
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” ...