Some time ago Mark Hadley (AgentParsec) created a game that captivated gamers around the world.Slender: The Eight Pages, available for free on Windows and Mac this was a short, experimental game that helped to breathe new life into the horror genre through its use of pure, uncensored fear.

Inspired by this game and its success Haunt (formerly known as Haunt: The Real Slender Game) is an adventure/horror game released for Linux, Mac and Windows that bring you in these terrifying setting.

So

What would you do, if you wake up on a place you never been before?

Synopsis

An unnamed male character comes across an abandoned pickup truck outside the fenced off Green Park in Poland. The truck belongs to a paranormal investigation/historical preservation organization known as, Project: HAUNT. Along with the truck the character discovers a portfolio with a document regarding the purpose of Project: HAUNT. Out of curiosity, the unnamed male ventures into the park to investigate the whereabouts of the organizations members and their discoveries by collecting a set of documents and photographs as well as keys to locked off locations within the parks grounds.

The story of Haunt is different from the original Slender Man mythos and story. By reading the scraps of paper found in the game (if the player has the chance to do it, since standing still for too long will make Slender Man kill you), the player discovers that the Project: HAUNT members caught a group of periodists that were in the building area. Mark Slender (one of the periodists) managed to escape the building and was able to hide in a bunker near the building, but the project members found him and burned him inside the bunker, which failed to instantly kill him but managed to burn his face beyond recognition. The group then left Mark for dead and the “Mark Slender case” was closed, but the project members began to experience paranoia as well as other symptoms.

The gameplay

The point of this game is to find all the scraps of the notes, in which each one has information about what happened. The player will also find the park map billboard in a lot of areas, to find out where they currently are. In addition, there are keys you’ll need to find to unlock access to some of those places, and there are special photos to find on the Gamer and Paranormal difficulty level settings.

The game has 3 difficulty settings:

Noob – Infinite Flashlight / Map Markers / Small Slender Agro / No Extra Photos To Find / Darkness Will Never come
Gamer – Batteries / No Markers(This is currently bugged) / Medium Slender Agro / Extra Photos To Find / Night Will Come
Paranormal – Batteries / No Markers / High Slender Agro / Extra Photos To Find / Game Starts At Night

So to see all the photos and information available you should end the game at “Paranormal”, but I suggest to start as “Gamer” in your first couple of games, and if you are killed right from the start don’t worry…it’s normal.

Installation

The files are waiting for authorization (IndieDB and Desura) and the game it’s on the greenlight program on Steam so at the moment the best way to get the .zip file with the full game it’s download it from Game Front, if your country it’s on the “white list” of this provider Italy is not , while it’s allowed from United States and many other countries.

If your country is not allowed on Game Front you can use atomicgamer as alternative, but for me it’s been painfully slow.

Once downloaded the file unzip it and rename the folder Haunt_1_Data in Haunt_1.1_Data, after that you should be able to run Haunt_1.1.x86_64 and play the game, from a terminal you can use these commands:

mv Haunt_1_Data/ Haunt_1.1_Data
chmod +x Haunt_1.1.x86_64
./Haunt_1.1.x86_64

Please remember that it’s still a beta version and there could be some bugs in the game.

Conclusions

I like horror games, and this one has really a great graphics in the “classic” Slender-man setting, play it by night with all the lights turned off and you’ll not disappointed.

References

The Slender Man wiki
Facebook fan page of Haunt

Related posts:

1. Linux Games: One late night
2. 5 New RPG games for Linux

I’m already an happy customer of Ubuntu One and Dropbox, I use them for different things such as website articles on one and photo and documents on the other, but why don’t try a new service that offer 15 GB for free and a native Linux Client ?

Copy.com it’s a relatively new company that at the moment is offering the biggest cloud space for free accounts, in these days they offer 15 GB for free + 5GB for every referral that sign in with your code, or + 5Gb if you sign in using a referral code (note in the link there is my referral code).

So what offer this new company ?

Copy is very much like Dropbox in many ways, Copy also allows you to share files with others, from the web interfaces or from the desktop client.
Once installed, Copy will create a folder on your computer called “Copy.” And so long as the Copy application is running and you are logged in to your account, any file you place in the “Copy” folder will automatically upload to the cloud and be accessible via Copy.com and any other computer that you have running Copy
(a home or work computer, for example).

The supported Platforms includes at the moment:
Android, iOS, MacOS, Windows and Linux

Installation

The website offers a generic .tar.gz file for both 32 and 64 bit architecture, I’ve tested it with Mint 14 (aka Ubuntu 12.10) at 64 bit and it has worked without any problem.
Once you have downloaded the file unzip it on your home directory with the command:

tar -zxvf copy_agent-1.28.0657.tgz

This will create a directory with name copy, to run the graphical client run the command:

~/copy/x86_64/CopyAgent

Or just use a file manager and double click on CopyAgent.

The first time it will ask for your email and password to sign into the cloud service, It automatically sets itself to start at login, so the next times you login into your desktop you’ll just see a small origami icon on your application bar that will confirm that the application is successfully started.

Clicking on the origami icon you can access the setting of this application, where you can set some useful things such as where do you want notifications to appear, set bandwidth limits and configure Selective Sync, so you don’t have to sync all the files in all your Copy accounts/devices, you can also choose where you want the apps main folder to be, much like you can with Dropbox.

From this icon you can also pause sync .

All communication with the cloud is SSL-encrypted, and the data stored is further encrypted with AES 256. In fact, every 1MB portion of a file storer is encrypted with its own key (source)

Another interesting option is the command CopyConsole that could be used on headleass server, good maybe to setup a backup on the cloud for your VPS, I’ve to explore this a bit more.

How to get the extra 5GB while registering

Click on the referral code
Register a new account
You’ll receive a verification email, just click on the link on the body of the email to verify your email account.
Download the application from the official website
Run the application and use the email/password you have used in the registration phase.

Congrats you have now 20 GB on the clouds with copy.com.
You can also get another 2GB for tweeting the referral link on the Copy website during their ‘Tour’, the first time you browse your files from the Web.

Related posts:

1. Install Dropbox On Ubuntu Server (10 & 11)
2. Take your notes on the Cloud

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.

Related posts:

1. Download your favorite video with xVideoServiceThief
2. Minitube watch youtube without Flash problems

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

Related posts:

1. Win Free Copies of Puppet 2.7 Cookbook
2. Easily manage your PPA in Ubuntu with Y PPA Manager