New Linux User » terminal

Weekend Reads: Office Suites, Command Line Applications and ioQuake 3

Clair Ching — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 14:38:37 +0000

Eleven is Louder summarizes what office suites are available for us that are open souce software. Of course it has OpenOffice.org in the list. However, it reminds us that Lotus Symphony does exist and that there are other suites like the GNOME Office Suite as well as the KDE Office Suite. I’ve tried using the GNOME Office Suite before but for the sake of compatibility I am using OpenOffice.org especially because I have to collaborate with co-workers on documents. I know that OpenOffice.org is commonly included in various Linux distributions and this blog entry shows you that you have options. No need to feel stuck. Some people think that OpenOffice.org is way too clunky and annoying so other choices could possibly be better for them.

Another blog entry from Eleven is Louder is all about Command-Line Applications and it has an interesting list. It includes the following and more:

rtorrent – for torrent downloads
cdrtools – for burning CDs
cdparanoia – a CD ripper
oleo – a spreadsheet application (I am really amazed that there is one on the command line!)
zgv – a picture viewer with good svga support
hnb – a hierarchical notebook

The last read of the day comes from Tux Arena which talks about the complete guide to configure and customize ioQuake 3 in Linux. For those of you who love first person shooter games, this could be interesting to check out. I was never really into first person shooter games on the computer because I get dizzy just by looking at the screen. Those of you who are fans will appreciate this guide because it has the details on what to do so you could have new maps, weapons, character models, etc. This particular article has screenshots included for better visualization.

I hope you would enjoy these reads!

Post from: New Linux User

Learn to Write Your Own Twitter Client in Python

Clair Ching — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:49:58 +0000

Akkana Peck has an awesome guide to writing your own Twitter client in Python. The timing of this article is perfect because I’m now using Empathy and I currently don’t know of any plugins to let me follow and post to Twitter.

What do you need?

python-twitter (source:http://code.google.com/p/python-twitter/)
SimpleJSON (source: http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/simplejson)
Tkinter or python-tk

Twitter

Akkana Peck’s guide teaches you what to write, line by line. Hers might be a simple Twitter client but it’s functional. Her guide teaches you what packages are needed, what the commands are for, and which variables are customizable. The guide also notes which lines of code must not be indented or else it will be part of the loop that might end up going on more than is expected.

If you don’t want to use clients that require Adobe Air, her Python scripts are quite interesting and useful. I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of having a graphical client like Gwibber because I find it too heavy to load on my netbook. The Python scripts seem logical for me to use because I am not always on Twitter and I mainly like to follow people instead of posting tweets myself. All of them are actually available on her site and because those scripts are all available for tweaking, you might end up learning a lot about Twitter and improving the client scripts to suit your needs. (Admit it, you’re probably hooked on to Twitter too! And so you must have a personalized Twitter client.)

Akkana Peck also happens to have written a guide to GIMP. It’s interesting because she had beginners as well as professionals in mind. Might be great to follow her on Twitter as well as check out her other written works.

Good luck with Python programming your client. I could imagine that the guide she wrote could be the start of your own Python programming exercises, especially for those who want to learn on their own time.

Post from: New Linux User

CenterIM Brings Messengers to Your Terminal

Clair Ching — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 14:53:07 +0000

I’ve been having some difficulty using Pidgin these past how many days so I was looking for another messenger client to check out. Incidentally I stumbled upon a blog entry about CenterIM, a messenger client for the command line/terminal. Knowing that it’s available in the repositories made me get it right away.

Centerim

Pros:

CenterIM consumes barely 1% of my memory. I am running it on an Acer Aspire One 150Bb with 1GB of RAM.
Several IM protocols are supported: Jabber, Yahoo, MSN, AIM, LiveJournal. It also has an RSS Reader.
You can have several conversations at the same time.
The screen shows the keyboard shortcuts that help you navigate through the application.
By default, the sound is on so you could hear the ‘ping’ sound when you receive a message.

Cons:

You need to set your terminal to have a dark background because the default colors are hard to see on a white background. If you’re not used to controlling the background of your terminal, then it might feel weird to you.

Going through conversations could feel weird when you’ve got a lot. Pressing the Esc key twice made me go back to the list of buddies I’ve got online so it was easier then.

Enter is not enough. You have to press CTRL-X to enter the message. The “Enter” key just skips a line. It might feel unnatural at first but you could get used to it.

It’s interesting actually. So if you’re looking for a way to chat while you’re on the command line and you don’t want to use an IRC client connecting to a Bitlbee server, then CenterIM is more of a good fit for your needs.

To learn more about CenterIM, here’s the CenterIM website.

Post from: New Linux User

Read Feeds from the Terminal via Newsbeuter

Clair Ching — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 06:20:27 +0000

I’ve been looking for a better way to read my RSS feeds and I’ve been thinking that it would be nice to take it away from the web UI of Google Reader. As much as I love Google Reader, I realized that I’d like a different way to read my feeds these days. Google Reader has been overwhelming, so to speak.

Image credit: Clair Ching, 2009.

Enter Newsbeuter. It is a terminal-based RSS reader which you could easily use and tweak according to your needs. For one thing you could export your OPML file and use that as a basis of your list of feeds. At the same time, you could also go start from scratch and all you need is a text files with all of the feed URLs of your choice. If you’re looking for a way to tag these feeds, don’t worry. Your text file can indicate the tags to be used for them. You just need a file called “urls” in your .newsbeuter directory and you’re good to go.

What I like about reading in Newsbeuter is that I could focus on the news and not look at the pictures yet. Sometimes pictures take too long to load on my computer and it gets irritating when there are too many pictures loading. At least if I could get the textual content right away, I could decide to open the article in a browser later on to view the pictures, etc. I also like how Newsbeuter is quick. One more thing that Newsbeuter has going for it is the keyboard shortcuts used. You’ve got “o” to open it in a browser, “q” to quit reading an article, “s” to save the article as a text file, and so on. There are also many things you could tweak so that you could use it according to your needs. I have yet to tweak it so I could easily manage podcasts.

It’s been a week since I started using Newsbeuter and I really like it. So far, I can’t see anything else that might replace it.

Post from: New Linux User

Clive for Downloading Videos

Clair Ching — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 05:45:04 +0000

Do you ever get a lot of video links from friends over IM and you wish you could actually just save them first? Well, you could download them via clive on the command line.

clive downloads videos from YouTube

It’s really nifty if you could save them and video them later, without having to browse it on the internet first. At least, for me, I think this is really cool.

Another awesome thing about clive is that it could download videos even from Google Video, CCTV, among others. See? Even other sites with video streaming could be a source for extraction via clive. How nifty is that? Also, the command to use when you want to download a video is easy to remember:
clive
It will save the file from wherever you run it. If you run clive on your home directory it will save the file there.
And in case you still find it a bit difficult to remember there’s a front-end for clive and it’s called abby. It might be easier to use if you prefer something graphical.

I suppose that files downloaded as mp4 would benefit those who use ipods. And at least it’s way better than getting stuck with only flv files. I tried playing the videos I downloaded and they were quite alright. This looks like something I might be using a lot in the coming days. My friends and co-workers give me interesting video links from time to time.

Post from: New Linux User