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When I ordered my Thinkpad laptop I specified the best video card that was available thinking that it would be the best choice with SLED or OpenSuSE. That turned out to be a bad idea until now.

The Slab, aka GNOME Main Menu, (http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME/Slab) and its associated Application Browser and Control Centre have some good points and some bad points. This article describes tips for customisation, the aspects I dislike and what I have done about them. It is largely written with a view to a scenario where the users of a SLED 11 machine do not have root.

For a while now I have taken for granted the marvelous functionality commonly referred-to as "workspaces" in the X window system. Anybody using a graphical interface with X already probably has this functionality present by default and in many distributions the feature of multiple workspaces is even enabled by default The idea behind this article is to show how efficiency in the GUI can be improved using this feature and the ease of adopting the technology to suit your needs out of the box, because Linux Just Does That.

Last week I was asked if there was a way to start an application at the command line and later come back to it from somewhere else. Normally in Linux/Unix (*nix) it is possible to 'background' a process and then return to it later on but that's only if you are still in the same session where the process was sent to the background. This is useful to have something run while you do other things but reconnecting to this session cannot be done with just the shell. Thankfully 'screen' is on Linux systems by default (all of them I've used anyway) and as a result, Linux Just Does That.

By default, SLED 11 will enable Desktop Effects in GNOME if it considers the hardware to be capable of supporting them. This article describes how to prevent GNOME from enabling Desktop Effects by default, whilst still allowing users to enable them if they wish to do so.

What do you do when you inadvertently change permissions on a bunch of files/directories in your filesystem without meaning to? How do you recover? What software do I need to buy to repair all the applications in my system?? It's time for the first article in the "Linux Just Does That" series.