Introduction

It doesn't exist a best tecnique or policy about how to backup your data in Linux. It depends how are your data and if you want backup them locally or in remote.
There are some mature tools for specific tasks and you have to decide with one suits better. There are some GUIs that simplify the job, but in case of issues, the terminal is the ONLY way to debug what is happening.

Entire partition

You can copy the entire partition in raw mode with dd:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/destination/file.raw

GUI: Partimage
Notes: the output file size will be about the partition size, even if it is almost empty.

Entire system

tar -cvpzf backup.tar.gz --exclude=/other-directory /my-directory

GUI: File Roller as root and save with .tar extension
Notes: You have to keep the permissions if you don't want problems. You will not copy the bootloader in this way.

Source code

The best way to backup your code and keep the modification is to use a Distribuited Concurrent version system:

Git (in italian)

GUI: Giggle or others (but a full-featured gui is still missing)

Introduction

People continue to ask "which Desktop Environment should I choose?" and the answer still is "It depends". It depends what you do with your DE and which apps you commonly use.
Kde4 is very fast and responsive (thanks Qt4), it has some new concepts behind and a new framework, but it still not complete and it is still a beta.
Gnome is a consolidated DE which adds some new features every 6 months. It also has interesting things to show but it needs a lot of time to make them mainstream. Somebody says it is in decadence.

Philosofical differencies

Kde offers to the user every settings a normal system could provide.
Gnome offers to the user only the settings a normal user could need.

There is not a correct approch, but a correct balance.

Every day usage differencies

Most of the useful features are avalaible for both desktop. You can surf smb://, ssh:// shares, send an email, organize your photos with both DEs.
Some applications are more intuitive or more featured for one DE, so you can to adapt to the app your DE provide or choose the other one equivalent.
Every DE provide an Office, Web Browser, Email client.. alternative but if you need a full-featured app, probably You'll continue to use some DE agnostic apps like Openoffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird,..

Every day differencies

I won't repeat everything that is already avalaible in the official specification. This 10.1 mega pixels Digital Camera is extremely interesting for it's unique features, specially in video mode. It is similar to s880 but a little bit thicker and with more features.

(Click on it for a 360° view)

Cool features

• Wide display, almost 16:9
• 4:3, 3:2, 16:9 formats
• ISO from 80 to 3200
• Multiple faces detection
• A single video recording up to 10 minutes
• "Past Movie" it records 5s before you press the shutter button
• Cable RCA to plug the camera to the most common TVs
• Audio attachments to the pictures
• Multiple shots with flash
• Very fast, menu, photo loading,..
• Basic video editing
• Calendar view

Some other Notes

• You can't switch from macro to normal during video recording
• The battery doesn't recharge when the camera is plugged via USB
• The zoom in videos is only digital

Some photo and video samples file

(with any special filter)
Photo 10m
Photo 3:2
Photo 16:9 HDTV

10 Fonts tested "on the road". Sometimes the preview isn't enought to have the right perception of the font, so here are some fonts that behaves very well for the everyday use.

I use 100 as resolution per inch.
Happy Ubuntu!

Bitstream Vera Sans Roman 9

Calibri 9

Dejavu Condensed 9

Delicious Regular 10

Freesans 8,6

Liberation Sans 8,6

Lucida Grande 8,6

MGOpen Moderna 8

QKlassic Bold 10

Trebuchet MS 9

Compiz Fusion is cool but not all PCs can run it well, on counterpart Metacity WM still doesn't implement any effect (horrible minimize effect apart).
So what to do for a transparent, drop shadows enabled, usable Desktop?

Xfwm4 is the answer, it integrates itself well in GNOME and it offers a nice gui to configure the effects. Cairo-clock and awn dock run with transparencies because this window manager has the composite already built-in.

(Drop shadows + transparencies + awn on a S3virge!! )

Installation

Just 2 dependencies.

sudo apt-get install xfwm4 xfce4-mcs-manager

Try Xfwm4

killall metacity && xfwm4

To enable effects run xfce-setting-show and go in the Compositor tab
If it satisfy you, is possible to make it default

Replace Metacity

gconftool --set --type string /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/current  "/usr/bin/xfwm4"
gconftool --set --type string /desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager/default  "/usr/bin/xfwm4"

You can also set the wm path with gconf-editor

Notes

Xfwm4 doesn't use Gnome global shortcuts, You need to redefine them.
If Metacity still remains the WM, you need to delete it from the session.

Openmoko platform doesn't run only on Neo 1973, Openmoko runs also on Pocket PC and other devices. This will be very useful when your device will be declared obsolete and won't receive official update anymore (ex. HTC Magician has a 416Mhz CPU but it's freezed to Windows Mobile 2003).

Openmoko and the driver support can't be considered a real alternative for now, but as you can see it is continously improving.


Disclamer: I'M NOT RESPONSABLE OF ANY DAMAGES EVERYTHING YOU DO IT'S AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Ingredients

Haret                (loader) (Use at least version 0.5.x and not 200x)
zImage           (a Linux kernel)
default.txt    (boot script)
Openmoko (or other distribution images) (Download them from here)

SD memory and card reader

Do Backup!

We don't want to lose datas, You will lose software installed, contacts,.. so use the utility x Backup ad do a full backup on SD
It isn't enought because now we are going to resize this partition.

Here some unresolved, unconsidered, unfixed features that Windows 98 has and GNOME Desktop doesn't.
Gnome would like to be the most user friendly desktop but these are long-time user requested feature.. and some of them still dosn't have an answer on Bugzilla.

I don't say that the feature to "resize an icon" is useless but probably GNOME needs a better priority managing on usability issues.
Every week I see on Digg a "10 issues that GNOME.." news and many GNOME user are interesting about KDE4, that is coming,.. So corporations are important but also the userbase..

File Browsing

• to get a useful autocompletion in Nautilus location bar
• to have a compact list view
• select multiple files in a list view only with the mouse
• create a new file in a list view only with mouse

System

• to share a folder via it's own property dialog
• to have black font on the icon description on the desktop
• undo a move/rename action (#167501)

Shortcuts

• to use ALT+F4 to close applications and desktop session
• to have a confirmation when you press CANC (#316807)

Menu

• drag and drop a shortcut into the application menu

UPDATE: A !! new version !! of this guide is avalaible.
UPDATE: This guide was for gedit 2.18.x, please upgrade to gedit 2.20.x to have an easier color scheme managing. Textmate is really a great text-editor (almost an IDE but faster), it has even the support for latest Ruby/Rails technologies like RSpec. On the GNU/Linux side there are also similar full-featured text editor and one is Gedit.

Gedit can be extended by plugins written in C or in Python, here is a tutorial how to set up a Textmate-like Gedit.

Syntax highlight for RHTML, RJS

By default Gedit supports a lot of languages php, C#, java,.. and Ruby, but Ruby embedded. To enable the sintax highlight in HTML files with embedded ruby code (.rhtml) you have to add 2 files (Thanks to Bitsbam).

From the terminal:

$ wget http://grigio.org/files/x-rhtml.xml; sudo mv x-rhtml.xml /usr/share/mime/packages

$ wget http://grigio.org/files/rhtml.lang;  sudo mv rhtml.lang /usr/share/gtksourceview-1.0/language-specs/

Select the plugin you need

The list of the plugins avalaible is growing fast; this is a list of plugins that work well each other.

Snippets: it permits to call structures of code easly and everytime you press TAB the cursor automatically jumps to the right position
Snap Open: it opens the files that contains the word you are typing