bet is lftp. Continue to read

• Turning OpenOffice.org into a document conversion tool One of the less well-known features of OpenOffice.org is its ability to run as a service. You can put that ability to some clever use. For example, you can turn OpenOffice.og into a conversion engine and use it to convert documents from one format to another via a web-based interface or a command-line tool. JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org’s file conversion capabilities. Continue to read

• WNotes: Creating a Writer/MySQL web application While OpenOffice.org is first and foremost a desktop office suite, it has a few powerful features that allow you to create some nifty solutions. For example, the Base application supports different database engines such as MySQL, and it can connect and manage remote databases. Moreover, the data from a remote database is available for other OpenOffice.org applications, so you can, for example, access and manipulate database records directly from within Writer. These capabilities can be put to some rather creative uses. Continue to read

• Must-have open source applications for writers Although OpenOffice.org Writer and AbiWord top the list of open source software for those who write for work or fun, they are not the be-all-and-end-all of writing tools. In fact, there are quite a few other nifty applications that can help you to collect ideas, manage notes, edit documents, and even improve your writing. Continue to read

• OpenOffice.org Base primer Of all four OpenOffice.org applications, Base is probably the most complicated one. It is a powerful tool that allows you to build complex databases, but this power comes at a price: if you’ve never worked with database applications, you might find Base a bit overwhelming. This article provides an introduction to the most important aspects of Base that will help you to create databases with consummate ease. Continue to read

• Top 7 flat-file web publishing systems While the vast majority of existing open source web publishing systems rely on database back-ends, there are quite a few high-quality applications that use plain text files instead of databases to store and manage data. These applications are often called flat-file systems, and they offer a few advantages that make them viable alternatives to the database-driven applications. Continue to read

• Learning foreign languages with jVLT and StarDict There are plenty of textbooks and teaching materials that can help you to learn foreign languages one way or another. Yet, there is no way to learn a foreign language without memorizing vocabulary and looking up words in a dictionary. This is hard and often not very exciting work, but there are a few tools that can make the process of acquiring new words and expressions a bit more tolerable and effective. Continue to read

• Create high-quality maps with OOoHG Creating maps is by no means an easy task. While there are a few open-source Geographical Information System (GIS) applications available for Linux, they are all geared towards professional users, and as such they have quite a steep learning curve. Even if you manage to master a GIS application, you still have to produce maps, or find pre-made map templates, which quite often are rather expensive. Fortunately, there is an easy-to-use software package called OOoHG that includes everything you need to create virtually any type of map. Continue to read

• Writer's Tools extension for OpenOffice.org
• Create a Mac-on-Stick popular
• Cheat sheets for open source applications

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• WordGrinder: Word Processing Terminal Style (2010/01/13 22:03)
• Tweet from the Command Line with Twidge (2010/01/11 23:47)