Dual boot interoperability is an important issue when you’re running a Linux OS alongside Windows. It’s also quite a tricky one - we all know Microsoft aren’t exactly very helpful at making it easy for dual boot users to experience the best of both worlds.

One of the problems dual booters face is trying to share files between the Windows and Linux portions of their hard drive, as Linux’s support for NTFS, Windows’ default filesystem, has always been limited to read only, if any support at all.

I reported a while back on our sister site Gizbuzz that the Linux NTFS project aimed to put a stop to that, and build a fully-working read and write driver for NTFS, so that Linux can write natively to Windows partitions.

The NTFS-3G driver is one attempt at doing this, and I thought it was about time I tried it out and shared my experiences with it. As the driver is still pre-release, I wasn’t brave enough this time round to try it out on my main system, but in this article, I’ve been using Ubuntu Edgy to write to a Windows Vista RC1 NTFS partition.

Read the rest of NTFS 3G - first experiences

The KDE team recently announced the release of KDE 3.5.6.

It’s only a minor release, as indicated by the version number, and it mainly includes bug fixes and a few small new features to some of KDE’s flagship applications.

Interestingly, though, it also includes better support for Compiz (think wobbly windows!) with KDE, which has been an issue for some time for KDE users wanting those effects (although some of that has been solved with the community fork of Compiz, Beryl).

A full changelog is available here.

If you’re a KDE user wondering how best to upgrade, my advice is don’t. Wait for your distribution to update KDE and you should get it via the software update system fairly soon (at the time of writing, Red Hat haven’t yet packaged it for FC6, so I’m still waiting too).

Feeling in the dark when it comes to WMV files, QuickTime movies, Real media files or any other popular (but proprietary) media format?

If you’re running the latest version of Ubuntu, it’s actually pretty easy to get yourself playing all of these formats and more with Mplayer - one of the best media players for Linux, and the Win32 codecs.

First of all, hit Alt-F2 and type in:

gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list

At the bottom of that file paste in the following lines (only do this if you haven’t already enabled the Universe and Multiverse repositories, which you might have done if you’ve followed other tutorials):

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy universe
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu edgy multiverse

Save and close that file.

Head over to the terminal now (there’s a bit to do, but it’s copy and paste-able):

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mplayer mplayerplug-in
$ wget http://www1.mplayerhq.hu/MPlayer/releases/codecs/essential-20061022.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf essential-20061022.tar.bz2
$ sudo mkdir /usr/lib/win32
$ sudo mv essential-20061022/* /usr/lib/win32
$ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/win32 /usr/lib/codecs
$ rm -rf essential-20061022

When that’s done, restart your browser and enjoy all that content!