Linuxlandit & The Conqueror Worm

Toribash is a turn-based 3D 3rd person tactical martial arts simulator using physics based attacks

2012-05-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Toribash is a ragdoll-physics, turn-based fighting game. Create your own martial arts movies in single player sandbox mode, or join the competition in the multi player modes.

The focus is on tactics rather than reaction and button mashing. The game features physics, full dismemberment, decapitation and comic style blood. Lovely!

The basic aim of the game is to fight the opponent, scoring points for damage. Some limbs break easier then others, others give more points when hit.

To get more points, each joint can be relaxed, contracted, extended or held. This makes the gameplay very open-ended as there are no set moves, although many people will copy a move which seems to work well.
Features include:

* Full multiplayer access, including registered only servers with 'buddies' system, protected nicks and head skins
* Join the competition in the online ranking system
* Custom mods, such as the official sumo mod
* Alter the rules of Single player and hosted Multi player games
* Host your own TCP or LAN server
* Your head texture included in the official releases
* Autosaving of matches
* Export screenshots and animations to POV-Ray
* Life Time free updates, including eventual v3.0 and upward
* Game scripting support
* Single player bots

Download Toribash for:

i386 (Intel/AMD 32bit)

Debian (APT or direct download)
Fedora, Redhat, SuSE and other RPM based distributions
Slackware
Installer or tar.gz-archive for other distributions

AMD64/EM64T (Intel/AMD 64bit)

Debian (APT or direct download)
Fedora, Redhat, SuSE and other RPM based distributions
Slackware
Installer or tar.gz-archive for other distributions

Latest version: 3.5

Screenshots.

source: Linux Games

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With ConvertAll, you can combine the units any way you want.

2012-05-20T00:03:00.001-07:00

With ConvertAll, you can combine the units any way you want. If you want to convert from inches per decade, that's fine. Or from meter-pounds. Or from cubic nautical miles. The units don't have to make sense to anyone else.

Features

The base units for conversion may be either typed (with auto-completion) or selected from a list.
Units may be selected using either an abbreviation or a full name.
Units may be combined with the "*" and "/" operators.
Units may be raised to powers with the "^" operator.
Units in the denominator may be grouped with parenthesis.
Units with non-linear scales, such as temperature, can also be converted.
A unit list may be filtered and searched
Recently used unit combinations may be picked from a menu.
Numbers may be entered on either the "From" or the "To" units side, for conversions in both directions.
Basic mathematical expressions may be entered in place of numbers.
Options control the formatting of numerical results.
The unit data includes over 500 units.
The format of the unit data file makes it easy to add additional units.
Command line options are available to do conversions without the GUI.

ConvertAll requires the following libraries:

    Qt (Version 4.1 or higher - see Trolltech for more information)
    Python (Version 2.3 or higher)
    PyQt (Version 4.0 or higher - see Riverbank for more information)

Download.

On a Linux system that has the libraries noted on the requirements page, all that is needed is the source code (with an install script), included in convertall-0.5.2.tar.gz (60 KB).

To install user interface and documentation translations for ConvertAll (French, German and Spanish are currently available), also download convertall-i18n-0.5.2a.tar.gz (140 KB).

But please read about the installation and use of ConvertAll. This information is available on this site and in the ReadMe file inside the above tar file.

Install.

Extract the source files from the convertall tar file, then change to the ConvertAll directory in a terminal. For a basic installation, simply execute the following command as root: python install.py

To see all install options, use: python install.py -h

To install ConvertAll with a different prefix (the default is /usr/local), use: python install.py -p /prefix/path

To install language translations for ConvertAll, download the "convertall-i18n-..." tar file that matches the version number of the main ConvertAll file (ignore the letter suffix on the translation version number). To install the program and translation files simultaneously, extract the translation file from the same directory where the main convertall tar file was extracted and run the install command as described above. If ConvertAll is already installed, extract the translation file to any directory and run the translation's install command as described above.

The real strength of ConvertAll lies in its ability to combine multiple units. Simply type the unit names with an '*' or a '/' between them. This allows the entry of units such as "ft*lbf" or "mi/hr". The '^' symbol may be used for exponents, such as "ft^3" or "ft*lbm/sec^2". Negative exponents are allowed for units such as "sec^-1" (per second), but may switch the multiplication or division symbol ("ft*sec^-2" becomes "ft/sec^2").

Multiplication and division have the same precedence, so they are evaluated left-to-right. Parenthesis may also be used to group units in the denominator. So "m / sec / kg" can also be entered as "m / (sec * kg)". The version with parenthesis is probably less confusing.

The buttons below the unit lists ('X', '/', '^2', '^3') will also place the operators after the unit nearest to the cursor. The exponent keys will replace the unit's exponent.

Similarly, clicking on a unit from the list generally replaces the unit nearest the cursor.

The "Clear Unit" button below the operator buttons may be used to empty the unit edit window to allow a new unit to be entered

Options.

The "Options..." button allows for changing several default settings. These settings are automatically stored so that ConvertAll will re-start with the settings last used.

The first options control the display of numerical results, including the use of scientific notation and the number of decimal places. Be cautious about setting the number of decimal places to a low value, which can result in a significant loss of accuracy. Six places or higher is recommended (eight is the default).

There is an option to set the number of recent units to be saved. Setting it to zero will disable the Recent Unit buttons.

There is an option to hide the operator text option buttons (x, /, ^2, ^3, Clear Unit and Recent Unit). These can be hidden to save space if the keyboard will be used to enter the operators.

Buttons are also included on the options dialog to control the colors of the text fields.

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EDE small and fast desktop environment.

2012-05-19T11:34:00.001-07:00

EDE is small desktop environment built to be responsive, light in resource usage and to have familiar look and feel. It runs on Linux, BSD, Solaris, Minix, Zaurus and even on XBox.

Previous 1.x versions were based on a modified version of FLTK called eFLTK, while later versions are based on FLTK.
In EDE 2 (currently in beta) eFLTK has been replaced with FLTK and EDE's own library, edelib.

edelib contains functionality for creating a window, saving program configuration, communicating via D-Bus, loading icon themes, etc. EDE2 will be following the FreeDesktop.org guidelines.

EDE is not as common in Linux distributions as other desktop environments such as KDE, GNOME, and Xfce. It is available as an optional package in MINIX 3.[6]However, EDE is available in the Mandriva Linux medias since its version 2009.0.

Download.

EDE 2.0 Installation.

Prerequisites.

Make sure you have listed requirements or EDE will not compile. If required packages has given version, please use that (or greater) release.

Required programs and libraries.

This is the list of must-have programs and libraries or EDE and edelib (EDE Library) compilation will fail. All these programs and libraries already should came with your distribution as package (or as opt-in from package repository) and if they are not installed, please use your distribution specific installation procedure to install it.

C++ compiler (g++ >= 2.95 or newer or any recent SunStudio version). Compiling on clang or intel c++ wasn't tested, but should be possible
pkg-config
FLTK >= 1.1.7
DBus >= 1.0
autoconf and aclocal (aclocal is part of automake package) are needed only if you downloaded EDE sources directly from the repository

Optional programs and libraries

This is the list of programs and libraries used by EDE and edelib we would like you have, but are not mandatory. If they are not present, certain features could be disabled.

edelib

doxygen - used to make API documentation
inotify (present in linux kernel since 2.6.13) or Gamin/Fam

EDE.

python >= 2.3 - used to make documentation
UPower - comes with newer distributions (you can find more at http://upower.freedesktop.org)
librsvg (only used rsvg tool) - used to create edeneu theme from .svg icons; this is only needed if you downloaded EDE directly from the repository
xscreensaver - should come with your distribution
cURL - used for bug report tool; it should come with your distribution

There is known issue (Bug #156) with python >= 2.6.2 and building EDE documentation. If you get into the problems as described in bug report, please use the solution given in the comment of that report.

EDE programs and libraries.

This is the list of EDE related programs and libraries you should download from our download pages:

jam
edelib 2.0
ede 2.0

Note.

If you are going to install EDE on default location (/usr/local), make sure you uninstall previous EDE version or use different prefix (like: ./configure --prefix=/opt/ede).

If you had previously installed EDE 2.0 (alpha/beta), make sure you uninstall it completely, no matter where it has been installed.

Compiling EDE

After you extracted each of EDE related programs, compile them in given order below.

Compile jam

Jam is make replacement we are using to compile EDE and edelib. Some distributions provides jam package so make sure it is official jam or ftjam; common version tody is Boost jam too, but EDE can't be compiled with it!

To see if it official jam, execute:

 jam -v

and if you get something like:

 Jam 2.5. OS=LINUX. Copyright 1993-2002 Christopher Seiwald.

 FT-Jam 2.5.3. OS=LINUX. (C) 1993-2003 Christopher Seiwald, see www.freetype.org/jam/

then is ok. If you are not sure what jam version you have (but have already some), let edelib's configure script detects it and report if can be used. You can always download jam we are using from our download pages is you are not sure.

If you downloaded jam source, it already comes with Makefile, so running:

 make

will compile it.

Installation is done by copying jam binary at the common binary location, like /usr/local/bin. Jam binary will be compiled in bin.YOUROS location, where YOUROS is operating system you are running, e.g. on Linux, jam will be in bin.linuxx86 and on FreeBSD will be in bin.freebsdx86. If you are using ftjam, binary directory will be bin.unix.

Copying is done with:

 cp bin.YOUROS/jam /usr/local/bin

Compiling edelib.

In case you downloaded edelib from repository, make sure to run:

./autogen.sh

first and it will create correct configure script. If you downloaded official source release, this step is not needed because configure script is already created. The rest is:

 ./configure

and run jam (not make!):

jam

and as superuser:

 jam install

Compiling ede.

If you installed edelib with different prefix than /usr, export that path to pkg-config so it can find edelib libraries. To do so, run:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=<your-prefix>/lib/pkgconfig

Compiling ede is the same as for edelib. Also, if you downloaded ede sources from repository, make sure to run:

./autogen.sh

first, then:

 ./configure

then:

jam

and as superuser:

 jam install

Note: if you downloaded ede source code from repository (ede2 module) default icon theme is not built, so you must do it manually. This is really simple procedure where you should pass only one parameter to jam tool (you have to have librsvg installed too). So, instead jam and jam install as given above, you should run:

 jam -sBUILD_ICON_THEMES=1

and

 jam -sBUILD_ICON_THEMES=1 install

This will build ede and icon theme, installing both.

Starting EDE.

If you are using display or login manager (like gdm, kdm or xdm) and you installed EDE with default prefix (it will use /usr by default), you will see session entry named EDE in display manager's list of available sessions. However, if you install EDE with different prefix, make sure to copy ede.desktop file (you will find it at <prefix>/share/xsessions/ede.desktop path) to /usr/share/xsessions folder, or configure your display manager to see EDE installation path.

If you are not using display manager (you start X session from terminal with startx command), put startede at the end of .xinitrc file (found in your home directory, like /home/your_username/.xinitrc, but make sure you comment previous window managers or desktop starting scripts if they exists.

If you do not have .xinitrc file in your home directory or you are not sure how things should be modified, here is a working sample you can copy and paste:

userresources=$HOME/.Xresources
usermodmap=$HOME/.Xmodmap
sysresources=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/.Xresources
sysmodmap=/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xinit/.Xmodmap

# merge in defaults and keymaps

if [ -f $sysresources ]; then
    xrdb -merge $sysresources
fi

if [ -f $sysmodmap ]; then
    xmodmap $sysmodmap
fi

if [ -f $userresources ]; then
    xrdb -merge $userresources
fi

if [ -f $usermodmap ]; then
    xmodmap $usermodmap
fi

# Comment your previously used window managers or desktops
# /usr/bin/cool-window-manager
# /usr/local/bin/cool-desktop

# Start EDE
startede


Screenshots.

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Entagged is a audiofile tagger, using the freedb online database for the retrieval of the tags.

2012-05-18T10:48:00.000-07:00

Entagged is a audiofile tagger, using the freedb online database for the retrieval of the tags.

It supports custom file renaming from tags (with any directory stucture) and vice versa. Supports: mp3, ogg, flac, mpc, ape, wma.

Entagged 0.35 released:
Here are the main things we have made:
- Folder explorer added in order to see which folders are indexed and to index or un-index them
- Button added to display indexed files in explorer
Indexed files can now be seen in green. Files that are not indexed are in red.
- One button allows you to (re)index the directory from the explorer
So now you can (re)index one directory by one (from the explorer)
- Two bars show indexation ratio in order to know if the folder has to be reindexed
- User's guide in French updated
- User's guide now available in Englis

Download.

To run Entagged, you need first of all to download the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) because Entagged is written in Java. This ensures a great crossplatform compatibility at the (little: approx. 10Mb) cost of these libraries.

You can get the latest Sun JRE (Entagged needs at least JRE v1.4.1 to work properly !).

Select the "Download J2SE v 1.4.xxx" column and pick under "JRE" your platform's version.

You can then download Entagged at sourceforge file release section, make sure you are downloading the latest version !

Entagged is packaged in three different ways:

"entagged-install-vx.xx.exe" is the windows installer version of this package (note that it is only a .exe wrapper to lauch the jar file, no native code here)
"entagged-vx.xx.zip" is the "all platform" package, it contains mainly the executable jar file, and some images files (make sure you extract this archive using the directory structure inside it)
"entagged-src-vx.xx.tar.gz" wich contains the source code and the resources needed to compile and build entagged (ant file, images, NSIS script, etc). This package is NOT needed if you only want to use Entagged (this is a developper resource)

Entagged as File Tagging API.

Beside the Tag Editor, we also maintain a library to access/modify tag data in all the supported formats, which the tag editor uses as back-end.

The library is available for JAVA under the LGPL license, and for C-Sharp (mono/.net) under the MIT X11 License.

JAVA - Javadoc API.

You can browse our Javadoc online, it contains the complete methods reference as well as usage samples. The Main entry point in the library is the class AudioFileIO.

Source Code.

Obtaining entagged sources via CVS:

The source code of Entagged can be browsed online via the web CVS interface.

You can also retreive a local copy on your hard-disk by running
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/entagged co -P entagged

Downloading source tarballs.

The source code of the latest release of the libs can be downloaded here, but it doesn't contain all the latest changes (see CVS for that).

Building entagged from source.

To build entagged libraries (and also the tag editor) you need "ant" the make-like application for java programs.

$ ant compile will compile the code in place, $ ant package will produce a jar file with the fresh compiled code

Pre-built JAR packages.

We also provide a single JAR file to include with your project if that's easier for you.

C-Sharp (Mono, .Net).

API Documentation.

Not available for the moment

Source Code-

Entagged-sharp is hosted on the Mono Project SVN repository, and co-developped by Aaron Bockover

Obtaining entagged sources via SVN.

The source code of Entagged-sharp can be browsed online via the web SVN interface.

You can also retreive a local copy on your hard-disk by running
svn co svn://svn.myrealbox.com/source/trunk/entagged-sharp
Downloading source tarballs

There are no source tarballs released yet for this project.

Building entagged-sharp from source.

Entagged-sharp uses the autotools, so the standard procedure applies: ./configure;make;make install

Screenshots.

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Prey is a first-person shooter in which players take on the role of a character who must fight against multiple alien races.

2012-05-15T11:04:00.000-07:00

Prey is a first-person shooter video game developed by Human Head Studios and produced by 3D Realms.

The Xbox 360 port was developed by Venom Games. The game was initially released in North America and Europe on 11 July 2006, and later was made available on Valve's Steam system on 6 November 2006.

Prey uses a heavily modified version of id Tech 4 to use portals and variable gravity to create the environments the player explores.

The game's story is focused on Cherokee Domasi Tawodi as he, his girlfriend, and grandfather are abducted aboard an alien spaceship known as The Sphere as it consumes material, both inanimate and living, from the Earth in order to sustain itself. Tommy's Cherokee past allows him to let his spirit roam freely at times, and gives Tommy an edge in his attempt to stop the Sphere.

Prey had been in development in one form or another since 1995, and has had several major revisions. While the general approach to gameplay, including the use of portals, remained in the game, the story and setting changed several times. The game received generally positive reviews and was a commercial success, selling more than one million copies and leading to the development of a sequel, with rights owned by the Radar Group. The rights were recently transferred to Bethesda Softworks and Id Software parent company Zenimax Media.

The story focuses on Domasi Tawodi (also known as "Tommy"), a Cherokee garage mechanic and former U.S. Army soldier living on a Native American reservation in Oklahoma. At the beginning of the game, Tommy is in a bar owned by his girlfriend, Jen. Tommy is tired of living on the reservation, and constantly tries to push his heritage away, while at the same time trying to convince Jen to leave home, if only for a short while, to which she refuses steadfastly. After an unfortunate bar fight, the entire building is lifted up by a gravitational force into a green light above. Tommy, Jen, and Tommy's grandfather, Enisi, are transported back to the massive alien starship called the Sphere. After docking, all three, along with countless other captives, are dragged through the upper levels of the Sphere. Tommy is freed in an explosion set off by a stranger who, despite being cybernetic like most of the Sphere's denizens, appears to be working against it rather than for it.

Tommy witnesses Enisi's death in a brutal alien device. While trying to find Jen, he falls from a walkway and has a near-death experience where he meets with his grandfather's spirit who bestows him with spiritual powers. After returning to the world of the living, Tommy gains the ability to spirit-walk, allowing him to separate from his body to pass through forcefields and operate consoles normally out of reach, as well as the aid of his spirit guide, the ghost of his childhood pet hawk, named Talon. Despite being entrusted by his ancestor's spirits with the mission to protect all of mankind from the sphere's invasion, Tommy can't stop worrying about Jen, and he only cares about how to find and rescue her. As the game's tagline says, "Earth's savior doesn't want the job."

Features include:

* Built on an enhanced Doom 3 engine
* Multiplayer deathmatch
* Portal technology adds a new dimension to gameplay, allowing enemies to appear out of thin air and create new and completely original puzzles and gameplay styles
* Several unique gameplay elements such as Spirit Walking, Wall Walking, and Deathwalk
* Highly organic, living environment that itself can attack Tommy
* Deep, emotional story of love and sacrifice
* Tommy has a sidekick, a spiritual hawk that can help him fight enemies and decipher the alien language of the living ship
* Multiplayer game support that takes advantage of the unique gameplay styles in Prey
* PunkBuster support

Install:

Can be downloaded here.
To install: set the downloaded file to be executable and run it. chmod a+rx ./prey-installer-02192009.bin ./prey-installer-02192009.bin
You will need the PC version: either the 3 CD set, the single DVD Collector's Edition, or a normal installed copy of the game, such as you'd download via Steam. You will need a valid and unique CD key in any case. The Mac version's install disc has not been tested, and the XBox 360 version will not work.
To install the Linux version using datafiles downloaded through Steam, run the installer like this (assuming the Windows partition is mounted at "/mnt/ntfsdisk"): ./prey-installer-02192009.bin --from-install --media '/mnt/ntfsdisk/Program Files/Steam/steamapps/common/prey/base'

Screenshots.

source: Linux & The Planet Games

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Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive.

2012-05-13T01:09:00.001-07:00

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff.

Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive.

You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

With Google Drive, you can:

Create and collaborate: Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.

Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go): All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.

Search everything: Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.

Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos andcreate website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future.

This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come.

Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start—and keep looking for Nessie...

Create & collaborate.

In Google Drive, you can create new documents, spreadsheets and presentations instantly. Work together at the same time, on the same doc, and see changes as they appear.

Work better with the products you use everyday.

Gmail.

Say goodbye to bulky email attachments. Send a link from Google Drive in Gmail and everyone has the same file, same version—automatically.

Google+

Your pictures in Google Drive are instantly available in Google+, so you’re never more than one click away from sharing with your circles.

Powerful search.

Google Drive helps you get to your files faster. Search for content by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Google Drive can even recognize objects in your images and text in scanned documents.

View anything.

Open over 30 file types right in your browser—including HD video, Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop—even if you don’t have the program installed on your computer.

Google Drive with your favorite apps.

Create, open and share files from a variety of apps directly in Google Drive.

Share the way you want.

You can share files or folders with anyone, and choose whether they can view, edit or comment on your stuff.

Start a discussion.

Create and reply to comments to get feedback and make files more collaborative.

Go back in time.

Google Drive tracks every change you make—so when you hit the save button, a new revision is saved.

You can look back as far as 30 days automatically, or choose a revision to save forever.

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10 of the Best Unity Lenses & Scopes for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” & Ubuntu 12.04 “Pangolin”.

2012-05-08T10:56:00.000-07:00

It’s somewhat apt that Ubuntu’s ‘Lenses’ feature has brought Unity into clearer focus for many of its initial critics.

The search-orientated display windows – called ‘Lenses’ – make finding specific files, apps or information easy to do thanks to their tuned ‘search backends’ – called Scopes’.

Below are 10 of the best Lenses and Scopes available for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” and Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin”.

Before going any further you will need to add the following ‘Super Lens’ PPA to your Software Sources so you can take advantage of the ‘one click install’ buttons used in this article.

Open up a new Terminal window and enter the following command as is:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jsevi83/unity && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/lenses && sudo apt-get update

Lastly, be aware that installed Lens and Scopes will not work until you have logged out and back in.

Graphic Design Lens.

The Graphic Design Lens is a veritable paintbox of inspiration having been designed to assist designers in finding resources to aid in their creativity.

Using it is simple: enter a keyword into the search field and the Lens will return designs and project ideas from Dribble; swatches from ColourLovers; icons from Iconfinder service; and GIMP brushes from DeviantArt.

The filter pane lets you narrow searches down to specific assets, whilst clicking on a specific result tile will download/open up the resource in a relevant app (i.e. GIMP brush opens in GIMP).

Install Graphic Design Lens

Contacts Lens.

Since getting an Android phone my ‘address book’ lives on Google’s servers as part of my Google account. Amongst the various pluses this offers me is that, rather than fire up GMail to find a contact, I can use this ‘Contacts Lens’ to search my contact details directly from my desktop.

It doesn’t do anything revolutionary; you enter a name and the Google Contacts Scope powering the lens searches through your contacts until it finds a match (or matches).

Clicking on a result opens a mini contacts window so you can get the information you’re after, or edit what’s already there.

Install Google Contacts Scope

Install Contacts Lens

Tomboy Leans.

Tomboy is a crutch of my creativity. I use it to jot down ideas, brainstorms, bad puns, shopping lists, contact details, etc. With so many notes covering so many different things it’s easy for me to loose track of what is written and where.

It’s this situation that the Tomboy Lens fixes. As well as displaying my most recent notes it also lets me search through the text of all my saved notes using the search bar. A killer feature made super easy to get at.

If you’re an avid Tomboy user then be sure to put installing this lens on your ‘to do’ list.

Install Unity Tomboy Lens

Photo/Flickr Lens.

Whether I’m in need of a photo for a blog post, a new wallpaper for desktop, or interested to see what images are turned for a random tag, I turn to Flickr.

With that in mind it won’t shock you to learn that I’m a big fan of the Flickr Scope/Photo Lens set. It lets me search Flickr without having to leave my desktop. The Scope does requires authorisation before it can access photos, both your own and those publicly available, but this minor inconvenience is well worth the convenience the lens lends to Unity.

Install Photo Lens & Flickr Scope

Unity YouTube Lens.

Not watched enough Nyan cat? Got an urge to knock on nostalgias door and checkout your fave cartoon as a kid? Need to see if OMG! Ubuntu! have uploaded a new video?!

Say hello to video-flavoured procrastination tool as all of the above tasks are possible using the Video Lens from developers Ateraeo. It making finding videos on YouTube stupidly easy from the desktop.

Video results can be sorted based on rating, relevance, upload date, etc. A configuration tool is included that lets you choose which application videos play back in. Options include VLC, YouTube app MiniTube, or the humble ol’ web browser.

Install Video Lens

Install YouTube Lens

Unity Cities Scope.

Short of a dedicated dedicated ‘weather lens’ is the ‘Cities Scope’.

Once installed, you can enter a city and country into the Dash search bar and have the current time, weather conditions, and link to Google Map for the location returned in the Dash under the ‘Utilities’ heading.

Install the Cities Scope

Torrents Lens.

You don’t need to be flying the Jolly Roger to make use of torrents; there’s a loot-load of legitimate and fully legal bounty to be found out there. From TV shows, movies and books that have entered the public domain, to .iso’s of your favourite Linux distributions.

The Torrent Lens and Piratebay Scope makes finding and downloading .torrent files quicker than growling “oo-arrgh” in your best pirate accent. Just enter a keyword and the Torrent Lens will scour The PirateBay for matching results.

Handy information on file size, type and seeder stats are displayed in the lens, and the filter pane lets you narrow things down based on category or file size.

Install Torrent Lens

Gwibber Lens.

Twitter. You either get it or you don’t. And if you do then there’s a good chance that you’re using Ubuntu’s default social client ‘Gwibber’ to post and read updates.

The official Gwibber Lens compliments the desktop app perfectly. It shows messages, replies, images, etc from your stream – all of which can be searched through and filtered. If you’re using more than one account you can also filter messages on a per-account basis.

If there’s a drawback to using the lens it’s that it’s slow. Often frustratingly slow. I found it to lag a good 15 minutes behind what was actually going on in my Twitter stream. I also dislike the fact that clicking on a tweet/item opens it up in the browser rather than Gwibber.

But the usefulness (read: search) offered by the elegant interface more than stands on its own merits.

Install Gwibber Lens

Spotify Scope.

There are a slew of additional scopes – ‘search backends’ – for Ubuntu’s Music Lens: Clementine, Grooveshark, and Banshee to name but three.

But my favourite music-lens addition is the ‘Spotify Scope’.

With a simple artist or track title search it ransacks Spotify’s millions-strong library and gives me a bunch of playable results (which are denoted by the Spotify logo in the bottom right-hand corner).

Clicking on a result immediately opens the track or album in Spotify for Linux for playback. Certainly sounds good to me.

Install Spotify Scope

Book Lens.

As a Kindle user I download and read a lot of books – the majority of which I don’t get from Amazon’s Kindle store.

I’m an avid fan of late Victorian/early 1900′s fiction. H.G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, Jules Verne, Stefan Zweig andthe majority of works by these authors are long-since out of copyright and freely downloadable online.

The Book Lens makes searching available to download freely (and legally) online, as well as sifting through any local copies you have, a snap.

Enter a title or author, narrow your search down to a specific source via the filter pane, and click on a result you want to be taken to page where you can download it.

Although the Lens is capable of searching and showing locally-stored .Pdf’s located in the Documents folder it doesn’t detect .mobi or .epub files – a sad oversight in my opinion as .epub is the definitive and most widely used ebook format.

Install Book Lens

source: Ubuntuland

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Lubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin is finaly here.

2012-05-06T08:00:00.001-07:00

Lubuntu is a lightweight Linux operating system based on Ubuntu but using the LXDE desktop environment in place of Ubuntu's Unity shell and GNOME desktop. LXDE is touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient".

Lubuntu received official recognition as a formal member of the Ubuntu family on 11 May 2011, commencing with Lubuntu 11.10, which was released on 13 October 2011

Like Xubuntu, Lubuntu is intended to be a low-system-requirement, low-RAM environment for netbooks, mobile devices and older PCs - but tests show it can use half as much RAM as Xubuntu, making it an attractive choice for installing on older hardware being refurbished for charitable distribution.

The name Lubuntu is a portmanteau of LXDE and Ubuntu.LXDE stands for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment, while the word Ubuntu means "humanity towards others" in the Zulu and Xhosa languages.

Features:

Based on the lightweight LXDE desktop environment
Pcmanfm 0.9.10, a fast and lightweight files manager using gio/gvfs
Openbox, the fast and extensible, default windows-manager of LXDE
Lightdm, using the simple GTK greeter
Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome
...and, of course, based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS

Improvements since Lubuntu 11.10

A new software-center, optimized to be lightweight, for easy installation and removal of applications from your system
New theme is used, and each previous themes are available in the repositories
Lightdm is used as the display manager with the default gtk greeter
Blueman is now used instead of gnome-bluetooth for managing bluetooth devices
A lot of bug fixes, especially on the panel and the file manager

Some links:

Full application list
The release notes with known problems
Information and bug report on wiki page
Lubuntu main website
Online documentation
LXDE environment website
An d here's the official announcement

Trisquel Mini 5.5 Brigantia

Celtic power arrives to our computers! It has been released Trisquel 5.5 Mini edition, with LXDE environment, and based on Linux-Libre (under the GNU Free Software Foundation); sorry, only Gnome screenshot. Brigantia ships with Midori as web browser, Empathy, Sylpheed, Transmission and XChat; Abiword and ePDFReader for the office, SimpleScan and mtPaint for the graphics, Gnome MPlayer and XFBurn for multtimedia, etc. Also, it's included Gigolo (from XFCE) for performing connections and mounting remote filesystems. You can download it here.

New Lubuntu icon theme

A new icon theme is going to land soon: Lubuntu Box. At this moment only a few icons and the design guide are being developed to create the main look line. Of course, the icon theme will (and always) be free, released under GPL license, and it will fit another desktop environments, such as Gnome3 or Unity. Stay tuned!

Downloads

Desktop CD

The desktop CD allows you to try Lubuntu without changing your computer at all, and at your option to install it permanently later. This type of CD is what most people will want to use. You will need at least 384MiB of RAM to install from this CD.

PC (Intel x86) desktop CD
For almost all PCs. This includes most machines with Intel/AMD/etc type processors and almost all computers that run Microsoft Windows, as well as newer Apple Macintosh systems based on Intel processors. Choose this if you are at all unsure.

64-bit PC (AMD64) desktop CD
Choose this to take full advantage of computers based on the AMD64 or EM64T architecture (e.g., Athlon64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon, Core 2). If you have a non-64-bit processor made by AMD, or if you need full support for 32-bit code, use the Intel x86 images instead.

64-bit Mac (AMD64) desktop CD
Choose this to take full advantage of computers based on the AMD64 or EM64T architecture (e.g., Athlon64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon). If you have a non-64-bit processor made by AMD, or if you need full support for 32-bit code, use the Intel x86 images instead. This image is adjusted to work properly on Mac systems.

Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) desktop CD
For Apple Macintosh G3, G4, and G5 computers, including iBooks and PowerBooks as well as IBM OpenPower machines.

Alternate install CD

The alternate install CD allows you to perform certain specialist installations of Lubuntu. It provides for the following situations:

setting up automated deployments
upgrading from older installations without network access
LVM and/or RAID partitioning
installs on systems with less than about 384MiB of RAM (although note that low-memory systems may not be able to run a full desktop environment reasonably)

In the event that you encounter a bug using the alternate installer, please file a bug on the debian-installer package. There are four images available, each for a different type of computer:

PC (Intel x86) alternate install CD
For almost all PCs. This includes most machines with Intel/AMD/etc type processors and almost all computers that run Microsoft Windows, as well as newer Apple Macintosh systems based on Intel processors. Choose this if you are at all unsure.

64-bit PC (AMD64) alternate install CD
Choose this to take full advantage of computers based on the AMD64 or EM64T architecture (e.g., Athlon64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon, Core 2). If you have a non-64-bit processor made by AMD, or if you need full support for 32-bit code, use the Intel x86 images instead.

64-bit Mac (AMD64) alternate install CD
Choose this to take full advantage of computers based on the AMD64 or EM64T architecture (e.g., Athlon64, Opteron, EM64T Xeon). If you have a non-64-bit processor made by AMD, or if you need full support for 32-bit code, use the Intel x86 images instead. This image is adjusted to work properly on Mac systems.

Mac (PowerPC) and IBM-PPC (POWER5) alternate install CD
For Apple Macintosh G3, G4, and G5 computers, including iBooks and PowerBooks as well as IBM OpenPower machines.

A full list of available files, including BitTorrent files, can be found below. If you need help burning these images to disk, see the CD Burning Guide.

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Terminator is a cross-platform GPL terminal emulator with advanced features not yet found elsewhere.

2012-05-05T05:23:00.001-07:00

Terminator will run on any modern OS with Java 6 or later. It replaces xterm, rxvt, xwsh and friends on X11 systems, GNOME Terminal, KDE's Konsole, Apple's Terminal.app, and PuTTY.

Features

Here are some of the features unique to Terminator, or which are rare amongst the competition:

Automatic Logging - Complete logs are automatically generated of all your terminal sessions [full details].
Drag & Drop - Text and URLs, and even files from Finder/Nautilus/Windows Explorer can be dropped on Terminator to be inserted as text, with automatic quoting of filenames containing shell meta-characters.
Find - Terminator provides you with a find function so you can search for text and regular expressions within your terminal (including the scrollback), highlighting them all, in the style of less(1), and offering quick movement to the next or previous match [full details]. As far as we know, the only other terminal emulator with a find function is Apple's Terminal, and ours is better.

Searches stay active until you cancel them, so if you're waiting for some particular output in a great stream of output, this is a really great way to make it blindingly obvious when it appears.

A screenshot of Terminator on Mac OS, after running 'man bash', and doing a find for '(?i)shell':

Despite the evidence that a pager is running, this is Terminator doing the highlighting — one of the authors uses cat(1) as his pager.
Freedom - Terminator is released under the GPL.
Horizontal Scrolling - Most terminal emulators wrap text when it intrudes upon the right margin. Terminator doesn't — it instead provides a horizontal scrollbar when necessary (hold down shift to make your scroll wheel scroll horizontally). This brings clear benefits in terms of readability of program output, or text files sent to the display with cat(1). (We tried both this and Apple-like reflowing of text when you change the window size, and we decided we preferred this. Sadly, we don't have the resources to support two implementations, so reflowing is no longer an option; it's gone from the code.)
Multiple Tabs - Like tabbed browsing, only with terminals [full details].
Number Reinterpretation - Terminator will recognize numbers in a variety of bases as the current selection, and add informational menu items to the pop-up menu showing the same number in other bases. No more man ascii or resorting to bc(1).
Open Terminator Here - Start a new terminal window in the directory you clicked on in Windows Explorer.
Portability - Written mostly in Java, with a small POSIX C++ part (for pseudo-terminal support) and a Ruby invocation script, Terminator should compile out of the box on most modern desktop operating systems. (Pre-built packages are available for most systems, so you don't need to worry about this.)

Now you can use the same great terminal emulator everywhere!
Proper Tab Character Handling - Most terminal emulators will translate tab characters into strings of spaces, which is very annoying if you then try to copy/paste a section of text from your terminal into a text editor. Terminator handles tabs properly, remembering where the tabs are and copy/pasting them as tab characters.
Unlimited Scrollback - Terminator won't throw away output when it scrolls off the top of the screen, nor when it reaches any arbitrary limit. You decide when, if ever, to clear the scrollback. (Even if you do clear the scrollback, you can still find lost text in the log, unless you turned that off too.)
Intelligent Vertical Scrolling - Terminator's scrollbar won't keep jumping when there's output if you've deliberately scrolled back to look at part of the history, but as soon as you scroll back to the bottom again, it will resume auto-scrolling. This gives you the best of both worlds without having to choose up-front via some configuration mechanism.
Fewer Gotchas - Terminator automatically turns off XON/XOFF flow control for terminal output. Being able to pause output by typing ^S and resume it by typing ^Q is much less useful given unlimited scrollback and intelligent vertical scrolling, and mainly leads to confusion when it's accidentally typed by someone who doesn't know about this functionality (or doesn't realize they've activated it). Turning off XON/XOFF allows Bash and Emacs, amongst others, to make use of these keystrokes.

A user who wants the XON/XOFF behavior – perhaps because they like to pause the output from commands like top(1) – can use stty ixon in their login script to re-enable it. Sadly, we can't just visibly indicate when ^S has stopped output, and provide help in re-starting output, because there's no way to read this aspect of tty state.
Safe Quit - Terminator knows when you still have processes running, and brings up a dialog rather than just letting those processes die.
UTF-8 - Terminator won't mangle your favorite accented characters, and it copes well with languages such as Greek where there's a mix of normal and wide glyphs:

The text is Markus Kuhn's UTF-8-demo.txt if you want to see what a mess Terminal.app makes of it. (On Mac OS, Terminal.app beats us on Thai, but we're better at Cyrillic, Greek, and Japanese. Results vary between platforms based on availability and suitability of fonts.)

One side-effect of proper support for variable-width glyphs is that you're not restricted to fixed-width fonts in Terminator, even if the only language you're using is English. GNU readline might get confused about the line length, though.

Here's a more convincingly terminal-like example of fixed-width English and variable-width Japanese; output from javac(1):

We think Terminator is the clear choice for the discerning terminal user. Though originally written for Linux to make up for the fact that no Linux terminal emulator was as good as Mac OS' Terminal, it has now surpassed Terminal in several areas.

Mailing List

Feel free to visit or join the terminator-users group.

Downloads

Pre-Built Packages

Linux

Linux x86 .deb for Debian/Ubuntu *

Linux x64 .deb

Linux x86 .rpm for Fedora/SUSE

Linux x64 .rpm

* Also available from our package repository. Using our Debian package repository.

Mac OS

Mac OS universal .zip (10.4 to 10.6)

Windows

Windows x86 .msi (Windows 2000 to Windows 7)*

* Requires Cygwin <= 1.7.7 and Cygwin Ruby and 32 bit Java. Setting up Cygwin. Common Cygwin problems.

Building from Source

If no pre-built package is available for your platform, or you just like building from source, anonymous read-only Subversion access is available. Copy and paste these commands to get everything you need:

mkdir ~/jessies && cd ~/jessies
svn checkout http://software.jessies.org/svn/terminator/trunk/ terminator
svn checkout http://software.jessies.org/svn/salma-hayek/trunk/ salma-hayek
make -C salma-hayek && make -C terminator

You may want to add something like this to your crontab to keep up to date automatically (assuming your computer's on at 23:00):

00 23 * * * echo ~/jessies/salma-hayek/bin/nightly-build.rb | bash -l

There's also a source distribution, terminator-source.tar.gz, but Subversion makes it easier for you to keep up to date, and makes it easier to submit patches. (Note that you need to build salma-hayek before building any of our other projects.)

The hints for building are the same for all our projects.

If you just want to look, you can browse the repository.

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Slackel is a Linux distribution and live CD based on Slackware Linux and Salix OS.

2012-05-01T09:33:00.000-07:00

Slackel is a Linux distribution and live CD based on Slackware Linux and Salix OS.

It is fully compatible with both. It uses the current version of Slackware and the latest version of the KDE desktop.

The Slackel disc images are offered in two different forms - installation and live.

Slackel 13.37 KDE-4.6.5 installation cd.

Slackel 13.37 KDE-4.6.5 image (32-bit) (size: 701MB, md5: b52245626b1babac05cb4f2fea914503 )

Download it from http://sourceforge.net/projects/slackel/files/kde-4.6.5/slackel-13.37-kde-4.6.5.iso/download

In installation do not choose default gr keyboard but choose us keyboard to have english enviroment and not greek after installation. It is slackel distribution which is for greek users and is based on Salix with some more packages as gftp, pidgin and kde 4.6.5.

KDE is excluded from slapt-get to not break system if someone install a kde-4.5.5 package.

The rest slackware packages can be installed as usual with gslapt/slapt-get.

If you want kdeedu-4.6.5, kdegames-4.6.5 etc can download them from http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.5/x86/kde/

and install them with installpkg package.txz

language packages (for both 32 and 64 bit) can download from http://alien.slackbook.org/ktown/4.6.5/x86_64/kdei/

Do not upgrade kdepim and kdepimlibs since these versions included in 13.37 works fine with KDE-4.6.5 and are stable.

bluedevil, the new bluetooth connection manager for KDE is included too. It integrates well with KDE (you will find a “send to bluetooth device” in Dolphin’s context menu for instance). The old “kbluetooth” application is no longer developed and the GTK application in Slackware “blueman” is not as featureful.

Slackel is a Linux distribution based on Slackware's "current" branch, with the goal of integrating the latest KDE desktop, the Calligra office suite and some custom artwork into separate live (installable to hard disk) and installation DVD images. The project's latest version, KDE-4.8.2, was announced yesterday: "A new set of Slackel KDE-4.8.2 version. A collection of four KDE ISO images are immediately available to our users, including 32-bit and 64-bit installation images as well as 32-bit and 64-bit live images that can be burned to a DVD or used with a USB drive. Slackel KDE-4.8.2 includes the latest 'current' tree of Slackware Linux and the latest KDE 4.8.2 accompanied by a very rich collection of KDE-centric software. The Firefox 11.0 web browser, KMail and KTorrent are the main networking applications included in this release, followed by Akregator and Kopete." Read the rest of the release announcement for further information. Download (MD5): slackellive-kde-4.8.2-32.iso (866MB), slackellive-kde-4.8.2-64.iso (881MB).

2012-04-12: Distribution Release: Slackel KDE-4.8.2

Screenshots.

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