This is a pretty good tip. The default style irritates me to no end. Check out the full post, there are some great tips, especially if you’re new to Nautilus like me. Ever since some distros started their attempt to become more “user-friendly” and gaining the nice looks, some default features got changed. In this case, it’s the location bar. Instead of it they got some buttons that shows the location and let you navigate through the directories!

It seems Oracle is hellbent on destroying whatever good Sun had done to the Open Source Ecosystem. The latest product to get the axe seems to be none other than the Flagship Virtualization program xVM VirtualBox. [….] All tests show that VirtualBox 3.2 lacks any semblance of stability, crashing any operating system running on it randomly. VirtualBox 3.1.8, using the binary-only release for Linux, works like a charm. It is also apparent that VirtualBox 3.

Couple of days ago, there was a huge debate (argument ?)  between Matt Mullenweg  – developer of WordPress and Chris Pearson – developer of Thesis premium theme over twitter which then extended to Mixergy.

Crux of the argument is the disagreement amognst the two over the licensing terms. Matt believes that Thesis should adopt GPL{#aptureLink_Q1kNtLltNY} which as Wikipedia states:

The GPL is an example of a powerful copyleft license that requires derived works to be available under the same copyleft.

Chris, on the otherhand disagrees with this. The full transcript of their discussion is available on Mixergy, here are some quotes which I found interesting:

Recently, I bought a pair of those new Western Digital Caviar Green drives. These new drives represent a transitional point from 512-byte sectors to 4096-byte sectors. A number of articles have been published recently about this, explaining the benefits and some of the challenges that we’ll be facing during this transition. Reportedly, Linux should unaffected by some of the pitfalls of this transition, but my own experimentation has shown that Linux is just as vulnerable to the potential performance impact as Windows XP.

Well it’s no secret that I’m a music fan and love to keep my music organized, and neatly tagged. ( Well, if you didn’t – now you do ). I’d posted quite sometime ago on how to keep your music well tagged and organized{#aptureLink_3xJl5k39gE}, so there’s pretty much no way that my files wouldn’t be tagged.

Of course, there exceptions here and there but majority are tagged. So I was rather surpised today when Amarok , during playback wasn’t showing any metadata. To verify – I installed id3v2, a CLI tool to view/edit ID3 tags for mp3 files using zypper and – guess what- it showed the meta data correctly.

Been a while since I posted ;) For some strange reason, recently I got an urge to try out ArchLinux{#aptureLink_BWSwiwROlt}. After much deliberation finally decided to try out ArchLinux again, in VirtualBox{#aptureLink_YQu9cIpVYm}. My little install guide I compiled as I was reading through the Official ArchLinux Install Guide{#aptureLink_OrVThoOrTI} + Beginner’s Guide{#aptureLink_AMQvvRytbx}.

Please note: This is highly customized according to *my* requirements and nowhere as thorough /generalized as the official guides. Still, it might help you. Here we go –

I had this problem with a wubi install. Ubuntu would highly pester me and drop to command shell (that of grub) without showing the boot options (Why and who knows??). I every time will have to boot by manually entering boot options (really painful). So I did this. I entered the boot command of the “recovery console” manually by finding it out from grub.cfg through the Live CD. After getting to the repair option I selected the option “Update GRUB”.

As mentioned openSUSE 11.2 is now available. If you’re on previous versions of openSUSE you can do an inplace upgrade to 11.2 by using zypper.

openSUSE 11.0/openSUSE 11.1

Just change the repos to mention 11.2 instead of 11.0/11.1, as shown in the pic:

I’ve been using Dropbox{#aptureLink_bv4dsrVQ0J} pretty extensively ever since its private beta days and just love its simplicity and ease with which I can keep all my files in sync across multiple computers. Even more awesome is its simple web interface – just upload a file and boom, the file you uploaded gets sync’d across all your computers. This coupled with Transmission{#aptureLink_qW0FfjT1X1}‘s ability  to start downloading torrents automatically when a torrent file is available in a folder means you can start torrent downloads from anywhere, even if your computer is not accessible. Let me show how you can do this.

I’ve been using Mozilla Thunderbird pretty extensively past few months. Even though I do have Microsoft Outlook installed on my work laptop – with the amount of mails  that I send and receive, Outlook just dies when the Inbox size shoots up and that’s an absolute killer. One of the problems with Thunderbird is that unlike Outlook, its an email-client, and not a complete PIM suite, and my work requires me to maintain an extensive calender system. But thanks to addons, you don’t have to worry about this. Let me show you how you can convert Mozilla Thunderbird to complete PIM suite.

Been a while since I’ve composed a post, work’s taken a toll on me and leave me with very little time :( 

Rather having no updates at all, decided to post some links which I found interesting and made for good read. So here we go!

Not many know of this, but as of KDE 4.2, Kwin, the window manager has a nifty little feature – it can grab videos of desktop much like a screencasting tool such as Camtasia. This functionality requires Kwin’s composition mode to be enabled (ie, you must be using Kwin’s desktop effects).

Below video shows where and how you can enable the video recording feature. Note this video was recorded using KWin.

I’ve jsut about had it with NetworkManager. Everytime I update my system I have to bite my nails wondering whether the update will break my wireless. I’ve posted earlier about my problems with NetworkManager and on howto fix it, there’s the best way to fix it: get rid of it.

Yeah, get rid of NetworkManager, install Wicd.

Here’s how:

PeerGuardian 2, is an awesome IP filtering software. Though its FOSS, it there isn’t a Linux port of it yet. But don’t worry, if you’re using KTorrent, you can make use of PeerGuardian’s filters.  Let me show how you can do so.

A while ago, I’d written a post on howto mount CD images, such as .iso, .mdf files etc via the command prompt using the mount command. In the post, among the comments, Sumeet had asked if there was a way to do all of this without having to type lengthy commands. Well yes there is! And it can’t get simpler than this!

Bang of the release schedule, the next version of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 8.10 dubbed the Intrepid Ibex was released on October 30th.

Ubuntu Intrepix Ibex brings in some new features like

Previously I’d posted on auto-mounting partitions at startup using pysdm. This post shows how you can do so by making use of mount command. Below steps require root priviliges, so switch to root or prefix sudo to the commands. For mounting NTFS drives with read and write support, open the terminal and type <span style="text-decoration: line-through;">mount -t ntfs -o nls=utf8,umask=0222 /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount</span> mount -t ntfs-3g /dev/device_name /where_you_want_to_mount/ Editor’s note: ntfs has been superseded by ntfs-3g and will mount with read/write privileges.

In my previous posts I’d written on how to mount your partitions using the mount command. In the post I’d mentioned that you’d have to mention the partition that you want to mount by specifying /dev/device_name as part of the command. The question that would come to your mind is, How do I know which of my partition is on what device? So let me show how to find out which partition is on what device!

Many, who do a dual boot with any Linux and Windows will face the problem of Master Boot Record (MBR). In easier words, one of them (Windows or Linux) wont boot after installing/uninstalling the other. This is a small guide I hope many would find it useful.

FIXING WINDOWS BOOT AFTER UNINSTALLING LINUX

While exploring Fedora 10 Beta, I found this neat little app called Phone Manager.

The about page of PhoneManager states

Phone Manager is a program created to allow you to control aspects of your mobile phone from your GNOME 2 desktop..

Couple of days ago, the second beta to the second version of the immensely popular and fantastic audio player Amarok was released by the Amarok team.

The second beta brings in some drastic changes, the main one being SQLite no longer being the default backend, and PostgreSQL support being dropped, in favour of a single backend, that being MySQL-Embedded platform. Other notable changes include improved scripting support, the return of lyric fetching and incremental scanner support.

Many people would like to use windows’ softwares in linux and would also like to run games in linux using wine. Many softwares and games work pretty well and are fully functional using wine. However, people may find it difficult to digest the fact that exe icons do not get displayed. If the exe icons could be made visible, then it will reduce the need to search for the exe file and will make linux and wine more user friendly.

Consider this situation. You have multiple programs installed for a particular file type. Now double clicking it opens an application, but you want it to open in another application.

For example, you want your images to open in showFoto instead of Gwenview, so how do you go about doing this? Let me show you how to do so!

Recently, Adobe had released the beta version of Adobe Integrated Runtime, more commonly known as AIR, for Linux. While this is indeed good news, unfortunately it isn’t available via repositories, meaning you’ll have to download the binaries, set the permissions and install it by launching via command prompt. While this seems pretty complicated, its not really.

Let me show you how to go about installing Adobe AIR and AIR applications on your Linux box.

Much like most of Google’s projects Google Chrome was launched all of a sudden yesterday. Though it was “discovered” rather “accidentally” by one a Google insider hitting the send button containing the comic-book type images of Google Chrome’s workings(excuse me, a Google guy hitting the “Send” button accidentally? Yeah,right! (Santosh agrees with me too on this one). And the hype was unprecedented. Once the hype died down and everyone got to try – the impressions were rather more or less universal, mainly being

Plasmoids are the little widgets that have made an appearance with KDE4. Plasmoids can basically do anything – from displaying your desktop and associated wallpaper to showing your laptop’s battery level,or even display the latest comics or post a tweet to twitter. While KDE 4 comes with some plasmoids, you can add extra plasmoids which do other things – from displaying your current system status to showing your current GPU temperature. Lets see how to do so.

It’s no secret that KDE4.0 didn’t get good reviews. Fact is it was heavily criticized, mainly for instability problems. So much so that it was argued that KDE 4.0 shouldn’t have been pushed out as a .0 release. But that was past, and today KDE 4.1 was released. Judging from the reactions, its no doubt that the KDE team has almos redeemed its mistakes of the 4.0 release. Linux.com carries a review of KDE4.

This is a guest post by Aditya. Most anime watchers who download anime must be knowing what styled subs are but for those who don’t know styled subs are special type of subtitles which have different fonts. The picture below demonstrates why exactly styled subs are needed. Here’s a picture to show a particular video with styled subs disabled Here’s the same one with styled subs enabled Now in the next to images notice the position of the word [Fail]

In my previous post, I’d mentioned about Virtualization – what it is, how useful it is to test new softwares, distros etc. Now while working in your virtual machine, you’d obviously save some data – do some wordprocessing, or compatibility testing of your programs, just to name some, all this would mean that the data would be stored in the virtual machine.

Now you would like to have this data on your physical machine. Or alternatively you may want to transfer data from your physical machine to your VM. Of course, you could always go about using the concept of shared folders, but this would require installation of guest-additions. On a linux-based guest, this would require running scripts, and these scripts most likely require kernel-header or kernel source files. Going by my past experience, in most default installations, the header files would not be installed, or simply be missing in all of Live-CD based distributions, requiring downloading of the packages from the Internet. Is there a simpler way of going about this? Yes! Lets see how.

Ever since being introduced to Twitter by Preshit, I’ve been addicted to twitter. While I prefer tweeting via IM or Twitter’s homepage, Few of you would love to use a twitter client. Here’s a list of some twitter clients for Linux

Last week,  the openSUSE team announced the first Beta release of openSUSE 11.0! Some of the many  enhancements and features in the new release include  the incredibly fast package management (libzypp), KDE 3.5.9 and 4.0.3, GNOME 2.22.1, a beautiful new installer, live CDs and much more.

What’s New

Consider this situation. You want to know much space is available on your hard disk. No big deal, du can tell you the stats. For this open the terminal and type du -h. You will get the required details as below sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads 35M /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs 177M /home/sathya/Downloads sathya@shaman:~$ du -h /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu\ debs/ 35M /home/sathya/Downloads/kubuntu debs But this isn’t sufficient, and neither is it very elegant. You want to know how much space each file is occupying, or what’s the max filesize occupied by a file.

Korneliusz Jarzebski, the autor polishlinux has posted a neat article on visual changes in KDE 4.1. Amongst new features include an option in the taskbar to Show tasks from the current screen only, ability to resize Kickoff menu. Kwin also gains the Coverswitch effect, which is a visual effect similar to Cover Flow in Compiz Fusion and in MacOS X(and one of the neatest effects, I might add). Marble, the geography app also gains a new view & the maps can be watched using Globe, Flat and Mercator views.

The good folks over at Free Software Magazine got bored writing regular articles on free software. For some chuckles, they decided to research on some easter eggs. Here’s what they found. What is it with cows and GNU/Linux? Let me answer my own self-serving question and show you some varied and slightly bizarre examples of human randomness. Assuming you are running under Ubuntu from a terminal type: apt-get help | grep -i super This APT has Super Cow Powers.

Yesterday, Mozilla announced that the 3rd beta of the next version of their immensely popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox would be available for download. I’d posted earlier on the impressive changes between Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 Beta 2. So what does the third Beta bring? Let’s have a look.

If you’ve ever followed KDE 4 development then you’ve probably heard about Marble. Marble is a virtual globe which displays the earth. So Marble can be used as a nice digital replacement for your desktop globe at home where you can look up places. But wait! There’s more to it: Actually these days Marble can also display flat maps (thanks to Carlos Licea), can show different “map themes” and can serve as a Qt4-widget as well as an application!

Virtualization is a concept most likely you will be familiar of.

Take an example. Consider PSCX. It’s an emulator, which allows you you to play PS2 games on a PC right? That’s basically virtualization at work. Virtualization is a fancy name for emulation. Virtualization software allows you to virtualize a machine, create a “virtual” PC – you can do anything on the virtual pc as you can do on a normal PC – Install an OS, run applications, compile applications, surf the web, the applications are limit less. So why virtualize you may ask?

Well that depends on what you want to do. If you’re a developer, wanting to test cross-platform applications(ie, applications that will run across multiple OS) virtualization provides you to do so without the hassles of actually installing the required OS.

Some terminology:

After countless days of waiting, KDE4.0, the first release of the KDE4 framework was released on Friday, January 11. Here’s an official announcement from KDE’s site: The KDE Community is thrilled to announce the immediate availability of KDE 4.0. This significant release marks both the end of the long and intensive development cycle leading up to KDE 4.0 and the beginning of the KDE 4 era. The KDE 4.

With the first release of KDE4 framework, KDE 4.0 just few days away — as the above counter shows, the next few articles will have a look at some of the features new to KDE 4.0

In case you’re still wondering what the KDE4 hoopla is all about, then keep reading. KDE4 is the next-generation of the immensely popular K Desktop Environment. KDE seels to fulfill the need for a powererful yet easy to use desktop for UNIX and Linux workstations. The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and

connecting different components in any way they want.

KDE4 introduces and updates many of KDE’s core components, notably a port to Qt 4. It will contain a new multimedia API, called Phonon, a device integration framework called Solid and a new style guide and default icon set called Oxygen. It will also include the new desktop and panel user interface tool, called Plasma, which will have support for desktop widgets, similar to SuperKaramba or Apple’s Dashboard widgets. The port to Qt 4 will facilitate support for non-X11-based platforms, including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. One of the overall goals of KDE 4 is to be more easily portable to different operating systems.

The Ubuntu developers are moving very quickly to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software the Open Source Community has to offer. Hardy Heron Alpha 2 is the second alpha release of Ubuntu 8.04, and with this new alpha release comes a whole host of excellent new features. Note: This is still an alpha release. Do not install it on production machines. The final stable version will be released in April 2008.

Couple of days ago, Mozilla released the second Beta for the third version of their immensely popular browser, Firefox. Now generally I stay away from beta versions of software, but when Subbu told me it’simproved a lot over the first beta, I just rushed to download it & try it out.

Let’s have a look at the new features of the Second Beta:

For the uninitiated, smart is the openSUSE equivalent of apt-get found in Debian based distributions such as Ubuntu.One of the biggest problems people who are used to apt-get face in openSUSE is that apt-get and Synaptic aren’t available in openSUSE and then they have no idea as to how to install software on their openSUSE machines. For them, and for many others, smart is the ideal solution. You can isntall software using the smart command prompt(“smart install ” or via the easy to use GUI. Like apt-get, smart also can resolve dependencies automatically. Here’s an easy guide to install smart on openSUSE 10.3.

There are lots of times where you’d want to mount a CD/DVD image. Say your friend who uses his Windows box has given you a .iso file or a .mds/mdf file, created using Alcohol 120%. How would you mount them in Linux? Using the Terminal and making use of the loop device,there is no need for any external software tools and utlities. Here’s the steps: Open the Terminal/Console. Switch to root user(mounting more often than not requires root privileges, we’ll have a look as to how make media user-mountable later) by typing su root *buntu users and others distros in which the root account is disabled, can skip this step.

KDE Developer beineri writes in blog about the general confusion among people between KDE 4 and KDE 4.0. To quote him, The last feature release of KDE is just over a year old, is well maintained and gains selected features about every two to three months. Still people long for the first release starting with the number 4 often called “KDE 4” – which is wrong. Let me try to disambigue: “KDE 4” refers to the whole life-time of the KDE 4.

It’s been a while since I’ve used openSUSE, as I was without a computer or a laptop for over 4 months. But now that I’ve got my laptop back, It’s good to be with openSUSE!

Alright so let’s have a look at how to change bootsplash screen. Note that this is written with openSUSE as the target distro, the same steps should work with all distros which have bootsplash package installed, if you don’t have it installed or are unsure if bootsplash is present, head over to http://www.bootsplash.org/ and check it out.

Boot splash screens are the screens that show up when you’re booting up or shutting down Linux. Basically while Linux boots, there are 2 modes-silent mode and verbose mode. In silent mode only the picture is shown, while in verbose mode the pictures as well as boot up messages are shown.

The bootsplash actually is a theme. The theme file(or rather theme directory) is stored in /etc/bootsplash/themes/ directory. The theme directory consist of 2 more directories: images and config. In addition to these, the theme directory optionally has animations and bootloader directories/ The directory naming convention is self-explanatory so I will not go into more details into these.

So let’s get to the action and start changing!

Phoronix reports that NVIDIA’s 169.04 driver brings out a lot of improvements over its predecessor. This X.Org driver contained a number of GeForce 8 fixes, initial support for the GeForce 8800GT graphics card, monitoring of PowerMizer state information, and other changes. 

What Phoronix had not tested, however, at that time was a performance comparison of the new driver and the previous 100.14.23 driver. The undocumented fact we have found is that this 169.04 Beta driver does deliver performance improvements for the GeForce 8 series on Linux.

These three short videos — all less than 8 minutes long — give you an idea of Fedora 8’s “look and feel” during the installation and setup process, and show you what software is installed by default. The third video shows you how to install and — just as important — uninstall software in Fedora 8. Fedora is often described as a GNU/Linux distribution “for enthusiasts and developers.” It is sponsored by Red Hat, and some people see Fedora as the “beta” version of Red Hat’s official releases.

Hakan Bayindir at Phoronix writes about ATI’s new drivers, their performance(Non-performance, should I say ?).

It’s been nearly seven months since I wrote my first article about ATI drivers and how they literally crippled my computer and my daily life. Last month, ATI had finally released their latest drivers which contains the new OpenGL component and AIGLX support (AMD 8.42 Linux Display Driver). Was this release worth the amount of hype and did it solve everyone’s problems? For me, simply, no. After seven months of waiting, updating, and struggling, things are not good for me, in every possible feature of the ATI Linux driver I use.

ATI released six drivers since the first article I wrote at Phoronix and I have installed and used all of them. While some of the drivers showed some improvements over my problems, nothing has fully recovered. I am still having some problems, which can be grouped as follows:

· Hardware issues
· 2D acceleration & video playback issues
· 3D acceleration & AIGLX issues

Every one is trying out linux, if you don’t want to be left out read on.

This topic covers what you need to know to shift to the boon called Linux.

Firstly why do you need Linux? Linux is for geeks and their geek factor right?

Well the answer is no. Linux is for those who need a peace of mind.

Let’s take an example here.

You come home tired after a long day’s work and all you want to do is sit in front of your computer and relax but as soon as you turn it on you get a message could not find system32 and windows wont start whatever you do.

So you call your system mechanic and he will comes the next day reinstalls windows an charges you a good 500 bucks. Now your system runs fine and also faster than before and all is well again right?

Again the answer is no.

Within a month or two you will experience the same or a new problem and again its 500 bucks gone.

Now you might ask if I mean to say that Linux is problem-free. I would say no to that. At present all Operating Systems do have their own problems but in the case of Linux it is lesser and you will find more stability and configurability. If this is not compelling enough then read on and I am sure you will reconsider.

A great time is upon us. A time of change. A time of revolution. In the past, we have struggled in a world of glass panes and fruits. Forbidden from seeing the world around us. Denied the possibility of showing who we are. But today, our eyes open. We’re not afraid to see, and we’re not afraid to show ourselves. This is a time of excitement. And a time to share our happiness, our sadness, our anger and our love.

This excellent Linux installation guide was written by my friend, “The Trojan” initially on the CHIP forums. So all credits to him, for writing this excellent post(and note that I’ve taken his permission to reproduce it here).

I am writing this down considering the fact that most of the newbies who want to try out Linux or want to make a shift to it or want to use it along side with Windows are afraid of the installation and the “GEEK” status of the Linux OS. I will try to resolve the issues with both the mental fear of geek status of Linux and the small technical fear of a new operating system.

First with the mental fear as it is necessary that you are mentally ready to do something before actually trying it out! So, what is the reason people fear that Linux is tough to use. Well, Linux is not tough to use, its only that it is a bit more difficult to administer it when compared to Windows Operating systems. So first of all, before installing Linux, be ready that you will have to learn new things and some really interesting facts about the real potential of your hardware and its details will be shown to you. The rules of Linux are much different from that of Windows. But there is JUST NO NEED TO BE AFRAID OF LINUX. It will become easier as you keep on using it.

This is the first BETA release of Linux Mint 4.0, codename Daryna, based on Celena and compatible with Ubuntu Gutsy and its repositories.

Daryna is using Gutsy’s package base (kernel 2.6.22, Gnome 2.20, OpenOffice 2.3, Thunderbird 2.0…etc).