Linux on Desktop

Organize your documents and Research papers with Mendeley

2009-10-20T00:18:00.010+05:30

Mendeley Desktop is a free desktop application(and web service ?) aimed at helping you organize and manage your collection of documents and research papers, primarily aimed at researchers Mendeley allows one to create a bibliography database of the research papers and documents.Mendeley is strongly integrated with the web and through a service named Mendeley Web allows you to upload 500MB(for a

Wbar - Attractive lightweight application launcher for Desktop Linux

2009-09-22T00:27:00.008+05:30

Its been some time since I have posted anything on my blog, which has to do a lot with my hectic study schedule. In case you still enjoy reading posts on my blog , mail me @ blogambuj( at {no spam} ) gmail.com with :) as subject line. This , should be encouragement enough for me to keep writing and updating this blog more frequently.Anyway, earlier in one of my posts I had reviewed Avant Window

Configuring Reliance NetConnect on Ubuntu 9.04

2009-07-19T00:11:00.003+05:30

Important: This post is for people living in India , using Reliance Netconnect and Huawei CDMA modem only. Finally after spending close to six months in University, am back home. Now, at home my dad uses Reliance Netconnect ISP for Internet. It is extremely simple to configure Reliance Netconnect on Windows, as Reliance provides a very simple installer for modem as well as dialer which configures

Browser Update : Opera 10 beta and Google Chrome

2009-06-13T18:17:00.011+05:30

Past few weeks saw lot of activity in Linux Internet Browser sphere, finally after waiting almost an year; an early alpha developer version of WebKit based Google Chrome was made available. Also, Opera released beta version of their popular web-browser, Opera 10 Beta.Google ChromeGoogle Chrome was released almost an year back with much fanfare, it was initially available only for Microsoft

Relive old NES days with Secret Maryo Chronicles

2009-05-18T02:22:00.005+05:30

Mario Bros and Super Mario has been one of the most popular games in computer games/console games history. The story of character Mario , who tries to save princess in Mushroom land has been like a legend in the video game world. I still fondly remember spending my childhood playing these awesomely made games day and night out (along with another awesome computer game Price of Persia :P) on my

A Look at Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope"

2009-05-04T05:45:00.015+05:30

First of all , I am sorry for taking hiatus from blogging, I was having my End Semester examination and hence wasn't able to devote much time to Blogging. Anyway , couple of days back Cannonical came out with new release of Ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" and being ardent follower of Ubuntu, I decided to take a look at some of the exciting new features in Ubuntu 9.04.Ubuntu 9.04 does not

Easily Convert and Encode videos with Handbrake

2009-03-30T22:10:00.007+05:30

Handbrake has been one of the more user friendly tools available on Windows and Linux for ripping DVD's and converting them to mp4 format. However , handbrake has been available on Linux as a command line application and did not support converting videos to lets say a format that could be easily played on Portable Meda Players. Handbrake with version 0.9.3 on Linux is available with a GTK+ based

Scan for Viruses under Linux with AVG Free Antivirus

2009-03-14T02:48:00.009+05:30

Most of us run multiple Operating Systems on our PC's and are connected to LAN with machines running different Operating Systems. Now, Linux even though is sort of immune to viruses (there are few viruses, and Linux can get infected ) most of Desktop Linux users don't need Anti virus tool, but there are people who run Windows and there are umpteen number of Viruses, Worms and Trojans for

Open Multiple Terminals in Single Window using Terminator

2009-03-13T01:45:00.007+05:30

While programming I have often found myself switching between terminals, debugging and compiling program in one terminal , looking up man pages in other and modifying source code in the other. I have always wished somehow I could avoid this nuisance of switching and juggling between terminals . Terminator is an application that might just solve this problem.Terminator allows you to open multiple

Create Screencasts with recordMyDesktop

2009-03-11T14:54:00.008+05:30

Screencasts are an important and user friendly way of demonstrating application capabilities and explaining them. Screencasts in lame man terms are video of desktop/application allowing you to demonstrate it's capabilities to people who might not be running the application or might not be running a computer at all.Now , I have been working on an application for some time now I wanted to show

Take and Manage Screenshots easily with Shutter

2009-03-08T22:16:00.016+05:30

Shutter is a simple application that allows you to take, manage and store screen shots. One might ask, What is the need for a separate application to take screen shots when we can easily take screen shot using Print-screen. Shutter is a huge improvement over Print-screen approach , Shutter offers number of features and improvements over the conventional Print-screen approach.Installing Shutter

Ubuntu Tweak 0.4.6: Easily Configure and Tweak your Ubuntu Desktop

2009-03-07T23:41:00.018+05:30

Ubuntu Tweak a druid based application that allows you to configure various aspects of your Ubuntu Desktop easily and tweak number of settings, is out with new version. Ubuntu Tweak 0.4.6 introduces some new features and has number of important bug fixes. If you remember I had written a short write up about Ubuntu Tweak close to an year back and In this article I would try to divulge bit more

Make your USB Pendrive bootable under Ubuntu Linux

2009-02-23T01:16:00.005+05:30

If you remember sometime back, I had written an article about making your pen-drive(memory disk) bootable using UNetBootin, Now while exploring Ubuntu 8.10 (yes I am still exploring it! ) I discovered an interesting feature that I missed while writing it's review. Ubuntu 8.10 comes preloaded with a tool that allows one to make Pen Drive bootable in a graphical manner easily.Why would you want

Eleven Tools to make your Life simpler on Ubuntu

2009-02-22T01:12:00.013+05:30

I have been over the past 3 years writing about all these nifty little tools and applications that makes your life on Ubuntu simple and better, also allowing you to configure your Ubuntu installation easily. I thought it would be useful if I could compile all these posts about tools and applications into one single post, and so here in this article I tell you about tools that help you do a

Monitor and Inspect your Hard-Disk easily with GSmartControl

2009-01-25T22:48:00.010+05:30

smartctl is a tool that comes with smartmontools package and enables one to control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA and SCSI hard-disks. This allows one to access the state of hard disk , it's level of degradation and monitor other parameters of hard disk, in addition to this it allows one to

Review : Songbird - Sleek , Simple and Feature rich cross-platform Music Player

2009-01-20T12:17:00.024+05:30

I had reviewed Songbird close to two years back , and at that time Songbird was impressive but was bug ridden, lacked important features and certain degree of polishing which was expected from an application intended to be used on Desktops. Songbird 1.0 is an entirely different story altogether, Songbird 1.0 is mature, has slick interface and most importantly is stable enough to be used by

Installing Adobe Air and some AIR applications on Ubuntu 8.10

2008-12-19T21:24:00.017+05:30

Adobe Air Environment is one of the hottest new technology around, it allows one to easily create cross platform Internet rich applications combing the strength of Adobe Flex , Adobe Flash , Ajax and HTML to create applications and widget that are Internet ready . Adobe Air allows one to deploy browser less rich Internet applications on desktop that are not bounded by local storage limitations or

Midori : Light Weight WebKit based browser for Linux

2008-12-11T13:26:00.008+05:30

The best thing about Open Source World is the number of different choices available whether its in the number of Linux distribution available or applications, and Web Browsers are no exception.There are a number of different web browsers available on the Linux platform like the popular Mozilla Firefox running on Gecko , Opera or the Konqueror running atop KHTML. However, most of these web

UsplashSmooth : TIme Based Usplash for smoother bootup bar

2008-12-03T07:09:00.006+05:30

Usplash is an application that uses Linux framebuffer interface/direct vesa to display splash screen at boot up(or while shutting down) while all the daemons are loaded(unloaded during shutting down). Usplash displays a progress bar which shows how much the operating system is loaded, this progress bar increases in a non linear way(is not smooth) , it remains standstill for sometime and

Review : KDE 4.1 - Next Gen Linux Desktop

2008-11-02T02:58:00.023+05:30

KDE was one of the first desktop environment I used when I started using Linux Back In 1998 , KDE was just out of beta and KDE Team had released 1.0 version of the Desktop Environment. At that time KDE was a revolution on the Unix platform, other desktop environment like CDE etc though were extremely good as desktop manager, but were not user friendly and there was non-existent interaction

Review : Ubuntu 8.10 "Intrepid Ibex"

2008-10-22T14:50:00.014+05:30

Ubuntu is one of the most popular desktop Linux distribution around and the latest avatar/version of Ubuntu , Ubuntu 8.10 named "Intrepid Ibex" is due to be released in few days (October 30 to be Precise) . Being a huge Ubuntu fan , I decided to give the RC version Ubuntu 8.10(released a day back) a try , to see some of the exciting new changes and additions that we can expect in the latest

Installing Adoble Flash Player 10 in Ubuntu 8.04

2008-10-19T13:42:00.003+05:30

Adobe a couple of days back released the latest version ( 10) of their popular Adobe Flash Player and surprised many by releasing a full fledged Linux version of the Flash Player simultaneously with the release for other popular operating systems.Adobe Flash Player 10 includes a number of new features like visual performance improvements ,GPU hardware acceleration , native 3D transformation

Dillo : Light Weight webbrowser for Linux hits version 2.0

2008-10-18T22:35:00.010+05:30

Dillo is a Multi platform lightweight web browser that has been in development for close to 8 years now, it is feature rich with features like Tabbed Browsing , support for multiple languages , anti-aliased text etc while occupying an extremely small memory footprint.Dillo has been used as default web browser by a number of lightweight Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux , VectorLinux

Running CrossOver Chromium aka "Google Chrome" under Ubuntu

2008-09-23T00:56:00.006+05:30

Chrome is a free web browser released by Google few weeks back , based on open source Chromium codebase and WebKit engine for rendering web pages. It offers attractive user interface , integration of Google services in the browser ,out of box support for Google Gears , shortcuts for Web Applications , suggestions for web pages while typing them in address bar and other exciting features.Now

Launchy : Application Launcher for Linux

2008-09-15T02:48:00.013+05:30

Launchy is a popular application launcher , that has been available for windows for quite some time now, recently they launched the Linux version of their application . Launchy is a application launcher that allows you to launch applications , open documents , webpages even search Google or get weather information, just by typing into a centrally located textbox on the desktop. As you type text