It's that time again when the summer months hit most of the world and some of us find ourselves lucky enough to find some spare time on their hands. Every year around this time, the Ultimate Linux Newbie Guide makes a call to all of our readers to contribute to the site in some way or another. You may be thinking, "How can I help? I'm only a newbie!", but don't worry, there are literally tons of ways you can help out. If you can help out, even just a little bit, together we can help make this site continue being the best resource on the net for people that are new to Linux.

So, if you have a spare 15 minutes to 5 hours at any time, or perhaps just know someone who might be interested helping out, please get in touch with us and let us know what you would like to do.

Here are just a few suggestions on the sort of things you could help out with:

Our friends over at ArsTechnica this week wrote a short review on the recent release of Fedora 11, the Red Hat derived free Linux distribution. To summarise their review very quickly, they felt that the distribution, when you actually got into it, was pretty nice, but was badly let down by an immature, buggy installer and seemed to be rushed to release.

From ULNG's perspective, it feels like Fedora have been trying to play catchup recently with Ubuntu's rapid, reliable six month release schedule. Whilst we applaud the Fedora Project for trying to get releases out quickly, surely the emphasis should be on creating a stable platform, especially when dealing with something so crucial as the installer? I'd rather have a stable release than a six-monthly one any day.

Check the full article out at ArsTechnica.

Some people using netbooks and the likes, especially suspend to ram resumes, are already used to having a machine come back within a fairly short amount of time, but Ubuntu are challenging the normal Linux desktop boot time and want to push it even further with the first 2010 release of Ubuntu, out in April 2010, Ubuntu 10.04.

The upcoming Linux distribution from Ubuntu, codenamed for the time being 'Karmic Koala+1', aims to beat the currently pretty zippy startup speed of the current release 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) in less than 1 year. Currently 9.04 boots in approximately 25 seconds depending upon your hardware, but Ubuntu wants to aggressively push the envelope and get to a 10 second start up time from cold. Ubuntu were recently praised for significantly reducing startup times in 9.04, after a bit of a feeling of creeping bloat was felt by Ubuntu developers and users alike.

Ever get bored of looking at that same brown desktop background? Yep, so do we. There are literally thousands of themes out there for your Linux desktop to make it look different. Some people take it to the next step and even change their Window Manager or Desktop Environment, a choice that poor Mac and Windows users don't have. Still, if you're not quite sure you want to take the leap and change from GNOME to KDE or from XFCE to Fluxbox, there are certainly plenty of things you can change to make your favourite desktop look nice.

This link is aimed squarely at Ubuntu 9.04 users running the default desktop, Gnome. If you want themes for KDE, try looking at kde-look.org.

[UnixMen: 265 Themes for Jaunty Jackalope]

Using modern day software, be it on Linux, Windows or Mac often has a habit of leaving a lot of 'junk' files in it's wake. Take the Firefox web browser for example; we all love what Firefox gives us, but it certainly leaves a lot of temporary/cache files behind. Sometimes, it's nice to clear up all that mess, especially if the software is running slower than it usually is.Falko Timme has written an excellent newbie friendly tutorial over at HowToForge.com which demonstrates the use of a graphical 'junk' removal tool for Linux called BeachBit.

The tutorial is meant for users of Ubuntu 9.04 but will work on some other Debian compatible distributions.

Full Article at HowToForge.com

Bleachbit homepage.

Here is a new video tutorial specifically covering how to install software in Linux. It talks about the differences between installing software on Windows and Mac OS X to Linux making a point of showing that there is no more laborious trawling the web to find that essential download, or hunting your ever growing CDROM library to get that software installed. On a slightly more advanced topic, part two of the video discusses briefly what software repositories are, and touches on the subtle differences between Debian based Linux Distributions versus Red Hat Linux based distributions.

From everything from an 'Apple photo booth' type application or an ascii based webcam plaything to complete SOHO surveillance solutions, Linux has plenty of free options to offer up for making your Webcam zing. This article over at brighthub demonstrates the top 5 available today.

Read the article at brighthub.

FFMpeg is a great tool for converting video including flash, quicktime, ogg, windows media (wmv) as well as plenty more formats. For example, you could use it if you've got a DVD and you want it converted to work on your MP4 media player. Converting media formats in Linux, Windows or Mac has historically been something that's not easy. FFMpeg certainly brings the technology together to allow the conversion of formats (and at a zero cost too), only problem is, FFMpeg is a command line utility. Front-ends (graphical tools that use FFMpeg in the background)  do exist, but the ones I've seen so far are overly complicated and don't let you easily just convert a file with sensible defaults.

Albeit slightly late news, better late than never: The OpenOffice suite, version 3.1 has been released offering a good number of enhancements. Including improved screen appearance (smooth anti-alised graphics, especially good for OpenOffice Draw), Improved file locking, Overlining, Improvements to comments, better grammar checker integration, zoom slider in the status bar, formula hot hints, improved sorting, font size buttons and new locale support amongst many other things.

You can either wait until the 3.1 release comes to your distribution through an update or upgrade, or you can download it from the OpenOffice website.

For further information on the new features in the new version, check out the new features list.