Linux Desktop Hacks

Preface

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tips for those who prefer to do most of their work at the text-mode console.

For example, you don’t need a graphical desktop to assign the multimedia

keys to control your CD player and multimedia experience.

Though this book plunges into depths far more deeply than what I’ve out-

lined here, it still uncovers only a fraction of what you can do with the Linux

desktop. Linux multimedia capabilities are improving steadily, and multime-

dia on Linux will virtually explode as problematic patent issues are

addressed (such as the decryption algorithms for playing DVDs). Desktop

environments such as KDE and GNOME, among many others, are chang-

ing and improving so quickly that by the time you read this book, some of

the problems I mention in the text that follows likely will have been solved,

the URLs to patches probably will have changed to reflect updates to those

patches, and so on (fortunately, it is easy to compensate for these changes,

as we point out in the affected chapters). If the evolution of the Linux desk-

top maintains its current pace, it won’t be long before you start hunting for

the second volume of Linux Desktop Hacks (101-200).

Why Linux Desktop Hacks?

The term hacking has a bad reputation in the press. They use it to refer to

someone who breaks into systems or wreaks havoc with computers as his

weapon. Among people who write code, though, the term hack refers to a

“quick-and-dirty” ...