Saturday, June 13, 2009

Browser Update : Opera 10 beta and Google Chrome



Past few weeks saw lot of activity in Linux Internet Browser sphere, finally after waiting almost an year; an early alpha developer version of WebKit based Google Chrome was made available. Also, Opera released beta version of their popular web-browser, Opera 10 Beta.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome was released almost an year back with much fanfare, it was initially available only for Microsoft Windows and Google promised to develop Linux and Mac OS X version of the web-browser. In the mean time , people eager to try Google Chrome on Linux and Mac OS X had to resort to version of Chrome running atop translation layer Wine and infact Codeweavers, released a package combining WINE and Google Chrome together for Linux. This , though worked was extremely slow, was bugged and provided no real benefit over native Linux web browser like Konquereor , Opera or Mozilla Firefox.

Now , after almost an year of development , controversy; Early Pre Alpha build of Google Chrome ( Chromium) is out!. I managed to try Google Chrome Dev channel build on my Ubuntu 9.04 desktop.

It was extremely simple to install Google Chrome , owing to fact that Chromium developers were generous enough to provide both 32 bit and 64 bit (.deb) package. You can get the package from this page.

NOTE: I wouldn't recommend installing this pre alpha release of Google Chrome for the sole purpose of using it as primary desktop web browser, as among many other things it lacks number of privacy feature , is unstable and may contain potentially dangerous bugs.

Once, you have install Google Chrome; you should be able to launch it from Applications -> Internet -> Google Chrome.



Google Chrome, after much confusion and controversy about Graphical Tool Kit to use , is based on GTK+ Graphical Tool Kit. Hence,its look and feel is similar
to your normal Gnome application

Google Chrome even though is alpha/pre-alpha release is quiet usable, the rendering was fast and almost all of the websites opened without any hitch. However, since a number of features have not been implemented; it lacked support for any plugins , so websites which rely on plugins like Mono or Adobe Flash don't load properly. Another, let down was the font rednering,which needs to be worked upon. A number of dialog boxes are yet to be implemented , they had options missing e.g: incomplete book mark support , missing features in options dialog etc.

Incognito browsing in Google Chrome


Google Chrome alpha supports tab browsing , has some rudimentary privacy and developer features, supports incognito browsing ( does not keep track of cookies, webpage is not saved in history etc) but that's pretty much it. It is still in development and it will some time before we have fully functional browser. Though, it is shaping up pretty well.

Opera 10

Opera has been a dark horse in the Desktop Browser market for some time now .Opera had been plagued with cluttered and non user-friendly interface for some time now, which probably has attributed to it having a small fraction of Desktop Browser Market; in spite of having extremely feature rich browser.

Opera released beta version of their software, codenamed Perigerene a couple of weeks back. Opera 10 beta features, fresh , professional looking and clean interface compared to previous release of Opera. This,interface revamp could be partially credited to Opera hiring John Hicks(credited with designing Mozilla Firefox logo) a popular British designer last October.

Opera 10 beta includes new Turbo technology , that improves the loading time of web-pages by almost 40%(as claimed by Opera).It does so by compressing the images, the page might not look good but for people like me who get speed of 4 Kilobytes per second during day in the university where I am studying, it is heaven sent gift.

The interface is slick , icons are much more user friendly and better looking, and one piece of genius is the new tab bar ,besides being clean and attractive, it is resizeable allowing you to drag the bar downward giving you thumbnail view of the opened tabs.

Notice thumbnail view of opened tabs at the top of the window.

Opera is extremely fast and probably has one of the most user-responsive graphical interface. Like the previous release, Opera still has Speed dial(which can now be personalized) allowing you to open frequently visited websites quickly.

Other cool features include , inline spell checker , better support for online search , new crash reporting tool and compliance to standards ( it scored perfectly to Acid3 webstandard compliance test and supports HTML 5).

Installing , Opera 10 beta is easy. Download debian package for Ubuntu from this page and install using dpkg -i command.

Overall ,Font rendering is something I did not like , fonts looked funny on my PC(could be due to missing fonts) besides that Opera 10 beta is feature rich and impressive. The interface is asthetic (though one could improve choice of colours used :P) besides that it is one web browser to look forward to coming out of beta(I liked it more compared to Google Chrome).


Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Linux on Desktop Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2009 , Ambuj Varshney




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Monday, May 18, 2009

Relive old NES days with Secret Maryo Chronicles



Mario Bros and Super Mario has been one of the most popular games in computer games/console games history. The story of character Mario , who tries to save princess in Mushroom land has been like a legend in the video game world. I still fondly remember spending my childhood playing these awesomely made games day and night out (along with another awesome computer game Price of Persia :P) on my black and white television.

Since then i.e 1980's and early 1990's computer gaming has changed a lot. We have powerful consoles which boast of Cell architecture processors and almost life like , photo - realistic graphics in games. I do play the likes of World of Warcraft , Counter Strike or even Spore :P but I still miss doze good old NES games, games which were not complicated , were innocently simple.

Now , there are couple of ways to actually run those old games , you can use an SNES/NES emulator to run those old ROM's if you manage to get them i.e or you could play one of the ports of these games. Many people have created ports of these games for different platforms , and infact you can play a lot of these games online as Flash Games or Java applet.

Secret Maryo Chronicles is loosely based on Mario Bros but has more friendly graphics , catchy sound/music and is extremely friendly. It is based on cross platform SDL library and hence could be played on number of different platforms. Secret Maryo Chronicles has been in development for number of years now , in fact it was listed on Sourceforge for the first time in 2003.

The character in Secret Maryo Chronicles is aptly called Maryo and similar to classic Mario you have to naivgate through Mushroom land by going through pipes and collecting different powerups and fighting monsters.

It is extremely easy to install Secret Maryo Chronicles in Ubuntu , as it is available in the official repositories and could be easily installed by issuing the following command in the terminal window:

sudo apt-get install smc
After issuing the above command you can launch Secret Maryo Chronicles from (Applications -> Games -> Secret Maryo Chronicles).


There is tons of information about Secret Maryo Chronicles available on their website which can be accessed at : http://www.secretmaryo.org/

Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Linux on Desktop Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2009 , Ambuj Varshney
**(one of the screenshots has been taken from SMC website)

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Monday, May 04, 2009

A Look at Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"



First of all , I am sorry for taking hiatus from blogging, I was having my End Semester examination and hence wasn't able to devote much time to Blogging. Anyway , couple of days back Cannonical came out with new release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" and being ardent follower of Ubuntu, I decided to take a look at some of the exciting new features in Ubuntu 9.04.

Ubuntu 9.04 does not boast of ground breaking or earth shattering new features but instead tries to be as simple as possible. Infact , compared to previous releases of Ubuntu it might be one of the least radical release.Ubuntu 9.04 is more of an update to the earlier release of Ubuntu. Though , there have been some significant changes in Ubuntu 9.04 which I try highlighting here.

I tried installing Ubuntu 9.04 on my Intel 965GM graphic chipset based laptop , only to discover that I was getting awful frame rate while playing HD or even Sub-HD videos. After spending some time on Google and Ubuntu forums , I found few Intel chipsets were blacklisted in this release of Ubuntu and would only be fully supported in Update to Ubuntu 9.04, which was kind of sad :( . However, I found one solution (is bit nerdy and could make your system unstable) which seemed to have got Graphic performance of my system back to awesome again. If you own one of these chipset based graphic card , you might like to see this post.

Ubuntu 9.04 is extremely fast and entire desktop loads up in a jiffy , Infact entire boot process and loading up of desktop took less then 45 seconds on my cranky old laptop. Another , awesome change in Ubuntu 9.04 is the new sleek interface and brand new visual notification system.

The new visual notification system does away with any sort of interaction element like buttons, this way Cannonical has tried reducing the distraction caused by notification popups. The notification bubbles are more aesthetic looking and are translucent. Multiple notifications pile up below one another , and hovering mouse over notification makes it translucent.Notification disappears automatically after few seconds.

Ubuntu 9.04 also includes a number of community themes which were optional in Ubuntu 8.10.Ubuntu 9.04 also has improved support for multiple monitors.


New Wave - One of the new themes included in Ubuntu 9.04

Ubuntu , has a entireley new log in screen and is extremely simple yet sexy.

Ubuntu 9.04 has removed Shutdown option from the System menu and instead the only way you can switch off , hibernate , logout , lock your system is by clicking on small power button at the top right corner of the screen. I found this bit annoying, I have been used to Shut down option in System menu for some time now.

One thing which pissed me off was the new update notification dialog box , unlike earlier releases where you had update icon in the bar, If updates were available. In Ubuntu 9.04 , update dialog box pops up every now and then and forces you to update your system(which is good , but this frequent popping up of update dialog box is annoying! ).

On technical side, Ubuntu 9.04 includes ext4 file-system which has support for extremely large files and is extremely fast, ext4 also allows you to defrag your drive which many Windows users might relate to. Though , ext4 is not enabled by default and you have to chose ext4 manually during partitioning.

Installation , has also been simplified with extremely user friendly time zone selector, which basically splits entire world map into different time zones and lets you chose your time zone graphically.
New Time Zone Selector :)

Ubuntu 9.04 includes OpenOffice 3.0.1 as Office Suite unlike Ubuntu 8.10 which carried older 2.x version of OpenOffice, Gnome 2.26 as desktop environment , Mozilla Firefox 3.0.9 and Kernel 2.6.28. Ubuntu 9.04 also to be future safe includes support for Cloud Computing.
Brasero - CD/DVD Burning tool

Ubuntu 9.04 has Brasero as it's default CD burning application , it also provides backend functionality to nautilus for burning CD's.

Conclusion : In conclusion I am not going to claim that Ubuntu is going to beat Windows on desktop or we will see hordes of people jumping onto Linux bandwagon, but instead with Ubuntu 9.04 Cannonical has made Ubuntu 9.04 simple yet functional and I sincerely beleive simplicity is what is going to make people adopt Linux! Ubuntu is definately on right course and given proper oppurtunity(in forms of OEM adopting it) we will definitely see more and more people chosing Ubuntu as their primary desktop operating system.

Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Linux on Desktop Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2009 , Ambuj Varshney

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Monday, March 30, 2009

Easily Convert and Encode videos with Handbrake



Handbrake has been one of the more user friendly tools available on Windows and Linux for ripping DVD's and converting them to mp4 format. However , handbrake has been available on Linux as a command line application and did not support converting videos to lets say a format that could be easily played on Portable Meda Players. Handbrake with version 0.9.3 on Linux is available with a GTK+ based graphical frontend and supports a number of different video formats as source, allowing one to convert these video formats into format suitable to be played on your PMP's like Apple iPod.

Installing HandBrake

It is extremely easy to install HandBrake on Ubuntu 8.10 , HandBrake provides easily installable .deb file for Ubuntu 8.10. To install HandBrake issue the following command in the terminal window (Application -> Accessories -> Terminal)
wget http://www.asshatandi.com/HandBrake-0.9.3-Ubuntu_GUI_i386.deb

and
sudo dpkg -i HandBrake-0.9.3-Ubuntu_GUI_i386.deb
This should install HandBrake onto your system , you can launch HandBrake from (Applications -> Sound & Video -> HandBrake ).

Using Handbrake

The first time you launch Handbrake you should see a number of predefined presets on right hand side of the Window , allowing you to easily configure Handbrake to convert videos to format capable of being played on number of devices.


Once you have selected the device you want to convert video for, configure/tweak the settings further and select source to select the source video which you would like to convert to suitable format, Also select the destination where you would like to save the video. Now , press Start button to start encoding the video.
Encoding in Progress

Handbrake also supports queues allowing you to put number of files for conversion into the queue and automating the conversion proces. Handbrake offers a number of options and features which cannot be fully described in a short article like this. So , What are you waiting for ? Download and Test Handbrake today.


Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Linux on Desktop Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2009 , Ambuj Varshney





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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Scan for Viruses under Linux with AVG Free Antivirus



Most of us run multiple Operating Systems on our PC's and are connected to LAN with machines running different Operating Systems. Now, Linux even though is sort of immune to viruses (there are few viruses, and Linux can get infected ) most of Desktop Linux users don't need Anti virus tool, but there are people who run Windows and there are umpteen number of Viruses, Worms and Trojans for Windows and removing them can be difficult.

Running Antivirus tool on Linux can be especially helpful in such cases , searching and removing viruses from a different Operating System would definitely help speed up the process and prevent Viruses from interfering with AntiVirus's scan process, also for PC's connected to LAN, Anti virus for Linux could detect any virus laden file transfer prompting one to take appropriate action and prevent virus from spreading to other PC's on the LAN.

There are couple of AntiVirus tool available on Linux, and in this article I would look into AVG Free Antivirus, which is one of the most user friendly of the Lot and offers a simple , intuitive interface.

Installing AVG Free Antivirus on Ubuntu

AVG provides a debian package along with packages for other distributions that you can download from this site , Or if you are on Ubuntu you can issue the following command in the Terminal (Application -> Accessories -> Terminal ) window to install AVG Free Antivirus.
wget http://www.avg.com/filedir/inst/avg75fld-r51-a1243.i386.deb

and
sudo dpkg -i avg75fld-r51-a1243.i386.deb
Finally , Once you have install AVG Free launch it's GUI Frontend from (Applications -> Accessories -> AVG for Linux Workstation ).

AVG Antivirus Linux Frontend

The AVG Free version that you have downloaded and installed contains Old Virus definitions and needs to be updated which you can easily do by clicking on the Update button.
AVG Antivirus Updating itself

Now, once AVG has updated itself you can start scanning your drive for Viruses. You might though like to configure few of AVG Antivirus settings which you can do easily from (Service -> Program Settings ).
Different AVG Antivirus settings

To scan click on the Test button and select the folder/drive you want to scan. However , one thing I disliked about AVG Free anti virus was that it does not offer any option to remove scanned Viruses ( You would have to buy a commercial version of the AVG to enable removing of viruses). You would either have to go to the path and delete the infected file yourself or use some other Virus scanner on Windows to remove viruses. I looked into the manual for options to enable removing viruses or at least quarantining infected file and found we could do by modifying configuration file , I tried on my system but it sadly did not work.
Scanning for viruses , and final test result.

The Test result of Virus scan are stored with names of virus , date/time and location where virus was found stored in the database. The Test Result can be accessed by clicking on Test Result button in the front end of AVG.

Virus Scan test result archive

Conclusion : Antivirus on Linux is not essential, still it is useful addition to your desktop arsenal especially if you are computer is part of a network with Windows computers. AVG Free though is limited with its lack of ability to disinfect virus laden files, still AVG Free is one of the most user friendly Antivirus solution available on the Linux platform.

Article Written by : Ambuj Varshney (blogambuj@gmail.com)
For Linux on Desktop Blog , http://linuxondesktop.blogspot.com
(C) 2009 , Ambuj Varshney

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