The application is free to use on it’s lite version, but not open-source,there is also a pro version that cost around 20$ that can be bought directly from the official website.
It supports all 32 and 64 bit Debian and RPM based Linux Distributions. The supported Linux Distributions include Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuse, LinuxMint, ArchLinux and many more.

Features

These are some of the most important features of flareget:

• Dynamic File Segmentation: It uses a robust dynamic file segmentation algorithm to speed up the download. It supports up to 16 segments per download
• HTTP-Pipelining: In addition to dynamic file segmentation, each segment is further accelerated up to six times
• Auto Segmentation: When one segment ends, it starts another segment to help terminate another segment more fast
• Multi-protocol support: It supports HTTP, HTTPS and FTP protocols to let you download files from internet. It also supports Metalinks
• Intelligent file management: It uses an intelligent file management system to automatically categorize your files based on their extensions. All the downloads are grouped in different folders as per their categories.
• Resume support: You can pause the downloads to download them later, you needn’t start from the beginning again. It also automatically retries when a segment or download fails. Currently there is no resume support for FTP downloads
• Clipboard Monitoring: No need to copy paste your download links, it monitors your clipboard
• Batch Downloads: You can simply import urls from a text file (each link in separate line) or an html file and download them all.

Pro Features

This is a short list of the Pro features that you’ll get if you buy the Pro package:

• Up to 16 parallel connections per download
• Browser Integration with all the browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera etc.)
• Support for download speed limits
• Support for auto-refreshing of URL and cookies
• One time payment and get FREE upgrade to all new versions of FlareGet

Installation

Download the packages that suits your distribution from the official download page, for me it’s the package for .deb based distributions at 64 bit, once the download it’s finished run the following command (on .deb distributions such as Debian, Ubuntu and Mint):

sudo dpkg -i flareget_1.4-9_amd64.deb

The version could change in the future, 1.4.9 it’s the latest stable release while writing this article.

If the software has some unmet dependencies, the installation will stop. Enter the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install -f

This command will install all the necessary dependencies and will finish by installing the applications itself.

Congrats you have installed flareget !

Basic Usage

Once installed you can start flareget from the terminal typing flareget or from the application menu under internet, once started you will see the first window of this application:

To start downloading from FlareGet, all you need is a download URL of the file. Just click Add Url in the tool bar, and copy the URL in the Start Download Dialog that looks like this:

The default number of segments is set at 8 (the max is 16 for the pro version), which will suffice for most downloads.
Each segment is downloaded as an individual file and the speed of each segment is added to the overall download speed. This means that if you usually get a file, with Firefox for example, with a speed of 1MB/s, with flareGet the speed should be eight times higher (in practice, the speed will not be increased by a factor of eight, but it will be significantly quicker that the default method).

You can start the download by clicking the Start button or queue it by clicking the Queue button to download it later.

Grabber – Flash Video Download

An interesting option that you can activate it’s the Grabber.
Grabber is a libpcap based HTTP sniffer which keeps on listening to network traffic and intelligently filters out download URLs of multimedia files like flv, mp4, webm and ogg, which flash player can play. The moment video starts in the flash player on any video website like Youtube.com, Dailymotion.com, Metacafe.com and all others, the video URL for that video is filtered out and a black panel is displayed over the screen, offering you to download the file.

In case of Youtube.com wherein user can select different video qualities, if you wish to download a video of different video quality, just change the video quality in flash player, the moment video starts playing, the new URL is added to the list. Now, simply right click the black panel and you will see the link of other video quality file too. It should look somewhat similar to this:

Conclusions

This software is interesting for sure and has some pro and cons in my opinion:

pro: Easy to install and use , has a grabber option that can be an interesting addiction.
cons: Closed Source and so not integrated in the main repository of any distribution, don’t has support for bittorrent.

I don’t consider the fact that there is a pro version a bad thing in general, but personally I’d have preferred an open source tool with a plugin model and the option to buy new plugin/extensions for some $, or as suggestion they could do a crowd founding campaign to open the source if they reach XXXX $.

Anyway if you don’t like command line tools such as aria2 this is a great application that can assist you in your day by day downloads.

Related posts:

1. How to convert YouTube Video to MP3 easily on GNU/Linux
2. The Best Driving Games and Car Games on Linux

Article By Chris Pentago

Goal of this how-to: Step to step guide on how to setup  OpenDKIM with postfix on Debian GNU/Linux to send signed email from your VPS.

There are numerous methods or techniques that you can use to achieve email message signing. Good examples are DomainKey as well as DKIM which is an abbreviation for DomainKeys Identified Mail.

DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) lets an organization take responsibility for a message that is in transit.  The organization is a handler of the message, either as its originator or as an intermediary. Their reputation is the basis for evaluating whether to trust the message for further handling, such as delivery. Technically DKIM provides a method for validating a domain name identity that is associated with a message through cryptographic authentication.

These two techniques will not use symmetric encryption but rather will employ asymmetric encryption. (more info: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/246071) In both methods, the common algorithm used is RSA. This algorithm is also the default for these methods of achieving email message signing.

For those wondering about what asymmetric means, the following is a detailed explanation. It is a technique that utilizes a key to sign the email message. Other methods will not require a key. One can have two types of keys: a private key and a public key. These keys will come into play to verify the message as well. The two methods of creating email message signing as highlighted above are filters for SMTP server. DomainKey works with a dk-filter although this filter has been discontinued in the market. OpenDKIM has become the preferred replacement where filters are concerned.

A mail server must be enabled with a filter to set up the server properly. In light of this, Postfix can be used because it is enabled accordingly. Another requirement is the freedom to add or change the DNS records as you desire. With the above in mind, the following is a step by step guide on how to set up Postfix email server with DomainKey Indentified Mail on Debian.

1. The first thing is to update your software if you do not have Postfix installed already. Look at the manual provided to know exactly how to install the software. Once you have it running, move on to the next step.

On Debian, issue these commands:

aptitude update
aptitude safe-upgrade

2. At this point, it is important to install the DKIM filter. As hinted above, the most common and available filter is OpenDKIM. Installing this filter is not complicated at all and should not take much time.

aptitude install opendkim opendkim-tools

3. The next step involves setting up a directory for the storage of private keys. You can have as many domains as you wish but make sure that the permission settings are in order because they are the most critical.

mkdir -pv /etc/opendkim/example.com/
chown -Rv opendkim:opendkim /etc/opendkim
chmod go-rwx /etc/opendkim/*

4. Here, security is pivotal and it will warrant you to create a key pair for each domain you have. In other words, every single domain should have a key pair and this is the way to go.

cd /etc/opendkim/example.com/
opendkim-genkey -r -h rsa-sha256 -d example.com -s mail
mv -v mail.private mail
chown opendkim:opendkim *
chmod u=rw,go-rwx *

5. The next thing to do is to publish a public key using the DNS record. You will be required to insert new TXT DNS record with key generated previously. You’ll be presented with key in Bind (DNS Server) format but it’s easy to paste necesary parts to your domain’s DNS provider:

mail._domainkey.example.com IN TXT "v=DKIM1; h=rsa-sha256; k=rsa;p=AySFjB......xorQAB"

Example on how it look in CloudFlare’s DNS manager:

6. At this juncture, it is vital to set up the key table. You will do this by using a specified format:

KeyID Domain:Selector:PathToPrivateKey

So fire up your text editor of choice and open/create /etc/opendkim/KeyTable file our example looks like this:

example.com example.com:mail:/etc/opendkim/example.com/mail

7. The next step involves setting up the signing table. The filter used is programmed to read the table by looking for matched domain. Again, open/create /etc/opendkim/SigningTable in your favorite text editor and put this into it:

*@example.com example.com

8. You will then have to create a /etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts file at this point. It will list the top trusted hosts as you desire. Again, the format used can be as given earlier when creating a signing table as well as a key table.

127.0.0.1
lola.ns.cloudflare.com (this is DNS server you'll get from your provider)
example.com

9. Next, set up the ownership of files we just created:

chown opendkim:opendkim /etc/opendkim/KeyTable
chown opendkim:opendkim /etc/opendkim/SigningTable
chown opendkim:opendkim /etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts

10. This step is critical because it involves configuring the OpenDKIM filter to read the files that you have created above. Do this by opening /etc/opendkim.conf using your chosen editor. Consequently, it might be good to delete the Debian configuration so that you can replace it with the new and edited information.

# Enable Logging
Syslog yes
SyslogSuccess yes
LogWhy yes

# User mask
UMask 002

# Always oversign From (sign using actual From and a null From to prevent malicious signatures header fields (From and/or others) between the signer and the verifier)

OversignHeaders From

# Our KeyTable and SigningTable
KeyTable refile:/etc/opendkim/KeyTable
SigningTable refile:/etc/opendkim/SigningTable

# Trusted Hosts
ExternalIgnoreList /etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts
InternalHosts /etc/opendkim/TrustedHosts

# Hashing Algorithm
SignatureAlgorithm rsa-sha256

# Auto restart when the failure occurs. CAUTION: This may cause a tight fork loops
AutoRestart Yes

# Set the user and group to opendkim user
UserID opendkim:opendkim

# Specify the working socket
Socket inet:8891@localhost

11. It is now time to change or configure the OpenDKIM filter on Postfix. This can be done by simply altering some parameters to achieve what you require. It is very important to do this carefully so that you avoid any errors that may come up later. Open /etc/postfix/main.cf and add/uncomment these lines:

# OpenDKIM
milter_default_action = accept
milter_protocol = 2
smtpd_milters = inet:localhost:8891
non_smtpd_milters = $smtpd_milters

12. When you reach this step, you are almost there. You will however be required to restart OpenDKIM service as well as Postfix. After doing this, make sure that everything is fine for you to move on to the final step.

service opendkim start

13. The final step is to check whether the changes you were making have turned out well. Check if OpenDKIM service is online and listens on port we defined above.

ps aux | grep dkim
netstat -tanp | grep dkim

This method works like a charm and it is the sure way to attain email messaging signing. It is really not a complicated process but you will need to follow the method to the letter. Beyond the technical jargon, any person willing to follow this guide diligently can achieve success. Keep in mind that the top benefits of DKIM is to curb abuse as well as to reduce spamming to recipients.

It is a method to verify how genuine an organization or a domain is. There are many other elements that will play a good role in helping your business or domain establish a credible name in the market through this process.

This is especially important if you plan to send email from your server outside to GMail or Hotmail servers with increased security/spam filters or your mail may end up sent to SPAM folder or even rejected.

If you followed the procedure but still unable to send mail to GMail for instance, ask your web host to set you up with ReverseDNS so those mail receiving servers could match message header IP address with your domain.

If your VPS or dedicated server are located in highly available and secure government data centre such as Macquarie’s or TheBunker’s, these indetifying features might be already set by default for their new customers.

Related posts:

1. How to configure postfix as smtp relay for Gmail on Archlinux
2. How to setup postfix to forward email to another email account on Debian/Ubuntu

Last year I’ve bought a new desktop computer and on this one I’ve moved from Ubuntu to Mint as “Home distribution”, but I still have as backup PC an old laptop with Ubuntu, and some days ago I’ve updated it from Xubuntu 12.10 to 13.04, these are my observations about this new release of Ubuntu.

First: I’ve heard that Unity has improved in this release, but I really don’t like this Desktop Environment and so I’ll only talk about Xubuntu, so Ubuntu 13.04 with XFCE, one of my favorite DE for GNU/Linux along Fluxbox, Openbox and Cinnamon (in this order).

So let’s see how to upgrade and what’s new in this release of Xubuntu.

How to update Xubuntu from 12.10 to 13.04

This time I’ve had no problem at all with the upgrade process from the previous release, but before doing it please read the official guide as a failed upgrade could damage your installation and make it impossible to boot.

Perhaps you are thinking about upgrading or not to 13.04, this is my point of view: Ubuntu/Xubuntu 12.10 it’s a “short time support” release that means that it will have support “only” for 18 months from it’s release, or if you prefer the 12.10 end-of-life is April 2014. So if you have installed in the past “short term support” release and you have now a 12.10 my suggestion is to move to 13.04, on the other hand if you have a 12.04 the choice it’s up to you, stability of the system and a long term support with 12.04 (five years support) or staying on the bleeding edge of the Desktop distributions with 13.04 and all the latest software.

For more information on Ubuntu release and their support check out their official Wiki.

To update your ubuntu/xubuntu system from 12.10 you need to first make sure you have every update available in in 12.10.
So open a terminal and run these commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y upgrade

After it finishes, reboot the computer, in this way you’ll be sure that you are running all the updated packages.
Now that we have a 12.10 updated, we proceed to upgrade to the newer version of Ubuntu/Xubuntu, my way of doing this is opening a terminal and run the command:

sudo do-release-upgrade

The system will do the update and notify you of all the changes that will occur between the update process.
After it updates, reboot and you should be in 13.04.

If you don’t have the do-release-upgrade command, you need to install the following package:

sudo apt-get install -y update-manager-core

Differences between Xubuntu 12.10 and Xubuntu 13.04

This is a short list of the software that I use and of the differences that I’ve found in Xubuntu 13.04

XFCE

Both versions use XFCE 4.10, the last stable release of XFCE, so in short no changes at all in the Desktop Environment.

Firefox

Xubuntu 12.10 was shipped with Firefox 18.0.2, on the 13.04 we have Firefox 19, and at the first update you’ll get Firefox 20
Some small changes between these versions, but nothing so important in my opinion.

Xfce4 Terminal

This versione of Xubuntu has Xfce4 Terminal 0.6.1 that includes an option to use the terminal as a drop-down console, like Guake or Yakuake.
But this new feature isn’t available as an option in the Xfce4 Terminal preferences, the program must be run as xfce4-terminal --drop-down, so you have to change how the app is started and add that flag.

For a detailed article on how to do this check: How to use the Xfce4 Terminal drop-down feature

LibreOffice

In this version we will find Libre Office 4.0, which comes with many new features than previous versions. Some of the most eye-catching are the possibility of Writer, to import records “by hand” or using vector graphics (and thus scalable) through a new interpreter called Logo; Calc has increased the ability to leverage other formats, improved PDF export , import XML, links between files XLSX and ODS, export to JPG or PNG.

Catfish

Catfish it’s a file search tool using different backends, in this release of Xubuntu you’ll find version 0.6.3 rewritten with emphasis on speed.
The program acts as a frontend for different file search engines, the interface is intentionally lightweight and simple but it takes configuration options from the command line.

Currently find, (s)locate, tracker, strigi, pinot, and beagle are supported as backends.

Other changes in Xubuntu 13.04

Starting with 13.04, the Xubuntu images are larger than 700MB so they no longer fit on traditional CDs. The decision has been voted 8-0 by the Xubuntu team members and thanks to the extra space, Gnumeric and GIMP that were removed from the default installation in Xubuntu 12.10 are now back in the default installation.

The Kernel has been updated to 3.8.0-19 (based on upstream Linux kernel 3.8.8), while Ubuntu 12.10 was based on Linux 3.5 kernel, a nice upgrade for sure.

Conclusions

Xubuntu 13.04 it’s a nice Distribution for sure, it has a large base of software, an easy to use and lightweight Desktop Environment and all the software you should need installed by default.
It’s the upgrade worth it ?

Yes in my opinion you should definitely upgrade from Xubuntu 12.10, I’ve read on other blogs that some people claims this version of Ubuntu to be faster than the previous, so far I’ve not noticed any significant speed upgrade, but I like the new versions of the software (Libreoffice and the terminal over all) and the flawless upgrade process, for these reasons I suggest to do the upgrade.

Related posts:

1. XFCE 4.10 on Ubuntu 12.04
2. The many faces of Linux

Linux is becoming more user friendly and mainstream with every passing year and with the passing of the Beta test for Steam you will have noticed a marked increase of games on offer. Many users are wondering if they still need to rely on Windows to use their PC as a gaming platform or if they can switch to Linux and give Microsoft the boot. This switch does depend somewhat on PC hardware, but generally Linux has proved itself to be a robust and reliable gaming platform that has been growing quietly for several years.

Whilst not yet on the same level as the Apple iOS or Android, Linux also offers hundreds of games and apps that also run on these Java-enabled mobile phones and tablets. With the massive popularity of mobile games the demand for cross compatible entertainment has risen and even top casino establishments have released real money iPhone and Android casino games that can be played on the go.

Free games for Linux have also helped boost its popularity and users are able to download arcade style games at no cost. Additionally, some of the most successful PC games have been released for Linux, with Valve releasing Portal to the public recently, a game that has been called one of the most innovative games of the decade. A hybrid of FPS style and a new genre of spatial brain teasers, Portal offers hours of totally unique gameplay. Set in the mysterious Aperture Science Laboratories, players must solve physical puzzles and challenges by opening portals, maneuvering objects, and moving themselves through space in ways that used to be impossible.

Valve has also released a beta version of co-op favourite; Left 4 Dead 2, the owners of this game should see a special beta version of the game in their Steam library; if not, a client reboot is required.
The Linux beta offers access to the Extended Mutation System, authoring tools and dedicated servers – on par with what’s been available to PC and Mac versions of the title.

In a show of Linux-faith, German game publisher Runesoft has released their award winning game Jack Kean on the gaming platform Desura. Runesoft’s point and click adventure is based on OGRE, a real time, flexible 3D, scene-orientated free rendering engine that has recently received multiplatform support across a variety of operating system platforms.

Colonial England. Under a certain amount of… duress… Jack takes on a job which will not only cause him a great deal of trouble, but also bring to light the answer to a mystery out of his distant past. A lack of money leads Jack to accept a charter to take a British secret agent to mysterious “Tooth Island”. When Jack’s ship shatters on the mysterious island’s cliffs on arrival and the secret agent quickly becomes a meal for a monster in the jungle, Jack is soon left to cope with the situation on his own. “ Tooth Island” is ruled by the strange Doctor T, who is cultivating man-eating plants and has his own dastardly plans for the British Empire. And why does he seem to know Jack, who can’t remember ever having been on Tooth Island? What are Doctor T’s plans? And what does he know about Jack’s past?

Valve’s increased push to move people over to Linux over the last year or so has seen a slow increase in the amount of gamers who rely on the Penguin platform. Valve has ported their back catalogue of games over to Steam for Linux users and every week more Linux games are added to the library, yet growth is not as fast as expected. However the growth of free apps and games available for both Linux on mobile and PC has seen extensive growth and as the mobile market continues to expand Valve may have to readdress their ideas of getting people interested in playing the penguin friendly games.

Related posts:

1. Steam for Linux available for all in less than 1 week
2. Is Linux better than Windows 8 for gaming?

Grub Customizer is a graphical settings manager for GRUB2 and BURG that allows anyone to easily set the boot options.

Disclaimer: Grub Customizer should be a stable application, but you should be very careful when using it and be sure to know what you’re doing!
Messing with GRUB2/BURG can cause the system not to boot!



Main Features:

• move, remove or rename menu entries (they are not touched by an update-grub)
• edit the contents of menu entries or create new ones (it edits the 40_custom)
• support for GRUB2 and BURG
• reinstallation of the bootloader to MBR
• settings like default operating system, kernel params, background image and text colors etc.
• changing the installed operating system by running on a live cd

Installation

For Ubuntu and Mint you can add its PPA to your repository list with these commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:danielrichter2007/grub-customizer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install grub-customizer

For Fedora there are some packages available online and for Arch there is the package on AUR, or if you prefer there is a complete guide on How to download and compile Grub Customizer.

Usage

Once installed you can access it by typing Grub Customizer in the Dash of Unity, or you can simply open a terminal and run the command

sudo grub-customizer

Either way you should get a window similar to this one:

This is the Main Screen of Grub customizer.
The software performs, automatically at the startup, the detection of the different partitions on the computer. After a few moments you will see within the program the various entries in GRUB.

In the main screen you can:

• enable and disable the entries for the various operating systems;
• change the default name of each item;
• activate or deactivate the entry for the memory test;
• add a custom script;
• choose whether to install GRUB2 in the MBR or on a specific partition.

The second tab of this application is dedicated to the General setting.

This section allows you to adjust various parameters and settings:

• set the default boot entry, select the item number or its description;
• show or hide GRUB2 boot time;
• set some kernel options;
• set the number of seconds before the default operating system boot;

And the last tab it’s used for the Appearance Settings.

This section allow you to change some aspects of the appearance of the grub menu:

• Change the resolution;
• Set a custom look by choosing from different combinations of colors.
• Set your custom background for the menu.

Once finished, you must click the Save button to apply the changes and generate a new grub.cfg file.

This is an easy and “safe enough” way to change your grub menu, but don’t forget the initial Disclaimer, if you mess the grub file too much you’ll need a live CD to rebuild the grub menu in the MBR !.

Related posts:

1. Windows entry disappeared in Grub2 menu
2. ETC – where the config files lurk

Check constantly your disk or its partitions is one of the essential things in a linux system. Today users usually checks this through graphical tools, but the real Linux old-timers use a terminal and the command “df“. Today I want to show you how to use “dfc“, similar to df but with the addition of colors and a percentage bar. You know, sometimes the eyes wants their part!



In dfc the available size correspond to the space available to a user point of view and not from root’s perspective (ie: use f_bavail instead of f_bfree). In the same idea, used space is computed simply by substracting the available space from the total size.

Without any argument, size is displayed in human readable format. Be aware that when using human-readable format, there might be some rounding when computing the size. If you want maximum precision, use the “-u” option and choose the unit.

Installation

[Arch Linux]

Let’s start with installing the package. The ones that use the repositories “archlinuxfr”, will be able to install the package from both this repository and AUR. Obviously I recommend compiling it from the AUR. So open our friend terminal and run the command:

$ yaourt -Sy aur/dfc

in this way you will install the package from AUR.

[Ubuntu - Mint - Debian]

The package is availabe in the main repository so you can install it with the command:

sudo apt-get install dfc

The installation is now complete and you can run the command:

$ dfc

And you’ll get an output like this one:

In my opinion the percentage bar that shows the percentage of used space it’s very useful to see at a glance if you have any problem on your filesystems, the color is based on the % of used space.

Useful flags

dfc has it’s own flags that you can activate to get more information on your filesystems, the most useful are:

-a print all fs from mtab
-i info about inodes
-T show filesystem type
-u choose the unit in which to show the values. UNIT can take one of the following value:

• “h”: Human readable (default when not using “-u” option).
• “b”: Show bytes.
• “k”: Show size using Kio.
• “m”: Show size using Mio.
• “g”: Show size using Gio.
• “t”: Show size using Tio.

This is another example of output with some options activated:

And as last thing, if you want, you can create an alias in you .bashrc to map the command “df” as “dfc”. Just open the file .bashrc and insert this line:

alias df="dfc"

Now every time you type df on your terminal you’ll have a different and nicer output.

Related posts:

1. Check your disk usage with df and du
2. How to stop packages from being updated in Linux

It’s not a secret that on youtube there are a lof of music videos and also some full albums, and so with this software you can download them as mp3 file and listen them in a second moment or on a mp3 player.

YouTube to MP3 allows you to download and convert multiple videos into audio files, to do this you have simply to enter the URL of the video on youtube by clicking the Paste button or dragging in the window.

Installation

If you use Ubuntu you can install this software directly from the Ubuntu app center, If you are using Ubuntu 12.04 and have problem with YouTube to MP3 Converter type the following command in the Terminal:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libmp3lame0 libavcodec-extra-53

Or as alternative you can download the package from the official website , but as first thing install the pre-requisites with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-53

And after that install the package with the command

sudo dpkg -i YouTubeToMP3.amd64.deb

While installing it on my Mint Nadia (based on Ubuntu 12.10) I got a small problem:

mint-desktop tmp # sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-53
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
You might want to run 'apt-get -f install' to correct these:
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 ffmpeg : Depends: libav-tools but it is not going to be installed
          Depends: libavdevice53 (>= 6:0.8.3-1~) but it is not going to be installed or
                   libavdevice-extra-53 (>= 6:0.8.6) but it is not going to be installed
          Depends: libavfilter2 (>= 6:0.8.3-1~) but it is not going to be installed or
                   libavfilter-extra-2 (>= 6:0.8.6) but it is not going to be installed
 libavcodec-extra-53 : Depends: libavutil-extra-51 (>= 6:0.8.6ubuntu0.12.10.1) but it is not going to be installed
                       Depends: libopenjpeg2 but it is not going to be installed
                       Conflicts: libavcodec53 but 6:0.8.6-0ubuntu0.12.10.1 is to be installed
 libavcodec53 : Conflicts: libavcodec-extra-53 but 6:0.8.6ubuntu0.12.10.1 is to be installed
E: Unmet dependencies. Try 'apt-get -f install' with no packages (or specify a solution).

But following the suggestion I solved the problem

mint-desktop tmp # sudo apt-get -f install
....

At the end of the process I had everything solved and the software installed correctly.

Basic Usage

Once installed you can start this program from the terminal with the command YouTubeToMP3 or clicking on the Youtube to mp3 entry in the Menu, under Internet.

The first thing to do it’s to take a look at the settings, to access them click on the “gear” icon located in the bottom of YouTubeToMP3 application windows, this will open the settings window that has multiple tabs, the most interesting are:

The Download tab:

In this Tab you can configure the number of parallel Downloads and the max bandwidth that the app can use, you can also setup a “speed limit mode”, you can set a limit lower of the former that you can activate from the application clicking on the snail icon, located at the bottom of the window.
Another interesting Tab is the Music output tab:

From this tab you can select the output format you like between mp3,ogg and m4a , the destination for the downloaded files, the default is the directory ~/Music/Downloaded by MediaHuman and the bitrate or quality of the produced file.

All done, once that you have set up these options you are ready to download your favourite video on youtube as mp3 file, close the setting window and go in the main window, the easiest way to add files is to copy the url of the youtube video on your clipboard and click on “Paste Url” this will add a small image of the video with its name in the download list, once you have put in all the urls you’d like to download just click on arrow down icon and the app will start to download the selected videos and convert them in the format you have previously selected.

These are 3 mp3 with bitrate 128 that I’ve downloaded as example to test the software, and anyway I suggest this group if you like ” American Celtic punk” genre.

#/Music/Downloaded by MediaHuman $ ls -alrt
total 13660
drwxr-xr-x 1 linuxaria linuxaria 48 May 7 23:17 ..
drwxr-xr-x 1 linuxaria linuxaria 316 May 7 23:17 .
-rw-r–r– 1 linuxaria linuxaria 3634092 May 7 23:17 Dropkick Murphy’s – The Dirty Glass.mp3
-rw-r–r– 1 linuxaria linuxaria 4217106 May 7 23:17 Dropkick Murphys – Going Out In Style (Official Video).mp3
-rw-r–r– 1 linuxaria linuxaria 3288707 May 7 23:18 Dropkick Murphys The Boys Are Back (Official Music Video).mp3

Conclusions

Quite easy to install and with some interesting configuration options this software allow everyone to easily download and convert any video that is present on youtube.

The bad side of this software ?
At the moment the only problem that I’ve found in this App is that It’s closed source, other than that it seem to work perfectly.

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The file name extension indicates the archive type used:

.cb7 → 7z
.cba → ACE
.cbr → RAR
.cbt → TAR
.cbz → ZIP

On Linux there are some good software can read these format and offer you the possibility to read your favourite Comic with the best Operating System, in particular today I’ll take a look at Calibre, Comical, Comix/MComix and ACBF viewer.

Calibre

Calibre is much more than a simply Comic viewer, it is a free and open source e-book library management application developed by users of e-books for users of e-books.
The main categories of its features includes:

• Library Management
• E-book conversion
• Syncing to e-book reader devices
• Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
• Comprehensive e-book viewer
• Content server for online access to your book collection

Personally I’ve discovered this great software when I’ve bought a Kindle ebook-reader, it’s great to convert your documents/books in the .mobi format of Amazon, and to copy in and out of your Kindle books, but now back on Comics.

Calibre supports many file formats and among these all the main Comic book archive files formats. So this means that you can convert a file from a format to another or open it with the embedded viewer of Calibre.
Comics book can be imported into the calibre library, either by adding files manually, or by syncing an e-book reading device. On-line content-sources can be harvested and converted to e-books. This conversion is facilitated by so-called “recipes”, short programs written in a Python-based domain-specific language. E-books can then be exported to all supported reading devices via USB or via the integrated mail-server. Mailing e-books enables, for example, sending personal documents to the Amazon Kindle family of e-book readers.

The content of the library can be remotely accessed by a web browser, if the hosting computer is up and running.

Installation

Calibre is available in the repository of the main GNU/Linux distribution, so you can install it with your package manager.

Comical

Comical is an easy-to-use, GUI comic book viewer with some useful feature, written in C++ using wxWidgets, it’s an open-source software released under GPL.

The main features are:

• Licensed under the GPL, version 2, with a linking exception for libunrar
• View one or two pages at a time
• Fits pages to window, to width, to height, or to a percentage
• Crisp image resizing provided by the FreeImage project
• Intuitive interface
• Opens CBR (RAR) and CBZ (ZIP) comic book archives
• Opens directories of images
• Displays JPEG, PNG, GIF, and TIFF images
• Prefetches and caches pages for speed and responsiveness

Installation
Comical is NOT so commonly avaiable as precompiled package (at least it’s not present in Debian/Ubuntu) so to run this program you have to install it from the sources that can be downloaded from the official website

Requirements for building Comical from source:
* gcc 3.3 or later
* wxWidgets 2.6.2 or later

Comix

Comix is a user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It can read comics from ZIP, RAR and TAR archives, supports CBZ, JPG, PNG, GIF, TIF, BMP, ICO, XBM and many other formats. There are various options to enhance user’s readability and viewing including, full screen mode, double page mode, fit image to window width and height, and magnifying glass. Comix provides image enhancements, bookmarking , archive creation/editing, comic book library creation options and much more.. It is written in Python and uses GTK+ through the PyGTK bindings.

Main Features:
Fullscreen mode.
Double page mode.
Fit-to-screen mode.
Zooming and scrolling.
Rotation and mirroring.
Magnification lens.
Changeable image scaling quality.
Image enhancement.
Can read right-to-left to fit manga etc.
Caching for faster page flipping.
Bookmarks support.
Customizable GUI.
Archive comments support.
Archive converter.
Thumbnail browser.

Installation

Comix is available in the repository of the main GNU/Linux distribution, so you can install it with your package manager.

Mcomix

MComix is a fork of the Comix project, and aims to add bug fixes and stability improvements after Comix development came to a halt in late 2009.
MComix is an user-friendly, customizable image viewer. It is specifically designed to handle comic books, but also serves as a generic viewer. It reads images in ZIP, RAR, 7Zip, LHA or tar/gz/bz2 archives as well as plain image files. It is written in Python using GTK+ through the PyGTK bindings, and runs on both Linux and Windows.

Mcomix is available too in the repository of the main GNU/Linux distributions.

ACBF Viewer

Advanced Comic Book Format (ACBF) specification is a distribution and interchange format for digital comic books. ACBF specification defines a means of representing structured and semanticaly enhanced content used in comic books. In contrast to widely used Comic Book Archive (CBR, CBZ, etc), content is represented in separate graphic and text layer(s) as well as comic book metadata is present.

Some of the properties of ACBF are:

• Definition of comic book metadata (title, authors, genres …)
• Definition of comic book structure (pages, frames) as well as order in which they follow
• Indexing of comic book pages (creation of Table of Contents upon page title)
• Definition of text layer separate from background graphics as well as reading order of text areas in it
• Definition of semantics on the text layer (e.g. emphasis, code, speech, commentary …)
• Support for more text layers in one document (translations to different languages)

ACBF aims to be used as a digital comic book format that is able to properly represent any comic books content and at the same time be suitable for automatic processing, indexing, comic book collection management and conversion into other formats.

ACBF is an extension of XML. Some inspiration regarding meta-data and semantics of the text layer comes from Fictionbook (file format that is used for electronic books distribution) and ACV 2 (comic book format used by Droid Comic Viewer).

ACBF does not use any kind of DRM (Digital Rights Management) and all specifications are open.

ACBF Viewer is a viewer application capable of reading ACBF and CBZ file formats. It is written in Python programming language. Currently there are versions for Linux and Windows. It is distributed under GNU GPL version 3.
ACBF Viewer is capable of displaying comic books in 3 viewing modes (one page, zoom to page width and zoom on a certain frame/comic book panel), it displays various comic book metadata, table of contents, can easily switch between different text-layers (translations). Text-layers are drawn automatically to fit into defined text-areas (bubbles), different fonts can be defined for semantic tags used on text-layers. Comic book library can be filled with comic books which than can be sorted and filtered by different kinds of available metadata.

Download and Installation

You can download ACBF Viewer from project page at: https://launchpad.net/acbf/+download
To install it on Ubuntu (or derivates) you will need to install required libraries first:

sudo apt-get install python-lxml python-imaging

Download and extract linux installation package (for example ACBFViewer-0.96_linux.tar.gz). Then navigate to the directory where you extracted it and run:

sudo ./install.py install

After install finishes properly you should be able to find ACBF Viewer in Applications Launcher.

Conclusions

As you can see there is plenty of choices to read comics on GNU/Linux with open source software dedicated to this, or you can just use some of the standard documents readers such as Okular and Evince, both provide page thumbnails, multiple views, page zoom, and allow users to open and read comic book files. Moreover, Okular and Evince are both standard document viewers and are preinstalled in the majority of Linux distributions regardless if you’re running an Xfce, Gnome 2, Gnome 3, LXDE, or KDE desktop environment.

As last thing if you want to manage just Comics but also E-book I strongly suggest to take a look at Calibre, it’s really a complete and powerful software.

Reference:

Calibre on Wikipedia
6 Reasons why Linux is Comic Book Friendly

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Now there is an official date for the release of Debian 7 “Wheezy”: it will be between 4 and May 5. Neil McGovern, on behalf of the project development team has officially communicated this on the Debian mailing list.

We now have a target date of the weekend of 4th/5th May for the release. We have checked with core teams, and this seems to be acceptable for
everyone. This means we are able to begin the final preparations for a release of Debian 7.0 – “Wheezy”.

Date will change only if a critical problem arise in the while.

Finally, if nothing goes wrong, the new release of the “mother” distribution of many others, will debut 27 months after its predecessor, Debian 6 “Squeeze” launched in February 2011. Time in which a lot has happened in the world of technology and that of GNU/Linux.
Debian is characterized by long development cycles whose goal is stability , the “new” Debian Stable is made by freezing the testing release for a few months where bugs are fixed to make the distribution as stable as possible; then the resulting system is released as stable, last freezing has been in August 2012 and from that date the team has worked to solve all open bugs and not to include new packages.

You can find a list of what’s new in Debian 7 on the wiki NewInWheezy the first thing that you’ll notice that many packages are “older” than other released in these days such as:

• Kernel 3.2
• GNOME 3.4.
• KDE 4.8
• XFCE 4.8
• LibreOffice3.5 replaces OpenOffice.org

In my opinion, Debian is the best “server” distribution, this distribution is absolutely stable and has a wide range of packages to choose from, so even on the servers I have no problem installing any software with all its dependencies already resolved.

So is really not an issue for me that the packages are a bit older and I’m really happy that Debian has reached this new milestone, for servers there is an interesting news:

Many Debian packages have now been built with gcc compiler hardening flags enabled. These flags enable various protections against security issues such as stack smashing, predictable locations of values in memory, etc. An effort has been made to ensure that as many packages as possible include these flags, especially focusing on those in the ‘base’-installation, network-accessible daemons and packages which have had security issues in recent years.

Note that the hardened build flags are not enabled by default in gcc, so are not used automatically when locally building software. The package hardening-wrapper can provide a gcc with these flags enabled.

But this can be also a great distribution if you want to have a stable desktop, without all the bugs and instability that could have other distributions that use Bleeding edge technologies, or if you are installing a desktop for a friend/familiar that is not so much “tech-savvy” and just need a stable platform for his day-by-day operations.

On the desktop side there is an interesting note about multimedia on the “What’s new” page :

Debian wheezy comes with improved multimedia support: ffmpeg has been replaced by the libav fork (libav-tools), which is considered to feature a more conservative release process and thus fit better to Debian’s needs. It provides all libraries and prepares an upgrade path for existing application packages. The full-featured libav libraries and frontends include e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!

This can seem a small thing for users of other distributions, but Debian had for long times a “problem” with many codec that were not free and so not available by default, after a basic installation, this was not a great problem for users that know how to add the multimedia repository, but it could be a great obstacle for other users.

Conclusion

In short, welcome Wheezi, I was waiting for you from the last summer
And for everyone, don’t forget the “Wheezy release parties” to celebrate the event and show all your Debian love!

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Livarp is a DEBIAN-based distro that tries to take the best part of available Debian GNU/Linux applications without loosing accessibility or design, special attention was paid to the documentation that in a simple page collects all the most important information you need to know on the available software of this distribution and how to configure it.

And if this is not enough you can also visit the the irc freenode chan #livarp, where you can get more help for the installation/configuration.

Livarp can run on a PIII with 128M ram but is better with a PIV and 512M ram, higher configurations are just a bonus.

But before continuing the description of this nice and small Distribution a DISCLAIMER, Livarp is done for people that love the terminal and are not scared by changin a configuration file with it, if you prefer a distribution where you can do everything from the GUI than it’s better to stay with the GNU/Linux distribution preferred by the masses.

Installation

Livarp can be installed from its installation CD or from the image done for USB, and it’s available in English and French from the official download page, if you want the English CD you can use the command:

wget http://arpinux.org/isos/livarp/livarp_039.iso

or if you prefer to download the image for USB stick you can use this:

wget http://arpinux.org/isos/livarp/livarp_039.img

Please note that at the moment of the writing of this article the last stable release was the 0.39, but the 0.40 should be available soon, so verify on the official website if it’s been released before going with these wget.

Once you have downloaded your favorite version burn it on CD or put in on your USB stick and reboot your computer, you should see the following image:

Select the GUI install and you’ll find a pretty standard wizard that will ask you the usual things, such as Language, keyboard layout, user and root password and how to partition the disk, if you are curious or want to see which kind of information you need for the installation you can go on the documentation site where there is a walkthrough of all the installation windows, the complete installation of your system should take something between 5 and 15 minutes.

On your first boot, the post-install script will auto-launch to purge the system from the live* packages, and configure apt with multimedia repositories, to do this the system will ask for the root password that you have just set, after this you are done, Livarp is successfully installed.

Features of Livarp 0.39

Livarp with Compiz

This is a short list of the main features that distinguish this small distribution:

• 95% of the software included is open source/free (conky, some firmwares and flashplugin for the last 5%)
• light, fast and stable: livarp is based on Debian Squeeze, one of the most stable distro at the moment.
• anynoob-inside livarp is made for every user that can read and want to discover alternatives window-managers.
• 9 sessions available from live to install: vtwm, dwm, echinuswm, awesomewm, evilwm, pekwm, wmfs, fluxbox and compiz stand-alone.
• livarp-xs-maker, this script transforms your livarp in livarp-xs (mono-session) by removing all unneeded sessions.
• livarp help center, a complete documentation available locally in your distribution including all the on-line docs.
• composite management with xcompmgr and transset-df.
• no graphical session-manager: your session is launched by startx, then a clean zenity dialog window appears to let you choose your session.
• auto-mounting handled by udisks-glue with dzen2 notifications.
• gnome-network-manager for network-management.

Coming soon in Livarp 0.40

Openbox, infos system & keybind help handled by conky as normal window

Livarp_0.4 will move from the actual 9 to 12 different Windows Manager that the author divided in three main groups:

‘Basic’ : dvtm, dwm, ratpoison and evilwm
‘Config’ : dwm_reloaded, wmfs², spectrwm, pekwm and openbox
‘Graphics’ : vtwm, awesome and fluxbox

Thus, a greater selection to choose from for users who want to test new Windows Manager.

The clickmes

The “clickmes” it’s a new implementation of the post-installation script and a replacement of livarp-xs-at the same time.
The principle of the post-installation is to complete properly the installation while offering a series of optional modification so each user can install the software he prefer,
and here is the problem: what changes and which packages should offer the post-installation script ?
In Debian there is a wide choice of packages, so putting to many choices could lead to a longer post-installation process and deprive the user of the immediate discovery of livarp and this is contrary to the goal of this distribution.

So the solution is to prepare a series of script that will do simply tasks, in version 0.40 there is a folder “clickmes” that contains a series of script called “install-linux-free”, “install-office-light” or “install-unison-backup-software” and so on, hopefully many more will arrive as contributes from the users in the future making this folder rich of many different scripts.

So the user will just have to use a file manager, or terminal, move in that directory and run the scripts that install their favorite software, a bit more “raw” than Ubuntu software center (or equivalent) but easy to setup and use.

Conclusions

Personally I like the the wide variety of choice that we have on GNU/Linux between different software, graphical environments and how to use GNU/Linux in general, this is in my opinion one of his greatest strengths, and not a weakness (can you imagine if there was only Unity ) , add to this that on the laptop that I use at work my WM is Flubox and you understand that my opinion for this project can only be positive, I think that it’s very well maintained and with a great detail to the documentation, that I have not always seen in other projects equally well made, but that left behind this important aspect.

It seems to me also good for all the old computers or if you want to test some of the alternative Windows Manager without having to install them on your computer, you can now finally try Awesome and Ratpoison and see if you’re comfortable with these window managers, rather particular and without having to touch your installation.

So to conclude my best wishes to the author and to all the staff of the project, I always love the minimalist new distributions like this one and I wish him good luck, and for more great images of this distribution check Arpinux’s DeviantArt page

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