Fotowall is a small application that allows you to make collages from your photos and export the result to use as a wallpaper on your desktop.

It sounds a simple enough concept and once you have learned how to use the program it can produce pretty nice results in a much quicker way than opening a graphics editor and laying out photos manually.

The application certainly has potential utility in a situation where you quickly want to put together a collage of a set of photos - perhaps as something you can distribute to remember an important event.

The main challenge is its rather quirky user interface, which really takes some playing around with to work out how to use it.

I have put together a brief video explaining how to use the program, which you can watch by clicking the thumbnail below.

Watch Video

Fotowall can be downloaded from its Google Code page, where pre-built versions are available for Linux and Windows, along with the source code for building yourself.

Traditionally, Gentoo Linux has been a distribution designed more towards the more experienced Linux user, perhaps the ‘power user’, if you will.

Its source-based package management and offering the user complete control over the system installation and configuration have meant that traditionally, it can be difficult to approach.

Having myself tried and failed to install Gentoo in the past, I thought I would take the recently released 2008.0 Live CD for a spin, and see what the installation process is like, and how easy it is to use and understand. So here goes.

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It’s no coincidence that Ubuntu is now the most popular distribution of Linux for desktop PCs. It is one of the easiest distributions to set up and use for day-to-day tasks.

Despite this, getting onto the ‘Linux ladder’, making your first steps into the world of Linux, can be daunting, especially without support. There are lots of books specifically targeted towards beginners and Ubuntu, and Apress’s Beginning Ubuntu Linux, by Keir Thomas and Jaime Sicam is one.

I was given a copy of the third edition of the book, which is updated to specifically cover the latest release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron (8.04). Its 700 odd pages are designed to take you all the way from a beginner moving from a Windows environment to a pretty proficient Linux user.

I should reiterate that point - this is very much a book for switchers (or people who want to use both). Throughout the text, comparisons are made between Ubuntu features and their Windows counterparts to aid the transition. It is also possible to follow coming from a Mac environment, but there is much more focus on Windows.

The book also includes a double-sized DVD with the full Ubuntu 8.04 distribution on one side, plus many alternative versions (including Kubuntu, etc.) in .iso image format on the other.

Structurally, the book is divided into eight parts, starting with an introduction to the world of Linux, progressing through installing Ubuntu and getting started with it, and then moving on to in-depth coverage of the command line, multimedia, many of the included applications and finally maintenance and optimisation of your system and appendices.

Read the rest of Book Review - Beginning Ubuntu Linux, Third Edition