As we all know, there are a vast amount of applications available for Ubuntu. People outside the Linux scene will probably have heard and used the most famous open source apps (such as Firefox), but there are a select few programs that are either insanely cool and innovative, or just extremely polished. They might not even be well known within the Linux community, but they make the overall experience that much better for everyone.

The latest series of the K Desktop Environment now utilizes Plasma, a new desktop and panel user interface tool that aims for a more functional, user-friendly, and sleek KDE desktop. Plasma also supports Dashboard-like widgets called plasmoids. If you want to further enhance the look of your KDE 4 desktop, I have here a list of some of the most beautiful Plasma themes available.

Looking for up-to-date Fedora DVD images? Want to change the default software selection? Or just fancy a new Linux project? Neil Bothwick shows you how to remaster Fedora with your own customisations. At the end of the tutorial you will have an ISO image that you can burn to a DVD using your favourite software.

In this article, I show you how to install Wine, Microsoft Office 2003, and Internet Explorer using my Red Hat derivative system (CentOS 5.1) as the host. You can give your system some Wine by compiling from source code, or by installing pre-compiled binaries from your distro’s repositories.