New Linux User » tools

On Ailurus and w3m

Clair Ching — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 02:23:49 +0000

Every newbie has a different expectation and experience. Sometimes it won’t hurt if things got better, right? Or at the very least, there would be clues on what makes their user experience better. It is not always easy to figure things out so it’s better if the users get a clue, right? There’s this project — Ubun-student, now Ailurus — which does that. It enhances your Ubuntu experience and it tries to explain the tricks, so to speak.

Features include:

Install/remove applications. Offline installation is enabled.
Detect speed of apt mirrors. Choose the fastest apt mirror.
Add/remove third party repositories.
Change hidden GNOME GConf settings.
Customize Nautilus context menu.
Know secrets enhancement tricks by “Tip of the day” dialog. The tricks help you use Ubuntu better.

The default Ubuntu experience might be good but this makes it more accessible ; ) Adding and removing applications could be quite confusing for new Linux users, no matter what distro it is. Ubuntu Geek has a good blog entry with screenshots that show us how easy it is to install applications with Ailurus. I hope to read more stories about how universities have used Ailurus to their advantage. Especially on the caching aspect and the downloading from the fastest mirror bit.

this is w3m

Linux Magazine has a good set of tips for us on using w3m. w3m is a text-based browser. I use this from time to time when I need to just check on something very quickly. Anyway, I didn’t know that it could also change html to text! How? The article gives us the tip:
w3m -dump -T text/html filename.html > filename.txt

You never know when you’re going to need a text-based browser. ; ) And it’s better to have an idea what these tips and tricks because they sure come in handy.

Post from: New Linux User

Sushi Huh? Helps You Download Packages

Clair Ching — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 23:48:16 +0000

If you’re someone with limited internet access and you need packages, you could try this script called “Sushi Huh?” It’s written in Python and you don’t have to install it or anything. Just run it from the command line. When you download it, you need to extract it first and then look at the src directory for all the scripts. If you’re running Windows, you have the sushi_huh.bat and for Linux users, you could use the sushi_huh.py instead.

Sushi Huh? a screenshot

What does Sushi Huh do for you?

Users have varying needs and there are times when you can’t find the applications you need by default. And some times you have little or maybe even no access to internet either. What Sushi Huh? does is that it allows you to download the packages you need when you have the chance to do so. That’s why it is a script which you could put in your USB drive or laptop and that’s it. The nice thing is that it allows you to download packages for the following distros:

Debian
Ubuntu
OpenSUSE
Fedora
Mandriva

Sushi Huh? will launch a web browser for you to configure where you will download your packages. It will also let you search for them and select them for downloading. Which is something like having Synaptic in your browser. Interestingly enough it will ask you which release of the distro you are using before you could start using it.

It took quite a while for my Inkscape install to be finished but that’s ok. Well at least it was there. And this means that when my internet connection at home is intermittent, at least I still have a way to download packages when I am out and using wifi elsewhere and just install them when I get home. This is pretty nifty stuff! Why don’t you try Sushi Huh? and see for yourself. : )

Post from: New Linux User

Mitter for Your Twitter Needs

Clair Ching — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 03:55:42 +0000

Ok, so I am back posting on Twitter and I’ve been looking for a desktop client since Pidgin isn’t quite working for me now and I am using Empathy. That means no Twitter plugin for me. And as much as I love Emacs, twittering-el doesn’t quite cut it for me. And I am not liking Gwibber much either. It’s too clunky for me.

So what can I do? Searching for another Twitter client, of course. I’d love a better way of getting updated rather than going to my browser and checking it every so often.

mitter - a simple twitter client

Thankfully BrightHubLinux posted on Twitter about Mitter. It looked like an interesting application which could be used regardless of the desktop environment you’re using. But there’s no deb for Mitter. You’d have to download it from its Git repository or from the Google Project site for Mitter. I installed python-simplejson on Ubuntu 9.04 as well, because of the comments I saw is that it was needed for Mitter. After unpacking Mitter on the directory of my choice, I ran it from the command line with the ./mitter command.

The nice things about Mitter:

The user interface is simple enough. You’ve got a box with status getting updated from time to time. And you have space to update your status. On that space where you could update your status, you type the @ symbol and start typing the name of your friend, it can autocomplete it for you. It’s convenient that way.
You could shorten the URLs without having to open your browser for a service like bit.ly etc anymore. If you choose the “shorten URL” option when you highlight your link on the status update space, it will generate a short URL for you. Easy, right?
You could see an indicator on your status bar. Because the icon for Mitter will get a star if there are updates.

For those who like the new Re-Tweet option, too bad you can’t really have it here. Same thing goes for the reply to a tweet link from the web user interface. But you could always just go for the @ symbol replies and copying the entire tweet for re-tweeting anyway.

I’d love to see what else will happen with those project. So far it’s been easy to use and not clunky.

Post from: New Linux User

Using F/OSS for Your Broadcasting Needs

Clair Ching — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:37:18 +0000

In Asia Source 3, we had a track focused on broadcasting your information. Throughout the camp the participants were discussing communications strategies and tools that they use as well as learn tools that help us with our broadcasting needs.

Of course there are a whole bunch of social networking sites that help us with promoting our causes as well as our organizations. There’s Twitter, Facebook, Blip.tv, and so on. But what do we post on these sites? What tools can we use to process the raw material we have?

We’ve got tools for multimedia like Avidemux, GIMP and Audacity. For those who are interested in podcasting, I am sure Audacity is one thing to check out because of its features that could be used in podcasting. You could cut clips, have fade in and fade out effects and so on. There are versions for Linux, Mac and Windows so that you folks out there could enjoy using this for your needs. I once shared a guide on how to make a ringtone using Audacity but you could also use that as a basis on cutting an audio clip.

GIMP is one heck of a useful tool for processing images. Its user interface is definitely not Photoshop’s but in terms of features, there’s a lot that it offers. If you take a look at the GIMP registry, the many plugins and scripts will blow you away. It will also help you in making it more useful and easier to manipulate images using GIMP.

And then there’s Avidemux. I wasn’t able to play around with it a whole lot but this looks like a promising tool for those who have video blogs and presentations to share. It’s very nifty, I like it and would love to learn more on using it too. The nice thing about it is that there’s quite a number of guides on the Avidemux wiki.

These are but tools to help us deal with broadcasting our information. At the end of the day, we must know how these tools will help us in conveying the messages we have, in making sure that we’ve got the material we need for the channels we want to enter and so on. Every organization has something to share — it’s a matter of how, when and why after you realize what they are.

And then there are also content management systems. But I think that there could actually be separate blog entry for them altogether. There’s too many aspects of CMSes that are worth talking about, I think.

Post from: New Linux User

Download Photos Rapidly

Clair Ching — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:06:18 +0000

Again, thanks to Dmitri Popov for the heads up regarding using Rapid Photo Downloader for Linux. Photography enthusiasts would love using this because you can download from many sources. Whether you have one or more memory cards on your camera, you could download everything quickly. This is very convenient especially for those who want to share their files as soon as they can. This is so cool!

Image Credit: jppi. Via MorgueFile. Click on the image for the original.

Rapid Photo Downloader has documentation that is also reader-friendly. It gives you tips on how to get started. It has a practical approach to installing the application. Here are the basic considerations you must have when considering starting to use Rapid Photo Downloader:

where you want your images downloaded

how you want your images named

where to download images from

if and how you want your images backed up

if you want image filenames to be compatible with other operating systems

how you want to handle any image name conflicts or missing backup devices

So you see, your considerations as users of this application are also considered and the documentation guides you through using it. It even has the explanations for the different things that you might have to use/consider when using it. After all, one of the features of Rapid Photo Downloader is that you could generate file names that are descriptive and you could create a filter for them. This way, you could deal with the files as an entire batch that has to be renamed. A great solution to a cumbersome task, right?

Another neat thing about this photo downloading application is that you could have backups of your images while you’re downloading them. And you could also automate tasks if you so wanted them.

I am sure my friends who are aspiring photographers will love this application, especially because of the options they have. Whether they’re using GNOME, KDE, XFCE or something else, this is said to run but because there’s so many out there, you might have to take a shot at using this to confirm it. Now you can be happily clicking your files and so on.

Post from: New Linux User

Manage Collections with Tellico

Clair Ching — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:13:08 +0000

If you’re a collector like me then you probably have spreadsheets of these things you’ve collected in the past how many months or even years. Personally I only started becoming aware of the need to keep track of all these things. I think it’s partly because I am running out of shelf space. And some of my books ended up on my sister’s shelves. Tsk, it’s really time for me to sort things out!

Tellico is a collection manager, not limited to books.

Tell It to Tellico…

And Tellico will save just about everything you enter in the application. This is not a difficult application to use. It already has pre-set collection data entry forms. The ones that are already pre-set include the following:

book collections
video collection
music collection
coin collection
card collection
stamp collection

There are other defaults you could use. And you could even make some. If for example you want to document your collection of your figurines or maybe even other stuff. You could use custom fields for your particular collection. It’s up to you to define which fields are needed for your documentation.

You could create custom fields

There’s supposed to be a way to be able to search for particular books or music from the internet but it doesn’t seem to work with me. Internet’s flaky these days so I would have to check it again another day to be sure. But there is a form for you to fill out and then you could choose from the results which should be in your collection.

And you could even have different reports that summarize the information about your collection. You could group the entries according to the filters you want. It’s really nifty. : ) You could even save those reports in HTML so you could upload them on your website, if you want to share such information with friends, family and fellow hobbyists.

Try Tellico and see how you like it. : )

Post from: New Linux User

Projects to Make with a Linux Desktop

Clair Ching — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:04:41 +0000

Ok, so there are seven interesting projects to check out, as mentioned by the Tux Radar blog. Not just one! But seven! Goodness, gracious. How does one give so much time to all these projects?

Wilber is GIMP's mascot

Anyway, in that list of seven projects, two of them caught my eye. First involves you writing a text-based interactive game. You can use the tool Gnome-Inform7 for this. It’s basically an application that lets you create your world and describe it. You could code your game just by writing it all in plain English. Who says you can’t create a game in English? Who says you must code it in the a computer language? ; ) If you like playing text based interactive games this looks like it has potential. This tool actually also has extensions that you could use. If you’ve got conversations you might want to check out this page.

As for the the other cool project I am interested in is the one that lets you animate your drawings in GIMP. It’s you making simple animation on GIMP. Neat huh? The article gives you a very basic idea on how basic animation could be done in GIMP and save them as GIF files. The idea is that you will have layers of drawings that will let you manipulate them. Basically your animation will be shown by each layer working together to create the effect. There is also a warning on this article on what the GIF plugin of GIMP can do. (Hooray for screenshots!)

One thing I could probably add here is a novel using a wiki, not a text editor or word processor. Why do I suggest a wiki? It’s because it’s easier to divide content into chapters. And you could easily edit small chunks of text. And if ever you’re already contented with what you wrote you could just upload it on your server. Especially if you will use Zim Wiki. It is possible to publish pages in HTML format. That will be really cool, don’t you think? And it’s the National Novel Writing Month before you know it. So you might as well consider a wiki as one of your tools. (I use Tomboy and Emacs Planner often enough but lately Zim Wiki seems to be showing me that it’s very useful. ; ) So please check that out too.)

Good luck if you’re going to try any of these mentioned projects. Have fun! : )

Post from: New Linux User

Backup Applications for Linux

Clair Ching — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 16:24:05 +0000

Backups are essential for everyone, whether it’s for our personal needs or our company’s. Backups are what we need especially when we’re migrating information. Especially when we’re going to migrate everything in a whole new system or environment. I usually just backup everything manually in DVDs every so often. I guess everyone has specific ways of making their own backups but ZDNet has shared a list of ten backup applications for Linux.

Some of the applications that caught my eye:

Back in Time

This one has a very interesting name. It’s as if your backups will bring you back to the time you made them. Descriptive and catchy, this tool has an easy to use interface. One panel has the snapshots of your backups, another has the view of your directory and your current location. You could also schedule your backups. GNOME and KDE are supported by this application.

Simple Backup

This is an application that can be run only by root. It has a user interface for you to easily select the options. You could set a periodic backup or manual backups. You could set which directories are included and/or excluded. It’s really up to you. You could even do that to remote directories. This is nifty that way.

fwbackups

fwbackups looks easy to use as well with its graphical user interface. You could even drag and drop files if you want to. This tool has additional preferences that let you determine how it will behave on your system: should it start upon you logging in the system or whether you should see it on the system tray. Also, if you want to know what’s going on with it, there’s always the log viewer.

I might be installing Back in Time because it really looks easy to use. Have you tried any of these? Which one will you recommend?

Post from: New Linux User

Getting Screenshots

Clair Ching — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 18:09:52 +0000

There are different ways to get screenshots. Personally I use at least three methods, depending on what I need to capture. It matters if what I need to take a screenshot of is a website, the entire screen, just one of the applications I am using, etc.

Using GIMP

GIMP has a function to get screenshots. It is awesome because you can set the delay of the screenshot. I use that when I am taking screenshots of a particular application. You could get screenshots by going to the “File” menu of GIMP. Select the item “Create” and then look for “Screenshot” because that is what you want to create. After that a dialog box will appear asking you for your options. You could select a region, an entire window, or the entire screen. The delay for the screenshot could also be set.

GIMP is great because you could get all sorts of screenshots using it. You don’t even have to crop a region because it could be selected in the first place. Same thing goes for those who only want to get screenshots of a particular application running on the desktop.

Firefox’s Screengrab plugin

This is one of the most useful things I’ve ever encountered. It lets you get screenshots of entire webpages or just a specific region. This is a very convenient tool for everyone who needs to put screenshots of web-based applications on their blogs or documentation. Who says you have to get several screenshots before you get the screenshot with the whole length of the page? This is really an awesome plugin.

Use Aviary

Aviary is a web-based application akin to GIMP because it allows you to manipulate images. One of the great things about it is that it’s as if you have GIMP on your browser. That’s why even if you don’t have GIMP installed you can still take a screenshot of the web-based application. And it’s as easy as appending “aviary.com” (without the quotation marks) before the URL of the site you want to take a screenshot of. I just learned about this today. And it looks very nifty too. For more details, you could view this article on how to capture screenshots without any software.

What are your tools and techniques to get screenshots that you need? Could you share them here too?

Post from: New Linux User

FOSS and Education: iTalc and Moodle

Clair Ching — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 08:22:15 +0000

If you’re running a training center, whether it concerns distance education or not, you need tools to help you manage your classes and facilitate discussions, especially for those who are into distance education learning programs. Issues that need to be addressed include: course management as well as ensuring that the training room is managed well so that learners can focus on the lessons and not be distracted by other applications.

Let the Training Room Come into Order with iTalc

Today, I’ve learned about iTalc. It is an application that lets you manage your training room’s computers by ensuring that your students will not be distracted. If you are the trainer, then you can do the following:

View snapshots of each unit – just so you could check if they’re still doing their exercises or if they’re goofing off already. Better yet, you could use this monitor if they’re just passing messages to each other.
Lock all the computers so that they will listen to what you are trying to explain. This will be very handy when you are explaining the instructions of an exercise.
Remote control of computers. In case one of your learners needs some assistance, you could access it without a hitch and you could help him/her.
Allow access to the network even if the learner is remote. As long as your learner has the iTalc client, then he/she can join via VPN-connections. He/She doesn’t need to be left behind by her peers.

The developers have made this software available for Linux and Windows users but especially those with Debian and Ubuntu Linux, as well as Windows XP. The minimum hardware requirements are listed here. Ubuntu LTSP users of iTalc have a specific guide too.

Moodle Gets the Distance Education Classes Going

Managing a group of learners not interacting with you face to face might not be easy. It’s not the same as guiding someone personally. Some people don’t really do well with just emails and forums. As a teacher, you’d need to announce deadlines, etc. With Moodle you could do that too.

Other things you could do with Moodle:

Manage a student profiles. People can enlist in your class and you would be able to view their profiles and let your students manage their profiles too.
Have a place for your reading lists, course outline, etc. Whatever is relevant for your course, it’s possible to put them all on Moodle.
You could also manage your Moodle setup so that you could make the students more comfortable in their native language since it supports 70+ languages. If ever, students can select the language of their choice too. This is especially for those with a students from everywhere.
Moodle supports various media and file formats. This would hopefully enhance the courses so that students will have a variety of material to choose from and learn from.

If you’re thinking about how to make learning better for your trainees or those who are interested in having their training with you but they are so far away, Moodle seems to be a good choice.

Post from: New Linux User