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

But there are other things to consider. Like skills. Children must grow up with the actual skills at the tips of their fingers, not just all in their heads as theories. Same thing goes for computer usage.

Admittedly the free and open source applications out there might look so scary. Why? There are still applications that say RTFM. How will children ever learn if they don’t even have documentation and everything looks weird?

There’s an awesome looking project called OOo4Kids. They want things to be based on OpenOffice.org though. They want to focus on the use of ooo4kids.org to just make sure that kids do have the skills they needed. On the website you could see Visual Guidelines, Usability, etc. Basically they want young learners to be more comfortable with using the software.

However, it makes me ask the question: What would kids use a separate OpenOffice.org for, right? Well, they could use it for anything and everything. It’s just that the user interface could be a whole lot better for kids.

Post from: New Linux User

Snort SMS Alert System is a tool which informs you of attacks or other suspicious activity in your server. For those who are system administrators, this could be a great tool. After all, even if you work practically round the clock (as if you are doctors) you can never tell when a situation might occur. However, this is what Snort SMS Alert System will help you out with.

I really liked what Ruth shared with us during the speed geeking session. It was a brief introduction to Snort SMS Alert System and how beneficial it is for web server admins. She also shared with us the system which involves the following:

• a standard workstation with Apache, MySQL
• intrusion detection system – Snort, Barnyard, Oinkmaster
• a sensor machine which updates the log files and database
• Gammu
• BASE and ACID

If you’ve encountered some problems on your web server before and you had no idea when it all happened, maybe you could show your sys admin this tool if he/she doesn’t know it yet. It could be quite helpful in the future. : )

Post from: New Linux User

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

You could go to your panel and select “Places” then “Connect to Server” for you to connect to your FTP server. Then a dialog box will pop up asking you for the following information:

• Service type – whether it’s Public FTP, FTP with login, etc.
• Server – What is your ftp server’s URL?
• Port
• Folder
• Add bookmark and Bookmark name — this is mainly for your usage on your computer. This is basically what you will see in Nautilus/file manager.

When you click “Connect” that’s the time you will have to enter a password if it’s necessary. Then you should be able to just drag and drop files into the file manager, as if the folder on your FTP server is just one of those folders on your desktop. Sounds painless, right?

Convenience for me will be the main reason to use Nautilus as an FTP client. It’s also easy enough to explain to another person who might be needing some help in uploading files. But here’s the catch: Nautilus isn’t the end-all, be-all of FTP clients. I wanted to change the properties of the file I was going to upload. So like any other file on my desktop I expected that I could do that. However, I was surprised I couldn’t. Too bad, right? Since that file’s permissions really had to be changed. I had to install something else right then and there. So I ended up with Filezilla.

Ah well, Nautilus is easy for straightforward uploads. But really, not being able to change permissions is sucky when you’re working on specific projects.

Post from: New Linux User

The design philosophy of Phraymd includes the following:

• The user interface must not be a blocker.
• It keeps the metadata in the images.
• There is a database that keeps track of data for faster searching.

It looks really nifty to me. It also is said to be designed so that one could easily call other applications when needed. For example, image editing tools that will enhance your pictures. Or maybe viewing it using Firefox.

If you take a look at page about using Phraymd

you will see interesting features. For me, one of the interesting features is to be able to select a bunch of pictures and not lose that selection if I move to another image.

Phraymd is also looking for people to use it and test it. It will be great if you could test it and give feedback. Of course, giving good feedback and not something too general might not be very helpful. Be specific about the your feedback especially when it comes to bugs so that the development of Phraymd will be better. There is a user group for Phraymd here so sign-up and be a part of it if you believe in this project.

For those who want to try Phraymd, read this guide on installing and running Phraymd.

Post from: New Linux User

Solang seems to have a problem with Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope so those who want to use it already might be better off with upgrading to Karmic Koala first. There’s a PPA for Solang but those who are not familiar with it might be turned off. I personally plan to upgrade before I try Solang.

The feature list as written by Santanu several months ago. I am thinking this would be applicable for Solang on Karmic.

• Paginated views for memory and speed efficiency (in git already)
• Icon zooming in browser view (in git already)
• Undoable delete feature for tags and photos (partially in git)
• Undoable basic editing (flip/rotate/scale) (underway)
• Batch editing of pictures (hopefully) (TBD)
• An importer from flickr (Underway)
• A basic exporter that exports selected photos to a directory (hopefully through a basic editing pipeline) (TBD)

It looks interesting especially with the screenshots on this blog entry about compiling Solang in Ubuntu.

Solang is one of the applications I want to try once I upgrade to Karmic Koala because I am still trying to find which application works best for me. At least when it comes to managing a photo collection offline. I’ve settled for Postr when it comes to importing photos since I mainly use Flickr rather than Picasa or Photobucket. If I uploaded images to other online image sharing sites then I might be sold on using F-spot. And I find F-spot a bit slow even if it is useful. Hopefully Solang will be a better option. If not Solang, there’s also Phraymd to take a look at.

Post from: New Linux User

playing a song using mpd + sonata

So why the heck do I need two things to play music?

Let me say this: MPD is basically a daemon that runs in the background to make sure that you could play music. Sonata is the graphical way for you to control it. I’ve read so many raves about how powerful it is as a command line player but at least Sonata as its graphical front-end makes me appreciate the information about the songs. Sonata’s song information section will fetch information such as

• title
• artist
• album
• date
• track
• genre
• lyrics
• album info

There are other things that people rave about in Sonata. One of them’s keyboard driven shortcuts. There’s also support for Audioscrobbler.

Anyhow, the instructions that the webupd8 blog gave are pretty much everything I needed to set it up and running. However, I hit a snag when I tried to run Sonata at first. Because it didn’t see the library of files. Annoying, right? So I tried running MPD first in a terminal. It gave me an error regarding not being able to set the user id. I ran mpd as root. Guess what happened next? It’s working perfectly fine now. Ain’t it grand?

So yeah, you could try out MPD and Sonata by following their instructions. But here are two tips I could give you for now:

• Copy the mpd config file from /etc/mpd.conf to /home/your_username/.mpdconf so that mpd will look there instead of /etc. Also, it would lessen the hassle of editing mpd’s config file.
• Run mpd as root first before starting Sonata. Because it’s really much easier that way.

So far, it looks good. There’s a smaller percentage of memory being consumed by a media playing application. Memory here’s at 1.2% so far. Neat huh?

Post from: New Linux User

a screenshot of kreetingkard

Kreeting Kard is available in the repositories. When you search for it in your distribution’s repositories, look for kreetingkard and kreetingkard-templates. Installing it with your Linux distribution’s package manager should be a breeze.

Once you have it installed, you could now begin using it. When you’re using Kreeting Kard, you need to choose a template first before you could do anything. If you don’t have a template you can’t make any card. When you select a card in the “Templates” section, you get into the “Designer” section already. If you have a picture you want to use, you could insert it into the card in this mode. For those who will make postcards, make sure you have selected the side where you want to put your picture. You just need to click on the icon with the mountains. That’s what you need to trigger the dialog for inserting images. You could also add text. The icon with the letters a and b is the one you need for that. Of course it will be best to install fonts first for an awesome text.

In Kreeting Kard, you could already store the names and addresses of the people who will be the recipients of your greetings. There’s an address book function that’s built in.

Personally, this application could be useful for those times that I just want a quick postcard or two. But I think that it’s still lacking in terms of templates which are available for users. Another issue I have when it comes to using this is that the application doesn’t seem to have a way to import addresses from your mail client. I think that would have been a more practical approach. In any case, it’s still useful but of course, you may also want to check out other options. This application doesn’t really give me a one-stop solution yet but who knows what its developers will do someday.

Post from: New Linux User

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