LINUX ON DESKTOP

I have a really slow internet connection in the university i am studying in so for installing applications i have to usually keep my laptop powered on for considerable period of time this almost makes it impossible for me to remove my existing Ubuntu installation and do fresh new installation again as i risk losing all my downloaded packages.

APTonCD is a tool that can help you precisely in such situations . Whenever you install applications via synaptic/apt-get/aptitude the corresponding Debian files are downloaded and stored (/var/cache/apt/archives) then they are installed on your system . APTonCD helps you create local repositories of these downloaded package files along with all its dependencies on a CD/DVD so that you could install these application on any computer whether internet connection is available or not using apt-get tool.

APTonCD is availble in Ubuntu official repositories and could be installed easily by issuing the following command in the terminal window :
sudo ap…

Please read THIS, the link points to an Updated Article for Ubuntu 11.04.

MAC OS has been traditionally known for their impressive graphical interface and stability. Now even though i have been an avid Linux follower over the past 9 years I have been using Linux still i find my self attracted to MAC OS .Now even though these days it's possible to run Hackintosh on normal Intel hardware but it's not stable and well there are hardware compatibility issues . So well other alternative to using MAC OS is either to purchase MAC hardware(which would be naturally expensive) and run full fledged MAC OS or you could tweak and customize your Ubuntu desktop to look more like MAC OS X .

In this tutorial i describe step by step how to make your Ubuntu 8.04 desktop look more like MAC OS X Leopard :) .
Installing Cursor , GTK and Icon Theme

To install cursor,gtk and icon theme first download the package from the link given below :

http://rapidshare.de/files/38210507/MyTheme.tar.gz.html

Now to i…

Even though i have a 120 GB HDD on my laptop and have dedicated a significant portion of hard disk space to Ubuntu still somehow every three or four months i run out of disk space . Also i am particularly bad at organizing stuff and well files are cluttered over my entire file system this makes tracking large files i don't need very difficult . Lots of application create a number of temporary files and these files also take significant amount of disk space and could be hard to track down if they are not created in /tmp .


The command I am discussing below helps you solve precisely this problem by giving you an ordered list (ordered in terms of size) of files and folders taking up space in your computer thus helping you find files/folder which are taking up significant amount of space :

du -sm *


Above command would display all the files and folder as well as their size as a list, however this is not a ordered list . To order the list we would need to pipe (that is send output…

Being an undergrad student a lot of the lecture notes and study related material i have is in PDF format now a lot of times i have felt the need of carrying this material around, however carrying laptop around all the time is just not feasible.I have a Video Ipod that could store images and one could view them on the go however it cannot display pdf files so my search began for a tool that could actually convert PDF files into PNG that could be later loaded on to the ipod and viewed at one's convenience .

Note : The installation instruction below are for Ubuntu however they should work perfectly well on any other distro as long as you have ImageMagik and Ghost Script installed.

Installing ImageMagick
ImageMagick is a powerful command line image processing package with a number of features you could install it using the following command :

sudo apt-get install imagemagickAfter installation is over to convert say sample.pdf to sample.png issue the following command

convert sample.pdf…

gconf-editor If you have been using Windows for a long time and are making transition to Ubuntu one of the first thing you notice is absence of Icons like Trash , Computer , Home and Network icon on the desktop. Though not a big problem and as you start using Ubuntu more and more you get used to this still if you want to display these icons on your desktop providing you easy access to Trash and Mounted Drives you can do so really easily by typing in following commands in the terminal window.


First open the terminal window from (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal ) and type in the following command to launch gconf-editor :

gconf-editor


You will get a window like this :






Now on the left side of the Pane in the window expand apps , inside apps expand nautilus and chose desktop (apps -> nautilus -> desktop )you will get a window like this :
In this window enable "computer_icon_visible" , "home_icon_visible" , "network_icon_visible" and "…

Adobe Flash is one of the most popular software used to distribute interactive media over the internet with approximately 95% of Internet Connected computers having flash preinstalled.
Adobe on Thursday released Beta version of their latest Adobe Flash Player for Mac OS X , Windows and surprisingly Linux simultaneously (they have even started supporting Ubuntu from this release which is really a welcome sign) . It is one of the major release of Adobe after their merger with Macromedia.

Adobe Flash Player 10 includes a number of revolutionary features like automatically adjusting video quality without the need of re buffering between video played between Flash Player and Adobe Flash Media server providing a video which could be played un-interrupted, new Text Engine paving way for creating interactive e-books and online publications in additional languages in future , improved visual performance , native 3-D transformation and animation capabilities ( which essentially means since…

Google has released a number of interesting softwares for Linux platform now because all of these softwares are closed sourced :( and better free open source alternatives are available these packages are not installed by default in most of the popular Linux distributions. Also being closed source means they are not available in Official repositories too. In this article we discuss how to install these software inside Ubuntu 8.04.

Note : All the installation instructions below are for 32 bit processor .


Google Picasa 2.7

Google Picasa is one of the more user friendly photo management software available , it is available on both Windows and Linux . It runs on Linux on top of Application Layer called Wine that allows Windows application to run on Linux . However this has some disadvantage firstly some windows application don't work as well as they do on windows , there are occasional application crashes, application freezes , also UI is bit less responsive however applications are s…

Weatherbug operates one of the largest weather network in the world providing information like local temperatures, wind speed, radar, and forecasts etc .Weatherbug widgets were already available on the Windows and Mac OS platform and now they have released their widgets for the Linux platform also providing weather information through user friendly widgets to people using Linux.



To install weatherbug issue the following command in the terminal window (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal )


Note : Weatherbug needs Java Runtime Environment to be installed since it is a java application , also i have found that weatherbug for some reason does not work with open source gcj instead it needs Sun JRE . Inorder to run weatherbug you would have to install Sun JRE which could be done by typing the following command in the terminal window :



sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jre libswt3.2-gtk-java
To install weatherbug issue the following command in the terminal window :
wget http://wdownload…

A number of applications are available for managing you audio/video collection, now being an avid reader of books i have always felt the need of a software that could index and catalog book collection. Alexandria is a software that does just that it allows one to easily catalog book collection and manage them.



Alexandria is an open source application that has been written using Ruby programming language. It's interface has been designed using the Gtk2 toolkit. It is available in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories and hence can be easily installed using synaptic or apt-get.



To install alexandria issue the following command in the terminal window (Applications-> Accessories -> Terminal)

sudo apt-get install alexandria
after the installation is over you can launch alexandria from Applications -> Office -> Alexandria Book Collection Manager

This is how alexandria looks

As soon as alexandria loads the first thing you notice is it's interface is not cluttered, the interface has…

Nautilus is the default file manager used in Gnome by most of the Linux distributions, now even though nautilus is extremely user friendly and has wide array of features(including ability to extend it's feature set with scripts and extensions) . All these features does make nautilus bit resource hungry especially if you are using older machine. In this article i discuss PCMan File Manger which is a lightweight alternative to nautilus and how to set various menus in Ubuntu to using PCMan File manager instead of using nautilus.

PCMan File Manager is extremely small and fast file manager that supports Tabbed Browsing. It is not as feature rich as Nautilus which probably helps it by making it much faster compared to nautilus which take a significant amount of time to load , however it does the job of file manager well . It uses multi threading to load large directories quickly and even shows thumbnails of images. It has been created using GTK2 Libraries and it's website claims it c…

A few days back i discovered a really neat tool called Ubuntu-Tweak which allows one to tweak Ubuntu easily using wizard based approach and easy to use attractive interface, which otherwise might take a number of cryptic commands and modification to config file to do . The tool basically allows one to tweak a number of things in Gnome running on Ubuntu which is difficult to do otherwise.

Some of the features of Ubuntu-Tweak includes (taken from Ubuntu-Tweak website ):
Features of Ubuntu Tweak

* View of Basic System Information(Distribution, Kernel, CPU, Memory, etc.)
* GNOME Session Control
* Auto Start Program Control
* Show/Hide and Change Splash screen
* Show/Hide desktop icons or Mounted Volumes
* Show/Hide/Rename Computer, Home, Trash icon or Network icon
* Tweak Metacity Window Manager’s Style and Behavior
* Compiz Fusion settings, Screen Edge Settings, Window Effects Settings, Menu Effect Settins
* GNOME Panel Settings
* Nautilus Settings
* Advanced Power Management…

Converting videos to a form playable on iPod/iPhone and managing music of iPod has always been a problem on the Linux platform.This problem is compounded by the lack of documentation available. Now after spending some time searching for solution to this problem of transferring and managing music on iPod i finally came up with a solution to this problem which i have tried documenting in this article.

Note : This documentation was written and tried on Ubuntu 8.04 so if you are using any other distro of Linux or version of Ubuntu there might be need of modifying the instructions.


Converting videos to iPod format

avidemux is a neat application that allows one to easily convert videos to a form capable of being played on iPod and a number of other gadgets. avidemux has a neat looking GUI and is very easy to use and install.

Installing avidemux

To install avidemux issue the following command in the terminal window :

sudo apt-get install avidemux

After installing you can launch avidemux from …